Before 1942 a country songwriter in the South often sold a song outright for a flat fee and never saw another penny from it. Floyd Tillman let It Makes No Difference Now go for three hundred dollars in 1938. Acuff-Rose was incorporated in Nashville on 13 October 1942 to change that. Roy Acuff, then the Grand Ole Opry's biggest star, put up 25,000 dollars, and the performing rights organisation BMI added 2,500. Fred Rose, a Tin Pan Alley songwriter and pianist who had drifted to Nashville, ran it. It was the first American publishing house given over entirely to country songs. Almost everything Nashville later became, a town where the money is in publishing rather than in performing, follows from that. Rose signed Hank Williams in September 1946 and edited him hard, and the catalogue that resulted includes Your Cheatin' Heart, Jambalaya and I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry. Acuff-Rose also published the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison. The proof of the whole idea came in 1950, when Patti Page recorded the Acuff-Rose song Tennessee Waltz and sold millions of copies to a pop audience, demonstrating that a country copyright could earn far more outside country music than in it. The company's building on Franklin Pike in the Melrose neighbourhood, which also housed its Hickory Records label, still stands.
Getting there
36.1249, -86.7762
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