Lisa Love, director of music marketing and development for the Georgia Department of Economic Development (and a Moultrie native), provided this photo of Boudleaux Bryant playing fiddle with the Twilight Playboys. The only other person in the photo she can identify is Gene Mills on banjo. If anyone knows who the other Playboys are, let The Observer know at moultrie.observer@gaflnews.com or at our office on North Main Street and we’ll forward it to her.

MOULTRIE — The late Boudleaux Bryant will receive special recognition Thursday night as part of the Colquitt County Career Achievement Award festivities.

Diadorius Boudleaux Bryant was born on Feb. 13, 1920, to Daniel and Louise Bryant. Daniel Bryant, a Moultrie attorney, named his son Boudleaux after a Frenchman who saved his life during World War I. Boudleaux grew up in Moultrie and graduated from Moultrie High School in 1937.

A classical violin student from age 6 through 17, Bryant spent the 1937–1938 season with the Atlanta Philharmonic while living in Atlanta with his father’s sisters, Aunt Maymee and Aunt Jewell. Afterwards he moved to hillbilly fiddling when he joined Hank Penny’s Radio Cowboys performing at WSB in Atlanta. He later worked with Gene Steele & His Sunny Southerners in Memphis before moving on to a touring jazz group.  While in Moultrie, Bryant played with a local band, Gene Mills and the Twilight Playboys.

In the summer of 1945, while he was performing at Milwaukee’s Schroeder Hotel, he met Felice Scaduto, then working at the hotel as an elevator operator. After a whirlwind courtship, they married in Newport, Ky., on Sept. 5, 1945. During the later ’40s the Bryants became quite itinerant as they lived often in a house trailer pulled behind their 1937 Oldsmobile. Their home base remained Moultrie and their two sons, Dane and Del, were born during this time.

 In contrast to Boudleaux, Felice wasn’t a musician, though she had sung on radio as a child and later did some volunteer entertaining during World War II with a USO show. Her real passion was poetry. During the couple’s first year together, they began putting his melodies together with her verses, and a songwriting team was born.

Their break came in late 1948, when singer Rome Johnson passed their song “Country Boy” along to Fred Rose of Acuff-Rose Publications in Nashville. Rose got the song to Little Jimmy Dickens, who scored a #7 hit with it on Billboard’s Best-Selling Retail Folk Records chart in the spring of 1949. The following year, Rose persuaded the Bryants to move to Nashville, where they concentrated on songwriting full time, with Dickens and Carl Smith being their most dependable clients. Among the many tailor-made Bryant songs Dickens recorded are “I’m Little but I’m Loud,” “Take Me As I Am,” “Out Behind the Barn,” and “Hole in My Pocket.” Carl Smith had big hits with “Hey, Joe,” “Back Up, Buddy,” and “It’s a Lovely, Lovely World.” Meanwhile, between 1951 and 1953, the prolific couple recorded four singles for MGM, the last three billing them as “Bud & Betty Bryant.”

In 1957 the Bryants connected with their biggest outlet for their songs — the Everly Brothers. The Bryants supplied the Everlys’ first hit, “Bye, Bye Love,” and continued to be the Everlys’ main source of material through the early ’60s. All told, the Bryants wrote 29 songs for the Everly Brothers, 12 of them hits, including “Wake Up, Little Susie,” “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” “Take a Message to Mary,” and “Sleepless Nights.”

The diversity and quantity of the Bryants’ total output is staggering. Among their hits for others are Red Foley’s “Midnight” (co-written with Chet Atkins), Eddy Arnold’s “How’s the World Treating You” (also with Atkins), Jim Reeves’s “Blue Boy,” Bob Luman’s “Let’s Think About Living,” and Roy Orbison’s “Love Hurts,” later an international hit for the rock group Nazareth. Other stars who recorded Bryant songs included Frankie Lane, Tony Bennett, Ernest Tubb, Buddy Holly, Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris, Roy Clark, Ray Charles, and Christy Lane. One of the Bryants’ best-known songs is “Rocky Top.” First popularized by the Osborne Brothers in 1968, “Rocky Top” is now known as an official Tennessee state song and the fight song for the University of Tennessee’s athletic teams.

During their distinguished career, the Bryants had some 1,500 songs recorded by more than 400 artists, amounting to sales of over 250 million records. Along the way, they raised their two sons, Dane and Del Bryant. Dane now works in Nashville real estate; Del retired recently as CEO of Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI). Boudleaux died of cancer on June 25, 1987; Felice died on April 22, 2003.

Their songs earned them a total of 59 Pop, Country, and R and B Awards. Due to their Georgia backgrounds they each were inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, Boudleaux in 1982 and Felice in 2006. They were inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972 and into the National Academy of Popular Music’s Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1986. They were honored in 2006 with a star in the first induction ceremony for Nashville’s Walk of Fame. In 1991 the Bryants were elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Tickets for the Colquitt County Career Achievement Award banquet are available for purchase at the Moultrie-Colquitt County Chamber of Commerce.  The recipient of the 2015 Career Achievement Award is guitarist Owen Smith. Smith will address attendees and will also be speaking to students at Colquitt County High School during his visit to Moultrie.