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Year of birth: 1920 City of birth: Shellman, GA  Diadorius Boudleaux Bryant, born in Shellman, Ga., was named for a French soldier who saved his father’s life in World War I. Young Boudleaux grew up in Moultrie, near the Southern tip of Georgia, where he was trained as a classical violinist, but also played piano, guitar, bass and sousaphone. In 1978, he told Kelly Delaney of Songwriter magazine, “In my early years, traveling musicians would come through town, get out on the courthouse square and do what we called ‘busking’ – playing and passing the hat. Daddy worked in the courthouse as a lawyer and he’d hear these groups. If he heard someone he liked, he’d bring them home. I’d listen and absorb. I knew as many hoedowns as anything else when I was a boy.”
At 18, Bryant performed with the Atlanta Symphony for a season, but found himself equally at home playing swing fiddle with country and western music. In 1939, he joined Hank Penny and His Radio Cowboys and performed regularly on WSB in Atlanta. Later, he gravitated to a jazz group and in 1945, while performing in Milwaukee, Wis., with a string group, he met a young elevator operator named Matilda Genevieve Scaduto. Just three days later, the pair eloped. Bryant and his bride returned to Moultrie, where Felice, as her husband affectionately called her, spent her days cleaning their tiny apartment and writing poetry, while Boudleaux worked with the locally based band, Gene Mills and the Twilight Playboys.
As a lark, Boudleaux and Felice began marrying her catchy poems with his innovative melodies and after amassing almost 80 tunes, they began sending them to potential music publishers. After several rejections, then a few minor recordings, things began looking up when in 1948, Fred Rose of Acuff-Rose had Little Jimmy Dickens record their song, “Country Boy,” which garnered a #7 hit on the country music chart. At Rose’s invitation in 1950, the Bryants moved to Nashville and became full-time songwriters. After sons Dane and Del were born, the Bryants were so engaged in writing, they would sleep when the boys went off to school so that they could write all night long after putting them to bed. Their reputations grew quickly, and in addition to Dickens, other artists began recording Bryant compositions including Carl Smith, Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers (who recorded 27 of their songs). The Bryants’ incredible career list of songs includes “Bye Bye Love,” “Wake Up, Little Susie,” “Raining In My Heart,” “Love Hurts,” “All I Have to Do is Dream,” “Devoted to You,” “Hey Joe” and over 1,000 more.
Artists in every genre have recorded their songs, including Tony Bennett, Gram Parsons, Nazareth, the Grateful Dead, Elvis Costello, Ray Charles, Dean Martin, Simon and Garfunkel, R.E.M. and many more. In 1978, the Bryants moved to Gatlinburg, Tenn., where they headquartered their successful House of Bryant publishing and bought and operated the Rocky Top Village Inn. “Rocky Top” happens to be one of the Bryants’ most famous songs and was adopted as the state song of Tennessee in 1982. As a couple, Boudleaux and Felice Bryant earned dozens of BMI Country, Pop and R&B music awards. They were inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. Boudleaux passed away in 1987 and Felice died in 2003. The unforgettable songwriting team are interred together in the Woodlawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Nashville.
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© 2006 All Music Guide, LLC