Roy Claxton Acuff was an American country music singer, fiddler, and promoter. Known as the King of Country Music, Acuff is often credited with moving the genre from its early string band and “hoedown” format to the star singer-based format that helped make it internationally successful.

Acuff began his music career in the 1930s, and gained regional fame as the singer and fiddler for his group, the Smoky Mountain Boys. He joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1938, and although his popularity as a musician waned in the late 1940s, he remained one of the Opry’s key figures and promoters for nearly four decades. In 1942, Acuff co-founded the first major Nashville-based country music publishing company—Acuff-Rose Music—which signed acts such as Hank Williams, Roy Orbison, and The Everly Brothers. In 1962, Acuff became the first living person inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Roy Acuff was born in Maynardville, Tennessee to Ida Carr and Simon E. Neill Acuff, the third of five children. The Acuffs were a fairly prominent Union County family. Roy’s paternal grandfather, Coram Acuff, had been a Tennessee state senator, and Roy’s maternal grandfather was a local physician. Roy’s father was an accomplished fiddler and a Baptist preacher, his mother was proficient on the piano, and during Roy’s early years the Acuff house was a popular place for local gatherings. At such gatherings, Roy would often amuse people by balancing farm tools on his chin. He also learned to play harmonica and Jew’s harp at a young age.

The Acuff family relocated to Fountain City, a suburb of North Knoxville, in 1919. Roy attended Central High School, where he sang in the school chapel’s choir and performed in “every play they had.” Roy’s primary passion, however, was athletics. He was a three-sport standout at Central, and after graduating in 1925, he was offered a scholarship to Carson-Newman, but turned it down. He played with several small baseball clubs around Knoxville, worked at odd jobs, and occasionally boxed. In 1929, he tried out for the Knoxville Smokies, at that time a minor league baseball team for the New York Giants. A series of collapses in spring training following a sunstroke, however, ended his baseball career prematurely. The effects left him ill for several years, and he even suffered a nervous breakdown in 1930. “I couldn’t stand any sunshine at all,” he later recalled. While recovering, Acuff began to hone his fiddle skills, often playing on the family’s front porch in late afternoons after the sun went down. His father gave him several records of regionally-renowned fiddlers, such as Fiddlin’ John Carson and Gid Tanner, which were important influences on his early style.

Rock Legend Roy Orbison was honored posthumously with the 2,400th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Mrs. Barbara Orbison accepted the star on his behalf. Leron Gubler, President and CEO of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, presided over the ceremony. Guests included Dan Aykroyd, T-Bone Burnett, Michelle Branch, Jeff Beck, Chris Isaak, Jeff Lynne, Jason Mraz, Joe Walsh, and Dwight Yoakum.

1750 N. Vine Street on January 29, 2010.

BIOGRAPHY

Roy Orbison was one of the very first international rock and roll stars, and was a household name by the time he was 21. Loved the world over for a soaring 5 octave voice, and his pioneering way of writing rock and roll songs, Orbison was an artist without limits. Orbison is one of the very few artists to have been accepted by the world in all forms of popular music, and to have won Grammys in pop, rock and roll and country categories.

Roy's career tells the story of rock and roll, having pioneered rock-a-billy, rock and roll and pop. Roy's music not only crossed all barriers, it broke them down. He brought rock and roll to Nashville, and these sounds were captured on vinyl and taken to England where they in turn inspired the British Invasion. Then, as the British bands took hold of the charts, Roy was the only single male artist to withstand it, ranking alongside the Beatles and the Stones, all artists who had opened for him as he toured internationally and all artists who remained friends.

Throughout Roy's career he would again and again Top the charts, and continue to inspire the new artists alongside the charts with him. The last decade of his life was no exception: The 80's saw Roy Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Bruce Springsteen, who subsequently joined an all star ensemble for Roy and friends 's Black & White Night (featuring Jackson Browne, T Bone Burnett, Elvis Costello, k.d. lang, Bonnie Raitt, JD Souther, Tom Waits, Jennifer Warnes). On December 6, 1988 the world lost Roy Orbison, but the legacy of his music lives on. Roy was the only artist (other than Elvis) to have two simultaneous posthumously-charting Top 5 albums with his mega-hit "You Got It" (written with Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty) off of Roy's solo release Mystery Girl (a collaboration with Bono); and The Traveling Wilburys (including bandmates Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty). Both of these releases also won him two Grammys. In 1991, two years after his death, he won the Grammy for Best Make Vocalist, for his performance of Pretty Woman from the concert Black and White Nights.

This totally unique artist enjoyed an unrivaled career that 22 years since his passing, is still flourishing. "And now the journey continues," said Barbara Orbison "with Roy Orbison's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame."

There will never be another Roy Orbison.

Rudolf Serkin, was a Bohemian-born pianist. Serkin was born in Eger, Bohemia, Austro-Hungarian Empire to a Russian-Jewish family.

Hailed as a child prodigy, he was sent to Vienna at the age of 9, where he studied piano with Richard Robert and, later, composition with Joseph Marx making his public debut with the Vienna Philharmonic at 12. From 1918 to 1920 he studied composition with Arnold Schoenberg and participated actively in Schoenberg’s Society for the Private Performance of Music. He began a regular concert career in 1920, living in Berlin with the German violinist Adolf Busch and his family, which included a then 3-year-old daughter Irene whom Serkin would marry 15 years later. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Serkin performed throughout Europe both as soloist and with Busch and the Busch Quartet. With the rise of Hitler in Germany in 1933, Serkin and the Busches left Berlin for Basel, Switzerland.

In 1933 Serkin made his first United States appearance at the Coolidge Festival in Washington, D.C., where he performed with Adolf Busch. In 1936 he launched his solo concert career in the U.S. with the New York Philharmonic under Arturo Toscanini. The critics raved, describing him as “an artist of unusual and impressive talents in possession of a crystalline technique, plenty of power, delicacy, and tonal purity.” In 1937, Serkin played his first New York recital at Carnegie Hall.

Shortly after the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the Serkins and Busches emigrated to the United States, where Serkin taught several generations of pianists at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. From 1968 to 1976 he served as the Institute’s Director. He lived with his growing family first in New York, then in Philadelphia, as well as on a dairy farm in rural Guilford, Vermont. In 1951, Serkin and Adolf Busch founded the Marlboro Music School and Festival near Brattleboro, Vermont with the goal of stimulating interest in and performance of chamber music in the United States. He made numerous recordings from the 1940s into the 1980s, including one at RCA Victor of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in 1944, with the NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Toscanini. Most of his recordings were made for Columbia Masterworks, although in the 1980s he also recorded for Deutsche Grammophon and Telarc. Serkin admired the music of Max Reger, which he discovered while working with Adolf Busch. In 1959, he became the first pianist in the United States to record Reger’s Piano Concerto, Op. 114, with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.