Wayne Raney - King of the Talking Harmonica
"The Living Legends" was the title of one of Wayn Raney's later albums - a project he had done with his old pal Lonnie Glosson. The title was apt, Raney enjoyed great popularity during the 1940s and was especially popular in his home state Arkansas - even during his later years. He is one of those musicians that were responsible for popularizing the harmonica as an instrument, along with his aforementioned partner Lonnie Glosson or such performers as DeFord Bailey.
During the 1940s, Raney was part of the Delmore Brothers' band but also found success as a recording artist in his own right, scoring a big hit with "Why Don't You Haul Off and Love Me". While his earlier recordings were heavily influenced by the Delmores and therefore blues- and boogie-tinged, predominantly of secular content, he later switched to country gospel music. Raney was also a successful businessman, selling harmonica instruction books as early as the 1940s and later operating his own record pressing plant, recording studio, and record label called "Rimrock" in Concord, Arkansas.
Early Years in Arkansas
Wayne Raney was born on August 17, 1921, in a log cabin on a farm near Wolf Bayou, a tiny place in Cleburne County, north-central Arkansas. His parents, William Frank and Bonnie Cumie Raney, had a total of five children and at least his father's family lived in Arkansas since the 1850s. Times were hard in these isolated area of Wolf Bayou and work on the farm exhausting. However, young Wayne Raney was freed from heavy labor due to a foot deformity. Doctors expected he would spent his life in a wheel chair but Raney mastered it without even needing a cane.
Raney was drawn to music at an early age and became interested in the harmonica after watching a street musician playing the instrument. Since 1931, the Delmore Brothers from Alabama increased in popularity both over radio and on records and they soon became musical heroes for Raney. A year later, at age eleven, Raney traveled to Atlanta, Georgia, to meet the Delmores in person. While being in Atlanta, Raney got the chance to record for Bluebird, RCA's low-budget label, but his two solo numbers "Fox Chase" and "Under the Double Eagle", remained unreleased due to poor sound quality.
First Steps and Rambling Years
He returned to Wolf Bayou but at age 13 (the exact year is unclear), the traveling bug bit him again and he made his way to the Texan-Mexican border town Eagle Pass, Texas, where powerful radio station XERP was located. Raney had been a steady listener of the station when he arrived in the city. He performed in a pool hall when the station manager head and hired him. Raney went on to work for XEPN and also recorded several transcriptions for it. From that point on, Raney traveled throughout the United States for much of the 1930s and 1940s, earning his living with radio work and life shows, being not only a harmonica wizard but also a talented singer.
According to Raney, he worked in almost every single state during this time but always found time to return home and spend some time with his family, working odd jobs for a brief time, then taking off again. In 1937, Raney took a job with radio KWK in St. Louis, Missouri, where he met another proficient harmonica player, Lonnie Glosson. They soon teamed up and found themselves soon in Little Rock, Arkansas, to perform over KARK. This was the beginning not only of a lifelong relationship business and musical wise but also of a friendship. As business partners, they would establish a mail-order business for harmonicas and instruction books, which was boosted in popularity by airing on powerful border-town radio stations.
Their affiliation with KARK didn't last long, though, and Raney was back in St. Louis by 1939, performing with Cousin Emmy's show on KMOX. That same hear, he also frequently appeared on KMBC's Brush Creek Follies stage show in Kansas City, Missouri. During the late 1930s, Raney also worked the west coast and appeared on KFWB in Los Angeles with Stuart Hamblen. He even appeared in two short Warner Brothers western movies. In the early 1940s, he remained in the four-state radius Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, and Tennessee, working live stage shows with the Wilbur Brothers, a brother duo also from Arkansas.
Meeting the Delmores
In 1941, Raney married Loys Oleta Sutherland, a 16 years old girl from Drasco, Arkansas. The couple went on to have three children: Wanda, Zyndall, and Norma Jean. Loys and the children followed the family's patriarch and traveled with him across the country. By the time of their marriage, however, the Raneys where living in Covington, Kentucky, where Raney worked across the Ohio River at WCKY Cincinnati. It was during this time that he met the Delmore Brothers again and as they wanted to expand their act to a band, Raney joined them on vocals and harmonica.
The connection to the Delmores proved to be fruitful as Raney began recording with them, the first time since the early 1930s. Although the exact date and place are disputed, it is likely that their first joint recording session took place in the fall of 1946 at either E.T. Herzog's studio in Cincinnati or in Chicago, and produced a wealth of recordings, including the Delmores' noteworthy "Freight Train Boogie". Raney was given the chance to record a song with him on lead vocals, "The Wrath of God", which saw release under the Delmores' name, however.
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| Wayne Raney, ca. 1940s |
More sessions followed through 1947 and 1948, some of them under his own name but he was also recording as part of Lonnie Glosson's Railroad Boys for Mercury and as part of Grandpa Jones' backing group. In very late 1947, on December 1947, Raney held a session at KWEM in West Memphis, Arkansas, with the support of the Delmore Brothers and the Luma sisters. This session produced some of his best and most well-known material, including "Jole Blon's Ghost" and "Lost John Boogie". The latter reached #11 on Billboard's country & western charts in 1948 and the same year, "Jack and Jill Boogie" placed #13.
By that time, Raney and the Delmore Brothers were living in Memphis, airing live over WMC. The Delmores had always been living in different cities, moving on from town to town where they found work and during this time, Raney would move with them. Therefore, recording sessions took place in different cities at different venues. The sound of Raney's King recordings was identical to the cuts released as by the Delmore Brothers, as the line-up normally consisted of Alton and Rabon on guitars and vocals (plus additional musicians such as Lonnie Glosson).
Raney's Way to the Top
On May 6, 1949, a session took place in Cincinnati (either at Herzog's studio or at King studio) that yielded several songs that were released either under the Delmores' name or under Raney's name on the King label. Among these songs was Raney's biggest hit, "Why Don't You Haul Off and Love Me", co-written by Raney and Glosson. The line-up included Raney on vocals, Alton and Rabon Delmore on guitars, Zeke Turner on guitar, Don Helms on steel guitar, Lonnie Glosson on harmonica, and possibly Louis Innis on bass. Released in June that year on King #791 with "Don't Know Why" on the flip side, the song reached the #1 spot in Billboard's country & western charts, where it remained for several weeks.
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| "Why Don't You Haul Off and Love Me" sheet music |
The success of "Why Don't You Haul Off and Love Me" propelled Raney into the first row of country music stars. He made appearances on both the Louisiana Hayride and the Grand Ole Opry and was booked for an extended Opry tour with such stars as Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizzell, Minnie Pearl, Rod Brasfield, and Lonzo & Oscar. An offer to join the Opry as a steady cast member was turned down by Raney, a fact that likely prevented him from super stardom and a move that "may have been a mistake", as he later admitted.
The year of 1950 brought more sessions for Raney, both as a supporting musician and for his own releases. He held several sessions that year at Jim Beck's studio in Dallas, Texas, supported by the Delmore band, that resulted in a wealth of sacred material, which expressed Raney's great love for gospel music. Some of these recordings were released on London Records under the pseudonym "Lonesome Willie Evans". In October, he was back at King's recording studio in Cincinnati to record more secular material but a second hit eluded him, unfortunately.
Struggling with Rock and Roll
Raney would work with the Delmores for radio, live, and studio work until Rabon Delmore's untimely death in December 1952 from lung cancer. By then, their momentum as a country music top act had passed. Raney continued to record for King until 1955 and in November 1953, worked a couple of sessions with Lefty Frizzell as part of Frizzell's backing band. His last session for King took place on March 21, 1955, supported by a young pianist from Arkansas named Teddy Redell. Redell, who appeared frequently with Raney during the course of 1955, would later find acclaim as a rockabilly artist.
Also in 1955, Raney hosted his own TV show on KRCG in Jefferson City, Missouri, which also included his newly formed band (including Redell, Johnny Duncan, and Kinky King, among others). In late 1956, at the height of the rockabilly trend, Raney, who paved the way for rock'n'roll with his country boogie numbers, held a rockabilly tinged session for Decca that included "Shake Baby Shake", a song that later found its way onto several rock'n'roll reissues. In the years to come, Raney would concentrate on religious influenced material and a 1957 session, held at radio WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia, with the Osborne Brothers, marked the beginning of this era in his career.
We Need a Whole Lot More Gospel
In 1957, Raney returned to WCKY in Cincinnati and continued to sell song books and harmonicas on air successfully. That same year, Raney decided to switch sides and established his own Wayne Raney Studio in nearby Oxford, Ohio, operating the Poor Boy, New American, and Down Home labels out of it. In late 1957, Raney recorded "We Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus (and a Lot Less Rock and Roll)" and "Don't You Think It's Time", which saw release on Poor Boy #100 the following year and the former became a hit in the gospel hit. "We Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus" was also recorded by several other artists in the years to come and became a minor standard.
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| Wayne Raney harmonica course, ca. late 1950s |
Ironically, the second release on his Poor Boy label, which he ran with guitarist Jimmie Zack, was a rock'n'roll release by Norman Witcher, "Somebody's Been Rockin' My Boat" b/w "Wake Me Up", which became a favorite among rockabilly collectors. The next years saw Raney and his family recording numerous gospel songs at his Oxford studio, released on his own labels as well as on Starday.
Rimrock Records - "Arkansas's First and Only Record Mfg. Company"
However, by 1961, Raney decided to pack up things and move back to Arkansas. He discontinued his mail order business, the small labels he had established previously and bought a 180 acre farm near Concord, Arkansas, not far away from his birth place. On his farm, Raney raised Black Angus cattle and it seemed, he had turned his back on the music business. But his occupation as a full-time farmer only lasted for a brief time, as he built the Rimrock recording studio on his property the same year. The first session was held with his family shortly afterwards, recording a couple of gospel standards for one of his Starday EPs.
Raney recorded a great wealth of material over the next years, which saw release on Starday, his own Rimrock label (which he established at some point after 1961) and other small labels. He established Rimrock not only as a vehicle to produce his own recordings but released countless country music artists through his label, including recordings by Connie Dycus, Larry Donn, Teddy Redell, Walt Shrum, the Armstrong Twins, among many others. He leased out the studio to artists to record their material and custom-pressed it with his own pressing plant, the only one that ever existed in Arkansas. Raney manufactured records well into the 1970s for artists from Arkansas, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri. He also founded his own publishing company Oleta, named after his wife.
In 1974, he sold his pressing plant to the struggling Stax Records company, which closed it not too long afterwards, and Raney moved to Drasco. He appeared on the popular TV show Hee Haw several times during the 1970s and often performed his his old friend Lonnie Glosson (with whom he had also recorded regularly throughout the previous decade).
In 1990, Raney published his autobiography "Life Has Not Been a Bed of Roses" and that same year, he was diagnosed with throat cancer, which costed him his voice following a surgery. Wayne Raney passed away January 23, 1993, at the age of 71 years. He is buried at Pleasant Ridge Cemetery Old in Ida, Arkansas. His wife followed in 2019. Raney was inducted into the Country Music DJ Hall of Fame in 1993.
Recommended reading
Sources
• Entries on 45cat and 45worlds/78rpm
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