Ralph Davis

Ralph Davis was born on March 15, 1930 in rural Wayne County, Tennessee. He moved to Wayne County, Michigan in 1951. After being drafted into the army, Ralph was stationed in Missouri, playing western swing with a ten-piece band nightly. After his military service was over, Ralph returned to Detroit in 1957 and formed the Western Rhythm Boys with two of his brothers: Kenneth on the fiddle, Guy on bass guitar, and Ralph on guitar.

During late 1957, Davis cut two original songs for Jack Brown of Fortune Records in Detroit. “Searching For You” featured bass, drums, steel guitar, fiddle, and Davis’ vocal and rhythm guitar. “That’s all I played back then,” Ralph said. “That’s all I’ve ever played, mountain guitar. I play a little banjo and mandolin, but not enough to amount to anything. … my brother Kenny, he’s a great musician. A great mandolin player…he played fiddle fluently, and he plays a great guitar.”

In an interview conducted several years ago, Ralph said, “One night we was working this club in Ann Arbor (Michigan), I’ll never forget it. I had an old ’53 Buick, and it had those fluid (electric) windows in it, and somebody rolled one down behind, and we couldn’t get it up. Boy, I was freezing! On the way home, Marty (Robbins) was singing on the radio. We had tuned in to WSM, I always listened. I told Kenny, ‘Do you know what I’m gonna do?’ And he said, ‘Nah.’ I said, ‘I’m going back to Nashville.’ He said, ‘What for?’ I said, ‘I’m gonna get on the Opry.’ And he just laughed, ‘Oh yeah?’ I said, ‘Yeah. In two weeks, I’m leaving.’ And so I did. I went out there and gave them my notice, and you know what? He left before I did!”

Soon after moving to Nashville during the winter of 1958, Ralph and his brothers Kenneth and Guy rustled up some gigs playing music in the city’s active night club scene. “I had to get a job when I went down there – something to do besides the music,” recalled Ralph. “I got a job in a print shop. Then I started writing songs, and hanging around Tootsie’s. I met a lot of people there…next thing I knew, I had a song on an Ernest Tubb record!”

Ralph worked with bandleader “Big Jeff” (Grover Franklin Bess) and his Radio Playboys for a while. At that time, Big Jeff and his wife, Tootsie, owned Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge on Broadway, a hangout for musicians who worked the Opry stage at the Ryman Auditorium, which was located near a back door to the club.

“Tommy Hill was a great influence on me,” said Davis. “He liked some of the songs I’d written, so I made a demo at Starday Recording Studio. They started getting some of them recorded by Archie Campbell, Roy Drusky…then Tommy asked me once if I’d fill in for him at the Opry. He was a rhythm (guitar) player. I said, ‘Sure, man!’ I got to know all the acts down there. When Tommy decided he didn’t want to play on a particular night, I’d go take his place. One day he told me, ‘I’m gonna quit. Do you want the job?’ I said, ‘You bet I do.’ This was, like, 1960. I talked with the manager and he said, ‘Yeah, as far as I’m concerned.’ It wasn’t really called a ‘staff band’ at that time. It depended on the artists who wanted to use you. That went on until about ’68. But then one day they called the musicians in and told us they were making a staff band, and they were just gonna keep so many of us to play. Me and my brother Guy were included in it. Hal Love, Billy Linneman, Junior Husky, Pete Drake, Jimmy ‘Spider’ Wilson…there were ten of us that was kept there. We stayed there for the next forty years.”

1999 marked the end of an era at the Grand Ole Opry, when management asked most of the regular musicians to retire. After forty years, Davis left the stage of the Opry for the last time. “I got to work with some great people,” he said. “It was my desire, when I was young, growing up on the little farm over here. We had a battery-operated radio and I’d listen to the Opry every Saturday night.” A decade after leaving the Opry, Ralph Davis passed away in Waynesboro on October 29, 2010.