“Rocky Top” has been a battle cry for University of Tennessee football fans for 52 years—and an anthemic bluegrass fleet-fingered rager for five years longer.
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The Osborne Brothers released “Rocky Top” on Christmas Day in 1967. However, “Rocky Top” wasn’t always rooted in Southern or athletic culture. The UT Pride of the Southland Marching Band played it at a football game in 1972, and its football fate was sealed. A decade later, the general assembly elected “Rocky Top” as one of Tennessee’s official state songs.
There are Knoxville stores that bear the name. And, even East Tennessee towns that changed their monkier to mimic the toe-tapper. Lake City, which is where locals often went to buy fireworks on holidays, officially became Rocky Top in 2014. The name change was part of an effort to boost tourism in the remote town of Anderson and Campbell Counties.
But, in the words of another sing-along favorite, where did it come from, and where did it go?
Songwriters Felice and Boudleaux Bryant checked into room 388 of the Historic Gatlinburg Inn on August 28, 1967. The getaway in the heart of East Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains remains a popular spot for Nashville songwriters to stow away in search of uninterrupted creativity. The Bryants were in search of the same. They were friends with the Inn’s owners, Rel and Wilma Maples. Their nephew, David Cross, is co-owner and also a member of the Gatlinburg Inn board of directors. He said room 388 was their favorite. When his family closed the Inn in the winter, they gave the Bryants a key.
Felice and Boudleaux Bryant Had the Key
“Very gracious people,” Cross said on The Historic Gatlinburg Inn’s website. “They had the first Mercedes Benz I had ever saw. They loved coming up here. The Bryants had such a good relationship with my aunt Wilma that when they were inducted into the National Songwriters Hall of Fame, they went to New York, and they took my aunt with them.”
In Gatlinburg to write slow songs for “Hee Haw” star Archie Campbell, the couple only had two songs to go when Felice wanted to pick up the pace. Her reticence irritated Boudleaux, according to their son, Del Bryant.
“My father got a little bit upset with her,” Del said during a UT homecoming game celebrating the song’s 50th anniversary with The Volunteers. “So, he grabbed his guitar and started singing, ‘Wish that I was on old Rocky Top down in the Tennessee hills,’ there what do you think?’ She said, ‘I like it. Let’s write it.’ Then, about 15 minutes later, it was written.”
The Osborne Brothers recorded and released “Rocky Top” within the next four months. Nashville radio personality Ralph Emery launched the song, which was the B-side to the Osborne record “My Favorite Memory.”
“Rocky Top” Credit Goes to Ralph Emery?
“He flipped over and played ‘Rocky Top,’” Cross said. “The Osbornes had made it more up-tempo, and according to what Ralph Emery said, he said ‘the phones started ringing.’ The song had a life of its own after that.”
Del encouraged fans to respect and support songwriters as much as artists.
“Become aware of the people who write the music you like. There are writers behind a lot of that music and root for them also,” he said.
As much as “Rocky Top” is a beloved ditty that most Southern children are as familiar with as nursery rhymes, there was no place in the area called “Rocky Top” when the Bryants wrote it. There’s a theory an area called Thunderhead Mountain in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park inspired the song because of its rocky peak. Del, the former CEO of Broadcast Music, Inc., said his parents didn’t write the song about a specific mountain.
“When you write a song in 10 minutes, you’re not wondering if there’s an obscure place called Rocky Top,” he told NBC in 2017. “My father said it was just the title of a song. It was all about a place where corn won’t grow, but you can still make moonshine.”
Rocky Top: No Corn But Plenty of Moonshine
They completed it so quickly because the Bryants were already in writing mode for Campbell’s album.
“Dad said, ‘Well, we had been bringing the muse down for a couple of weeks. We had been writing hard. We were in the zone,’” Del recalled. “They were writing everything that was being given to them by the grand creator. They wrote it as fast as it came to them.”
Boudleaux Bryant died in 1987, and Felice Bryant died in 2003. Both are members of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. Artists recorded more than 1,000 songs the couple wrote, including 29 for the Everly Brothers, such as “Bye Bye Love,” “Wake Up Little Susie,” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” However, “Rocky Top” is among the most impactful because, nearly 60 years after its creation, it continues to bring joy and spark enthusiasm for hundreds of thousands of people every year – at least at UT football games.
“It is also a thrill to see something your parents wrote bring so much joy to people,” Del said. “Without the song, my parents already had wonderful careers, and we would be very proud. ‘Rocky Top’ is a juggernaut that is destined to become another ‘She’ll be coming around the mountain’-type of song people will always remember, even if they don’t remember who wrote it.”
The Cherry on Top
He called it “the cherry on top” of their careers.
“It surpassed all expectations,” he told NBC. “It is also one of the rare songs that gets stronger over time,” said Bryant. “‘Rocky Top’ is relevant not only to Tennessee but throughout the South.”
As a tribute to The Bryants, room 388 at Gatlinburg Inn has been left almost untouched.
(Photo from American Songwriter archives)
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