Vernon Dalhart

Marion Try Slaughter was born on April 6, 1883, in Jefferson, Texas. When he was twelve or thirteen, his family relocated to Dallas, where he attended the Dallas Conservatory of Music and performed at local community events, singing and playing harmonica and Jew's harp. He married Sadie Lee Moore-Livingston in 1901 and had two children, a son and a daughter. In 1910, acting on the advice of a teacher at the Dallas Conservatory, he moved his family to New York City, where he worked in a piano warehouse while pursuing occasional singing engagements. He adopted the stage name Vernon Dalhart, combining the names of two Texas towns between which he had worked as a cattle hand during his teenage years in the 1890s.

Dalhart's formal training was in classical music, and he harbored ambitions of an operatic career. In 1913 he was cast in productions of Madame Butterfly and H.M.S. Pinafore, and he appeared on Broadway in 1914. During this period he also auditioned for Thomas Alva Edison after responding to a newspaper advertisement seeking singers, which led to a recording relationship with Edison Records. From 1916 through 1926, he made more than 400 recordings of classical music and early dance band vocals across multiple labels.

His trajectory shifted in 1917 when he recorded "Can't You Heah Me Callin', Caroline?" for Edison Records, a recording that first connected his work to the country music tradition then commonly called Hillbilly Music. Dalhart drew on his background in farming and ranching as an influence on this direction, and he subsequently began recording prolifically for Columbia, Edison Records, and other major labels of the era. In the 1920s and 1930s he sang on more than 5,000 singles for numerous labels, employing over 100 pseudonyms including Al Craver, Vernon Dale, Frank Evans, Hugh Lattimer, Sid Turner, and Bob White. On Grey Gull Records he frequently recorded under the name Vel Veteran, a pseudonym also used by other singers. Between 1927 and 1929 he recorded as part of the Vernon Dalhart Trio alongside Adelyne Hood and Carson Robison.

His most commercially significant recording was a 1924 version of "The Wreck of the Old 97," a ballad about the 1903 derailment of Fast Mail train No. 97 near Danville, Virginia, released on the Victor Talking Machine Company label. Paired with "The Prisoner's Song" as the b-side, the single ultimately sold as many as seven million copies. The Recording Industry Association of America awarded it a gold disc, and it has been identified as the biggest-selling non-holiday record in the first seventy years of recorded music. Joel Whitburn, a statistician for Billboard magazine, determined that "The Prisoner's Song" held the number one position for twelve weeks during 1925 and 1926. The success of the single prompted the Victor Company to send Ralph Peer to the southern mountains in 1927 for the Bristol Sessions, which resulted in the discovery of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. His 1925 recording of "The Runaway Train" became particularly well known in the United Kingdom, where BBC Radio's Children's Favourites broadcast it regularly between 1954 and 1982.

By the late 1930s Dalhart's popularity had diminished and he had suffered significant financial losses during the Great Depression. He made a final recording for Bluebird Records in 1939 and relocated to Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1940, where he worked as a night clerk at the Hotel Barnum. He died of a coronary occlusion on September 14, 1948, at the age of 65, and is buried at Mountain Grove Cemetery in Bridgeport.

Dalhart received posthumous recognition from several institutions. He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1981. The Recording Academy presented Grammy Hall of Fame Awards for "The Prisoner's Song" in 1998 and for "Wreck of the Old 97" in 2021. He was also honored on the Gennett Records Walk of Fame in 2007, and "The Prisoner's Song" was included among the Songs of the Century.