Ramblin’ Rose After Lifetime Of Singing Hillbilly Music, Rose Maddox Finally Garners Grammy Nomination

Little clues to the star’s life Rose Maddox once led can be found around the modest southern Oregon ranch house where she has lived for 39 years.

A black-and-white blowup of Rose as a young woman with a wide grin and a cowboy hat hangs in the hall. A snapshot of Rose hugging a bare-chested Jerry Lee Lewis sits on the mantle.

And on the CD player is a copy of her latest album, “$35 and a Dream,” the first of the hundreds of songs she recorded in 59 years of belting out hillbilly music to earn a Grammy nomination.

“It’s about time,” Maddox said.

Rockabilly fans in Europe have kept tabs on Rose Maddox, mobbing her appearances and buying reissues of The Maddox Brothers and Rose hits from the 1940s and 1950s, when they were billed as “The Most Colorful Hillbilly Band in America.”

But at home she largely has been forgotten, until now. In the wake of the Grammy nomination for best bluegrass album, she was feted in Nashville as a country music pioneer, riding in chauffeured limousines and wearing new designer outfits.

“She should be in the Hall of Fame. She’s living on Social Security,” said Jonny Whitesides, whose book, “Ramblin’ Rose, the Life and Career of Rose Maddox,” is coming out in May.

The title song of her latest album tells Rose Maddox’s life story. In the midst of the Depression, her Alabama sharecropper daddy sold everything the family had for $35 and loaded his wife and five of their seven kids on a freight train bound for California. Rose was just 7 years old.

Four years later, in 1937, Rose’s brother Fred decided he’d had enough of picking fruit for 10 cents a box in the San Joaquin Valley. He had seen a band paid $100 for playing at a rodeo and decided to go into the music business with his brothers. Fred did the announcing, Cal played guitar and harmonica, Don played fiddle and Henry played mandolin.

A furniture dealer in Modesto, Calif., agreed to sponsor the band on the radio, but only if they found a girl singer.

“They didn’t know if I could sing or not - Fred didn’t - but he wasn’t about to lose that opportunity,” Rose recalled. “And he knew Mama wouldn’t let him get a girl singer. So he said, ‘We’ve got the best girl singer that’s ever been.’ He didn’t tell him it was a kid, an 11-year-old kid. We went on the radio the next day, and we started selling that furniture like mad.”

In 1939, they won a hillbilly band contest that landed them on KFBK radio in Sacramento, Calif., tapping a huge audience among the Dust Bowl refugees derided as “Okies.”

A contract with 4 Star Records didn’t pay any money, but spread their music around the country. Their biggest hit was Woody Guthrie’s “Philadelphia Lawyer.”

In the boom after World War II, The Maddox Brothers and Rose struck it rich, touring West Coast dance halls and honky-tonks in their big black Cadillacs and playing a mix of blues, boogie and bluegrass that set people on fire.

Rose “had quite a reputation for being this colorful, lusty firebrand,” said Whitesides. “She would sing, ‘Hangover Blues,’ ‘Pay Me Alimony,’ ‘Oh Lord, I Wish I Were a Single Girl Again.’

“Rose would get on stage and high-kick and shimmy-shake. That drove people crazy.”

In 1949, they were the first hillbilly band to play “The Strip” in Las Vegas and appeared on “The Grand Ole Opry” in Nashville. In the 1950s, they were regulars on “The Louisiana Hayride,” touring the rest of the week with Elvis Presley, Hank Williams and Marty Robbins.

From costumes to music, The Maddox Brothers and Rose always pushed the limits, Whitesides said. Rose created a sensation at The Opry in 1956, when she ran on stage wearing a little cowgirl costume with a bare midriff and sang “Tall Man.” Songs such as “Pay Me Alimony” paved the way for Lorretta Lynn to sing “The Pill.” Fred Maddox made slap bass, a jazz technique, a standard of rockabilly music.

The band broke up in 1956 and Rose’s brothers settled down, but Rose kept singing.

“It wasn’t an easy life,” Rose said. “But compared to picking cotton and fruit it was. And it paid a lot more.

“I wouldn’t trade it. When I’m on stage, I’m a different person. Because that stage is mine. Lord help the person who tries to take it away from me.”