Written by Pee Wee King (music) and Redd Stewart (lyrics), 1946
🎵 Sing along with the full lyrics at LyricFind
“The Tennessee Waltz” was born in the cab of a truck. In late 1946, bandleader Pee Wee King and his lead singer Redd Stewart were driving home from a show when Bill Monroe’s brand-new “Kentucky Waltz” came over the radio. They looked at each other and asked the obvious question: why doesn’t Tennessee have a waltz? Stewart grabbed a matchbook, opened it flat, and started scribbling lyrics on the inside while King worked out a melody from the band’s old theme song. “We should have kept the matchbox cover,” Stewart later admitted. “But who thinks of those things?” The next day they showed it to legendary publisher Fred Rose, who tweaked a single line in the bridge — and the correction is still visible in pencil on the original manuscript, which now lives at the University of Tennessee.
King’s Golden West Cowboys recorded it in 1947 and had a solid country hit. But the song became a phenomenon in 1950, when a young pop singer named Patti Page cut it — almost as an afterthought, as the B-side to “Boogie Woogie Santa Claus.” Her label wouldn’t pay for backup singers, so Page overdubbed her own harmony vocals, a novel trick at the time and part of what makes the record sound so haunting. The throwaway B-side buried the Santa song, spent thirteen weeks at #1, and sold in the millions — often cited as the biggest-selling record ever by a female artist, and a massive hit as far away as Japan. Tennessee made it an official state song in 1965, and Page’s recording entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998. Not bad for a few lines jotted on a matchbook at 60 miles an hour.
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