06/05/2026
Thank you for sharing this labor of local music love, Wayne Bledsoe and Bradley E Reeves!
A once-mythical Tennessean has now been confirmed to have written many of early country’s biggest hits and evergreens, songs credited to other artists and songwriters.
His name is Arthur Q. Smith — “Q” for short. His story involves the most important names in country music history, and, thanks to southern music historians Wayne Bledsoe and Bradley Reeves, his story isn’t going away.
The long-murmured tale goes something like this: From the 1930s through the 1950s, Arthur Q. Smith roamed the country music and radio worlds, drinking, writing, and selling hundreds of songs on envelopes, napkins and paper scraps, often for the price of a bottle or his bar tab. Some became top Billboard hits, with Q’s name nowhere to be found, as a song’s owner controls its writing credit.
What happened along the way is what Wayne Bledsoe, a 40-year career Knoxville music journalist and radio host, and Reeves, founder of the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound (TAMIS), set out to thoroughly document in the early 2000s. Years of paper-trailing produced reams of solid evidence, which led to official public records, then a few confirmed pictures and film clips, and eventually, actual Q demos in acetate record form.
Reeves says the disc discoveries actually became routine.
“Word got around we were searching for materials. The families of these deceased country musicians, they’d start digging around, and, ‘Oh, what’s this?’ And there’s a ‘Q’ written on this homemade demo disc, an acetate, stashed in a piano bench. Over and over this happened. He’s left this trail behind for many years.”
Eventually, Smith’s family was located, along with boxes of handwritten sheet music, lyrics, and purchase records for countless songs. Together, they confirmed Q’s role in shaping early country music.
The end result of all this musical archeology was The Trouble With The Truth, a 49-track, double-CD of every known Arthur Q. Smith recording, alongside studio versions of country stars performing the songs as originals.
Included are “Wedding Bells” (credited Claude Boone), a Top 5 for Hank Williams, and covered by Dean Martin, Jerry Lee Lewis, Charlie Rich and George Jones; “If Teardrops Were Pennies” (credited Carl Butler), a Top 10 for Dolly Parton, and also sung by Loretta Lynn and Kitty Wells; and “Rainbow at Midnight” (credited Lost John Miller), a No. 1 for Ernest Tubb, and No. 5 for the Carlisle Brothers.
Released in 2016, The Trouble With the Truth earned Bledsoe and Reeves a Best Liner Notes Grammy nomination for its 124-page booklet, a thorough curtain-pull on Smith in the early country world.
As the album circulated, country elders spoke up regarding even bigger Q hits, and a fuller picture of his catalog emerged.
Read our in-depth feature on Q in full at the link in the comments below.
