Richard Edward "Eddy" Arnold was an American country music singer who performed for six decades. He was a Nashville sound (country/popular music) innovator of the late 1950s, and scored 147 songs on the Billboard country music charts, second only to George Jones.
Background
Arnold was born on May 15, 1918, on a farm near Henderson, Tennessee. His father, a sharecropper, played the fiddle, while his mother played guitar. Arnold's father died when he was just 11, forcing him to leave school and begin helping on the family farm. This led to him later gaining his nickname - the Tennessee Plowboy.
Education
Arnold attended Pinson High School in Pinson, Tennessee, where he played guitar for school functions and events. He quit before graduation to help with the farm work, but continued performing, often arriving on a mule with his guitar hung on his back.
Arnold’s father died when Eddy was eleven, and the next fall, creditors auctioned the family farm; thus, the Arnolds became sharecroppers during the Great Depression. Arnold’s singing at candy pulls, socials, and barbecues for $1 a night helped supplement the family income while providing some relief from daily toil. In these circumstances, he jumped at the chance to pursue music professionally. Beginning at age seventeen, he worked on radio and in beer joints in Jackson,Tennessee, while also serving as an undertaker’s driver. Next he moved to radio work in Memphis and St. Louis, singing and performing rube comedy as well.
Arnold’s early releases sold well, and he dominated the Billboard country charts for the remainder of the decade with hits such as “That’s How Much I Love You” (1946), “I’ll Hold You in My Heart (Till I Can Hold You in My Arms)” (1947), “Anytime” (1948), and “Bouquet of Roses” (1948). Many of his hits crossed over into the pop market, thus paving the way for later crossover acts, such as Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline. With help from his then manager, Tom Parker, Arnold became host of the Mutual Network’s Purina-sponsored segment of the Opry and of Mutual’s Checkerboard Jamboree, a noontime show shared with Ernest Tubb and broadcast from a Nashville theater. Recorded radio shows widened Arnold’s exposure, as did the CBS Network series Hometown Reunion, undertaken with the Duke of Paducah after Arnold left the Opry in 1948. In 1949 and 1950 Arnold appeared in the Columbia films Feudin’ Rhythm and Hoedown, respectively. Soon his earnings from recordings and road shows - together with a lucrative song scouting arrangement with music publisher Hill and Range Songs - enabled him to diversify his investments and build a fine home in Brentwood, Tennessee. He was determined never to be poor again, and he succeeded.
One of the first country artists to work the Las Vegas scene, Arnold was also a pioneering country television performer. He appeared on the Milton Berle Show in 1949 and hosted summer replacement series in 1952 and 1953 for Perry Como and Dinah Shore, respectively. Eddy Arnold Time, a series made in Chicago, appeared in 1955, and The Eddy Arnold Show, shot in Springfield, Missouri, followed in 1956.
During country music’s late-1950s slump, Arnold’s record sales fell off, as did his personal appearances, and he considered retiring from music. In fact, he was on the verge of a new wave of popularity, as he traded his Tennessee Plowboy image for an uptown, sophisticated one. By the mid-1950s his somewhat plaintive singing style had already begun to mellow, and songs such as “I Really Don’t Want to Know” (1954), recorded with background harmony vocals and without the earlier trademark steel parts of Little Roy Wiggins, and a new version of “Cattle Call” (1955), recorded with an orchestra, anticipated the pop-oriented groove he would later establish with hits such as “What’s He Doing in My World” (1965), “Make the World Go Away” (1965), and numerous other #1 records. In the mid-1960s, under the management of Gerard Purcell, Arnold began to wear tuxedos and make personal appearances with orchestras. His nightclub and TV work increased markedly, and his discs charted abroad as well, paving the way for international tours.
In 1966, at age forty-eight, Arnold was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame. He remains the youngest inductee ever to receive the honor. In 1967 he won CMA’s coveted Entertainer of the Year Award, and in 1984 he received ACM’s Pioneer Award. In 1970 RCA awarded him for reaching the 60 million mark in lifetime record sales, a number that reportedly topped 80 million by 1985. In 1993 RCA released the album Then and Now, marking Arnold’s fiftieth year with the label, an association interrupted only briefly from 1973 to 1975, when Arnold recorded with MGM.
Arnold continued to tour heavily during the seventies and beyond, and as of 1998 Arnold, by this point recording for the Curb label, was still playing occasional show dates. He announced his retirement from the stage on May 16, 1999, during a show at the Orleans Hotel in Las Vegas. He continued to record, however, and 100th album, After All These Years, was released in 2005 on RCA.
Arnold died from natural causes on May 8, 2008, in a nursing home in Nashville, seven days before his 90th birthday.