SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Tennessee Ernie Ford was a singer who hosted a top-rated primetime TV show. He recorded number one hits, collections of hymns and spirituals that dominated the Billboard charts. Sixty years ago this winter, Ernie Ford was at the top of both the country and pop charts with his recording of the Merle Travis song "Sixteen Tons."
A new a five-disc set that's up for a Grammy this year features Tennessee Ernie Ford's early career and his influence on another style of music, rock 'n' roll.
Wayne Winkler from member station WETS has more.
WAYNE WINKLER, BYLINE: Tennessee Ernie Ford was fed up with the trappings of fame and the demands of the music business. It was 1955, and his label Capitol Records had threatened to sue him if he didn't make another record. He decided to fulfill his contract and leave, so he recorded this.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SIXTEEN TONS")
ERNEST JENNINGS FORD: (Singing) Some people say a man is made out of mud. A poor man's made out of muscle and blood, muscle and blood and skin and bones, a mind that's weak and a back that's strong. You load 16 tons. What do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store.
TED OLSON: He covered songs that were Appalachian in origin, but he kind of modernized them.
WINKLER: Ted Olson is professor in the Appalachian studies program at East Tennessee State University and produced the new box set.
OLSON: He was a country music hit-maker, but he also scored many hits on the pop charts.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MULE TRAIN")
ERNEST JENNINGS FORD: (Singing) Mule train. Giddy up, pah-giddah.
OLSON: He covered hillbilly boogie selections, which are the forerunners, in many people's books, of early rock 'n' roll.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHOTGUN BOOGIE")
ERNEST JENNINGS FORD: (Singing) There it stands in the corner with a barrel so straight. I looked out the window and over the gate. The big fat rabbits are jumping in the grass. Wait till they hear my old shotgun blast. Shotgun boogie...
WINKLER: Ernest Jennings Ford was born in Bristol in 1919 and began his career as a radio announcer at local station to be WOPI. He also studied voice at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. During World War II, he served with the Army Air Corps as a bombardier trainer in California. He also hosted an armed forces radio program from a nearby radio station. After the war, Ford worked at stations in San Bernardino and Pasadena, where he hosted a popular country music program.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ERNEST JENNINGS FORD: Well, it's love song time, and here's a lovely girl to sing it for us.
OLSON: It wasn't uncommon for radio announcers to have a persona like that. He just was particularly good at it.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ERNEST JENNINGS FORD: Yes, sir. Fine, fine.
WINKLER: Ford's radio program soon earned him a recording contract. But unlike most country singers, Ted Olson says he was not based in Nashville.
OLSON: He recorded in Hollywood for Capitol Records, west coast-based label, major label. And Capitol had a different approach, as they showed with somebody like Merle Travis in the '40s and early '50s, they would take an artist with strong roots in kind of the Appalachian Uplands area and take what had been folk music and encourage the artist to kind of revise it or revision it or come up with a new interpretation and a fresh approach.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TROUBLE IN MIND")
ERNEST JENNINGS FORD: (Singing) Trouble in mind, I'm blue. But I won't be blue always 'cause the sun's going to shine in my backdoor someday.
WINKLER: Ford went on to host several TV shows and often ended them with a religious song.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HIS HAND")
ERNEST JENNINGS FORD: (Singing) His hands paint the flowers. He puts leaves in the trees. At his whisper, birds start singing when my heart needs melodies.
WINKLER: After Ford's 1956 album of hymns stayed on the Billboard charts for 277 consecutive weeks, Capitol turned him into a gospel singer. But his son Buck Ford wants his father to be remembered for more than just that.
JEFFREY BUCKNER FORD: Because Ernie Ford was not a gospel singer. He was not a country singer. He was not a jazz singer. He was not a pop singer. He was a singer, period.
He could literally cross from genre to genre. And I mean, literally, from opera to pop without taking an extra breath. The great volume of gospel music that he did was due, less and less over time, to its popularity than it was with Capitol's failure to continue to see him as a singer of American music and not just a gospel singer.
WINKLER: In fact, producer Ted Olson says Tennessee Ernie Ford was a pioneer in bringing the music of black Americans to the pop charts.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I DON'T KNOW")
ERNEST JENNINGS FORD: (Singing) I don't know - my, oh my, oh my, oh my. I don't know what my baby's putting down.
OLSON: People have focused on the Sun Studio role in popularizing Southern black music. They were, in some respects, students, so to speak, of people like Tennessee Ernie Ford, who were doing similar sorts of things earlier than that. Tennessee Ernie Ford was a pioneer of rock 'n' roll music, to date, uncredited by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but perhaps they'll get around to recognizing that at some point.
WINKLER: Tennessee Ernie Ford was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1990. He died a year later and in 1994, was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame.
For NPR News, I'm Wayne Winkler in Johnson City, Tenn.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I DON'T KNOW")
ERNEST JENNINGS FORD: (Singing) Putting down...
SIMON: NPR is following developments now. Secretary of State Kerry is in Vienna. Iranian State TV reports four Iranian-American nationals will be released from prison. It might be part of a broader deal to lift sanctions against Iran, which could happen early as today. This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.