It is hard to believe that our subject this month has never been the subject of one of our history articles, but he hasn’t. Until now.
When it comes to singing, songwriting, live performance, promotion, or simply being beloved among fans of gospel music, few could equal or surpass one Wally Fowler.
Born John Wallace Fowler on February 15, 1917 near Adairsville, GA, the young Fowler was the son of a successful cotton farmer, called by some the “cotton king of Bartow County, GA”, who, like many, saw his wealth disappear due to the effects of the Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s.
The Fowler family’s lot was so bad that young Wallace (as he was called then) had to support them on the $7.20 he made per week working for a florist. But even then, he loved singing, and along the way, formed a quartet called the Harmony Quartet based in Gadsden, Alabama.
In 1936, rising gospel music star John Daniel heard Fowler sing, and immediately hired him to sing lead for his quartet, the soon-to-be-famous John Daniel Quartet. At that time, the quartet (like many others of its’ day) , sang a mixture of gospel and country songs, and Fowler soon developed a flair for country-style singing as well, becoming known as the quartet’s “secular solo singer.”
Wallace was writing gospel and country songs by that time, and one of his better known country songs of that time was an original number called “I’m Sending You Two Red Roses”. The song earned a triple encore for the Daniel Quartet when they sang it on a 1940 “All-Night Broadcast” from Dallas’s Sportatorium, a promotional brainchild of gospel music patriarch V.O. Stamps. Stamps’ promotional acumen and ideas would later serve as a major influence on Wallace Fowler’s career.
Another event that would prove to be a major influence on Fowler’s career was the John Daniel Quartet’s joining the staff of the famous Grand Ole Opry in 1942. There, the quartet continued its’ combination of gospel and country music, and it was the first gospel quartet to reach such national prominence. Fowler and the John Daniel Quartet were taking gospel music to new levels of visibility and popularity.
By 1944, Fowler’s talents had drawn such notice that he got an offer from a Knoxville radio station to form his own group and join a popular midday radio show there. Despite Daniel’s insistence that it would not work out for him, Fowler accepted the challenge, left the Daniel Quartet, and began to assemble his own group.
Two things happened when Fowler left the Daniel Quartet. One, he decided to shorten his surname to Wally. And two, he could not find the members of the band he’d hired.
Needing musicians, he hired a number of the staff musicians at WNOX on the spot, and the Georgia Clodhoppers were born. One of the better musicians in that band was a young guitarist named Chet Atkins, who later became a country music superstar on record, in the studio, and as a record company executive.
But Wally also wanted a gospel quartet to front the band, and that took a little longer in coming. When Lee Roy Abernathy’s Four Tones Quartet broke up around that time, two of their members, Johnny New and Curley Kinsey, joined up with Wally and Lon (Deacon) Freeman to form a new version of the Harmony Quartet, the same name that Fowler used for his first quartet in the 1930s. Sometimes the Georgia Clodhoppers would back them, other times just a guitar.
But Wally decided to change the name of the quartet after a series of Saturday concerts for schoolchildren in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Oak Ridge was a place where the new atomic bomb was being built. After a year, Fowler was so taken with the youngsters’ response to the Harmony Quartet that he decided to rename the group after their hometown.
After the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima to help win World War II, the Oak Ridge Quartet joined Red Foley on the Grand Ole Opry. From 1946 to 1950, the Quartet was a part of that famous institution. Again, Fowler had succeeded in bringing gospel music to the mass public with success.
But in 1949, three men left the Oak Ridge Quartet. Undaunted, Fowler took control of another group, the Calvary Quartet, and renamed them the Oak Ridge Quartet. The quartet continued to be one of the outstanding groups of its’ day.
But by 1957, the group’s fortunes had fallen on hard times. And Wally Fowler was beginning to incur debts. To escape one of those debts, he sold the rights to the “Oak Ridge Quartet”’s name to a young singing talent named Smitty Gatlin, who Fowler hired to manage the quartet back in 1956. That version of the Oak Ridge Quartet would later become the Oak Ridge Boys, and become one of gospel music’s most successful quartets, and later still would become one of the most popular vocal groups in the history of country music.
Fowler tried once more to capitalize on his association with the Oak Ridge name, forming another quartet with that name in the early 1960s. Fowler was taken to court in 1964 by Gatlin and his Oak Ridge Boys, and was ordered by that court decision to stop using that or any similar name in the future.
But one of Fowler’s other ideas earned him justified recognition. Influenced by V.O. Stamps’ “All-Night Broadcasts” in Dallas in the 1940s, Fowler began a series of singings from Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in November 1948, and by the spring of 1949, those “All-Night Sings” were a staple of the first Friday of each month at the Ryman, and soon they spread throughout the South, the Southeast, and the Southwest. People all over those areas loved the many gospel groups singing well into the night. These singings brought gospel quartet music into the national spotlight,,,and once more, Fowler was at the center of it, and used his considerable talents and creativity toward that end.
Fowler was also featured often on TV in the 1950s and 1960s, and featured many of the top gospel artists of the day on his own show during those years.
Fowler continued to record many gospel recordings all through the 1960s and 1970s, and even had a minor country hit, “Lo And Behold” in 1984.
Among the many gospel songs Fowler composed, his best known is probably “Wasted Years”. It is considered a gospel music standard. The extremely personable Fowler was known to gospel music fans as “The Man With A Million Friends”.
On July 3, 1994, Fowler apparently suffered a heart attack while fishing in Tennessee, and his body was discovered floating in the water.
But the name Wally Fowler lives on as a legendary gospel music singer, songwriter, promoter, personality, and discoverer of talent. Besides the many gospel singers he mentored, he is also credited with discovering the legendary country singer Patsy Cline.
We hope you enjoyed this look back at one of gospel music’s true legends, and look forward to you all checking back here next month.
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Author: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Written: 08/09/2010
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Category: SG History 101
Comments: 4
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Hey John...Wally Fowler told me one time that he wrote "I Bowed on my Knees and Cried Holy" under the alias Bea Packer. Fact or Fiction?
"Wasted Years" is truly one of the great songs! The story in that song could be the theme song of hundreds of thousands of us. Good article, John.
Wally did write Bowed on my knee's and many many other songs under that name. he was under contract and in a dispute with his record label so he wrote songs under an alias. he also, wrote 13 steps a way, soldiers last letter and Eddy Arnolds first six number one hits, including That's how much I love you.
How sucessfull were the "All Night Sings?
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