HE BOUGHT THE GRAVESTONE YEARS BEFORE EITHER OF THEM NEEDED IT — BECAUSE HE WAS CERTAIN HE WOULD GO FIRST. He was wrong by eleven years. Roy Acuff married Mildred Louise Douglas on Christmas Day, 1936. He was a fiddle player from Maynardville, Tennessee, who had failed at baseball and had only just begun to record. In 1942, publishers were offering him around a thousand dollars a song. He turned the money down and started his own company instead — Acuff-Rose. Six years later, that company signed a young man named Hank Williams. The company was in Mildred’s name. She was a founder and a vice president, and she handled the business side of his life while he sang. She traveled with him on tour and stayed off the stage. “She wasn’t shy,” Roy said. “She just didn’t care for the spotlight.” On June 17, 1981, he found her in the bedroom of their Nashville home. She had died of a heart attack in her sleep, at 67. Only days before, he had told her he wanted to go first so he would not be left alone. They had been married 44 years. He lived eleven more years. He moved into a house on the Opryland grounds and came in early most mornings, doing small chores backstage like stocking the soda refrigerators. Roy died on November 23, 1992, at 89, and was buried four hours later. He had asked for it that way so no one could turn it into a circus. The monument he had chosen years earlier is carved with a raised fiddle and bow. They are under it together.
Roy Acuff and Mildred: A Love Story That Chose Its Ending Early Roy Acuff had a habit of thinking ahead,…