His Country credentials are purely authentic. He was born Richard Edward Arnold in West Tennessee. He was 11 when his daddy died and the family farm went under the auctioneer's gavel. Early on Eddy saw the world through the eyes of the depression sharecropper. Many years later he would become one of Nashville's shrewdest real estate investors, and there can be no doubt that his depression upbringing fostered his desire for ample financial security.

He learned guitar as a child, and soon he was earning precious pittances playing local events. By the time he was 17 years old, Eddy was a familiar figure in the honky tonks and radio stations of Jackson, Tennessee and the surrounding vicinity. Over the next few years he worked in radio in Memphis and St. Louis, sang with Pee Wee King's Golden West Cowboys, joined the Opry, and recorded his first sessions for RCA Records in 1944.

The following year he hit the charts for the first time with a Top-5 hit on " Each Minute Seems A Million Years". That record was recorded for RCA's subsidiary, Bluebird, in the studios of WSM, the clear channel AM radio station that was home to the Grand Ole Opry. Bluebird was RCA's low budget label, a label generally earmarked for second-tier artists not expected to command big sales. Eddy's early success persuaded the RCA executives to move him to the RCA label, and there he remained for nearly four decades.

Through the remainder of the '40s, RCA made Eddy Arnold a national singing star. Even then, the Tennessee plowboy had a smooth, relaxed delivery more reminiscent of the pop crooners than traditionalists like Uncle Dave Macon or honky-tonkers like Ernest Tubb. Records like "I'll Hold You In My Heart (Till I Can Hold You In My Arms)", "Anytime" and "Bouquet Of Roses" found an audience far beyond the South. But during this time the songs and instrumentation on his records still fell well within most fans' ideas of what a Country record should sound like.By 1950, Eddy Arnold had sold twelve million records at RCA. As a huge Country star he was in an odd position. Hank Williams was all the rage in Country music. Hank's singing had a raw quality to it. Other Country stars at the time also were stylized like Hank, artists such as Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb and a young Lefty Frizzell. But there were also a number of smooth Country singers, stars such as Red Foley, Jimmy Wakely and George Morgan. The smoothest of them all may well have been the West Tennessean, Eddy Arnold. And that smooth relaxed voice was finding its way into the homes of many Americans who were not particularly interested in Country music.

In 1951, he sang three times on Perry Como's network TV show, and he had his own network show Saturday afternoons on the Mutual Network. That summer Eddy was Como's replacement on Como's thrice-weekly Chesterfield Show. In August he appeared on the cover of TV Guide. The following year his Eddy Arnold Show ran as a summer replacement for Dinah Shore. He was no longer the exclusive property of Country fans. He appealed to a much wider variety of music listeners, and he knew it. In Don Cusic's excellent biography on Arnold titled I'll Hold You in My Heart, Cusic quotes Arnold from an interview done in 1952. Eddy describes his records thusly: "They're not pop, but they're not quite as hillbilly as some of the others. I do a lot of ballads and novelties. A lot of my songs go into the pop field later on."

Fans and artists will never see the music business in the same way. Country fans want their artists to be pure and loyal to the genre, according to their varying ideas of what "pure" and "loyal" are. But successful artists are usually ambitious career builders who want to sell a lot of records and play to packed auditoriums. Sometimes they will change their music a bit in order to go for a larger audience. Other times they will change their music to suit themselves, hoping that their fans will stay with them. Eddy Arnold did both.

He was never really a songwriter, but when he heard a song he liked, he truly treasured it, and he had a wonderful ear. In his long career, he recorded many songs that became great standards, not just because he recorded them, but because they were great songs. Fans generally don't get to hear a song until it has been recorded by a name artist and played ad nauseum on the radio. It is not all that easy to identify a hit just by listening to the demonstration recording. Eddy Arnold had that gift.

In 1953, Eddy recorded " I Really Don't Want To Know". There were no fiddles or steel guitars on that record, just a pair of acoustic guitars and a backup vocal group. Eddy was trying new sounds. There might have been some complaints from fans that had grown up with Eddy's Country records, but he knew what he was doing. Over the years he would weather a major Country music slump and reemerge a crossover pop star.

By 1955 Eddy's career record sales had reached 30 million, an unbelievable figure for that era, and one that put Eddy at the very top of his profession. Still, his music was in a state of flux. That year he recorded his old reliable signature song, "Cattle Call", backed by strings and violins, if you will, not fiddles. Many Country fans and Country industry people considered this move a sellout, and through the media they let Eddy know how they felt. They were feeling especially sensitive at this point.

From the middle of World War II to the early 1950s, Country music had grown to be a mainstay of the American public. But on January 1st of 1953, Hank Williams was discovered to have died on the back seat of his Cadillac on the way up to a show in Canton, Ohio. Hank's death marked the beginning of a steep decline in the popularity of Country music, and no one knew where that decline would end. The Country music industry may have seen Eddy Arnold's embrace of more pop songs,sweetened by strings, as a sign that he was planning to forsake Country music altogether in favor of pop ballads.

Eddy was a unique Country artist for his time in that he took a very strong role in choosing the material that he would record. It may be hard for fans to imagine, but back in the '50s and '60s most Country singers had to work very hard to make a decent living. Most of them were playing small venues like bars and high school auditoriums. Their appearance fees were not that high, and they had to pay travel expenses and bands out of that money.

On the other hand, there were a lot of opportunities to perform. Some, like Ernest Tubb, were known to work well over 200 dates a year. That's a lot of traveling to make a buck. Many artists were out on the road so much that they had little opportunity to visit the publishing companies in pursuit of a hit song. So they relied on their producers to find them hit songs while they toured the honky-tonks and high school gyms of America. It was not unusual for them to come off the road for a few days, learn the songs that their producers had found for them, go into the studio and record a few sides, then it was back on the road for a few more weeks of touring.

But Eddy Arnold was on another level. He played a lot of high-priced dates and could afford to come home to Brentwood, just outside of Nashville, and take a couple of weeks off to listen to songs, choose the ones he wanted to record, learn them thoroughly, rehearse them, and still have time off to relax and ready himself for his studio work. In the '50s, most Country artists did not sell a lot of records. They hoped that by getting airplay, and by having records at the top of the airplay charts, they could get more bookings at higher prices.

But Eddy had come to expect profitable record sales, and he took a lot of pride in the knowledge that his record sales were proof of his extraordinary popularity around the country. So it was terribly important for him to devote his time and effort to finding and recording great songs.

In those days, the bulk of record sales for most Country artists came from the half million juke boxes gracing the nation's honky-tonks and diners. Eddy Arnold's records wound up in people's homes. Cusic notes that before the mid-'50s, Eddy, like most other Country artists, sang tempo songs in a tenor range. Starting in the mid-'50s, Eddy began singing in a lower range, aiming to croon romantic ballads in the relaxed style that suited him very well. He loved Bing Crosby's sound, and his evolved style reflected that preference.

As the years went by, Country fans noticed the change in Eddy's singing style, the change in the instrumental sound of his records, and the change in his stage attire. Some of the fans resented these changes. But Eddy knew as he continued his live appearances, his TV and radio work, and his promotion of his records, that a lot of fans loved what he was doing.

Country music does not stand still. The string bands of the '30s gave way to the honky-tonk artists of the '40s and '50s. The early '60s saw a lot of Country records cross over to pop. Harold Bradley, studio musician and brother of Patsy Cline's producer Owen, recalled that the Decca executives in New York pressed Owen to make Patsy's records sound more pop. He did, and Patsy's sales soared. The '70s, '80s and '90s all witnessed changes in the kind of music Country radio stations played, and there were always fans who resented those changes.

According to Don Cusic, 1957 witnessed the beginning of a recording slump for Eddy that would last through 1963 and into 1964. During this time he had no #1 records, and his sales were way down. So were demands for personal appearances. Eddy must have wondered if his long successful career was at an end. Had the music industry passed him by? He stayed active, appearing on numerous TV variety shows over these years, continued to record, and hoped for the hit that would turn his career around.

In 1965, Eddy's manager, Jerry Purcell, put Eddy in a tuxedo and began booking him in concert venues. More importantly, in January of '65, Eddy recorded "What's He Doing In My World?". The session featured an orchestral string section and was very much in line with what would soon be known as the "Nashville Sound", which combined expressive Nashville songwriting with sophisticated studio arrangements in a successful attempt to broaden Country music's appeal. The record became Eddy Arnold's first #1 hit in ten years, and it would usher in the greatest era of his long career. Over the next three years Eddy would have six #1 hits. By far the biggest record of his career would be the Hank Cochran standard, " Make The World Go Away", which would not only reach the #1 slot on the Country music charts but would occupy the #6 spot on Billboard's pop chart and sell millions of records.

To the media world, Eddy Arnold was the undisputed king of the Nashville Sound. Through 1965 and the ensuing years, he was a staple on TV variety shows in his tuxedo, microphone in hand, without the guitar, and without the hay bales that directors often trotted out as scenery for any Country act. Hard Country fans scratched their heads and had a difficult time understanding what was happening to the music they loved.

But in truth, Eddy Arnold was paving the way for acceptance of Country music by mainstream America. We know that acceptance is spotty. The New York and California media never seem to completely divest themselves of their regional prejudices where Country music is concerned. But for a fleeting moment, Eddy won national respect for Country music, paving the way for an evolving Ray Price, and later artists like Kenny Rogers, Crystal Gayle, Barbara Mandrell and Ronnie Milsap.

Within Country music the fans will always debate who is truly Country, but it's Eddy Arnold, the Tennessee Plowboy, who more than any other artist made certain that Country music would be a rich and diverse form of music for the heartland.