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Playing dances as well as radio shows, the group shifted their sound to get people moving. She played occasional gigs with other bands until the war ended and the Maddox Brothers & Rose reformed, with the youngest Maddox child, Henry, now joining on mandolin. Auditions with Roy Acuff and Bob Wills went nowhere. However, things unraveled for a time in the early 1940s, as Fred, Don, and Cal were drafted in World War I, and Rose became an unhappy bride at 16, then a single mother at 18.
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They followed the California rodeo circuit and played bars for tips, then won a State Fair competition that crowned them California’s best hillbilly band. Thus, the Maddox Brothers & Rose were launched - with the spunky lead vocalist just 11 years old. The caveat was simple: The furniture store owner wanted a girl singer. Acting as manager, he found a furniture store to sponsor some radio spots. After hearing that the band who’d just played the rodeo made $100, he decided it was time to get into the music business. Her brother Fred had a similar epiphany while picking cotton that fall. At that moment, Rose had found her calling - to be a singer. One Sunday the Sons of the Pioneers appeared in person at the Strand Theater. They collected whiskey bottles, turned them in for a penny a piece, then spent their dimes on movies. With some stability, the kids were putting down roots in Modesto. When Charlie got harvesting work in Modesto, the family followed and became what they called “fruit tramps.” They settled and resettled in various towns, with their situation once so dire that Lula had to place Rose with another family - but Rose acted up so often that the family gave her back. And after crossing over the state line to Mississippi and encountering another family who explained train-hopping, the seven Maddoxes rode the boxcars all the way west. The two oldest children stayed behind, while the youngest five and their parents set out for the Golden State in the spring of 1933. They sold everything they had and stashed away the proceeds - just $35. After getting stiffed for a job chopping wood, Charlie decided to skip town and finally indulge his wife Lula’s lifelong dream of living in California, panning for gold. Rose’s father, Charlie Maddox, worked as a sharecropper and hired hand. Her paternal grandfather was a fiddler and roaming preacher, while her uncle Foncey gave lessons to locals and performed in blackface. Her incredible rags to-riches story touches on boxcars and sharecropping, the Grand Ole Opry and Buck Owens, and finally the Father of Bluegrass Music himself, Bill Monroe, who laid the foundation for that seminal 1962 Capitol Records LP, Rose Maddox Sings Bluegrass.īorn on August 15, 1925, in Boaz, Alabama, Roselea Arbana Maddox arrived in a family with some musical heritage. Rose Maddox, the lead singer of the Most Colorful Hillbilly Band in America, made a significant mark in bluegrass, too, as the first woman ever to record a bluegrass album.