'Tis Sweet to be Remembered': Mac Wiseman, who did just about all of it in music and the music business, gone at 93

Mac Wiseman in 2014, when he entered the Country
Music Hall of Fame. (Photo by Mark Humphrey, AP)

Funeral services were held Wednesday in Nashville for Mac Wiseman, who died at 93 on Feb. 24. He "did just about everything a person could do in the music business: worked as a disc jockey, promoter and record executive; recorded more than 65 albums; helped found the Country Music Association and served as its first treasurer; received a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellowship; and influenced greats like Kris Kristofferson, Merle Haggard and Alison Krauss," recounted Juli Thanki of The Tennessean.

The list of Wiseman's honorary pallbearers in Bluegrass Today illustrated his ecumenical, eclectic music history. They included Krauss, Marty Stuart, Bill Anderson, Charlie Daniels, Vince Gill and Sonny Osborne. His "hallmark was crossing musical genre lines," Bill Friskics-Warren wrote for The New York Times. Thanki notes, "He collaborated with artists ranging from big band leader Woody Herman to singer-songwriter John Prine [another honorary pallbearer] to funk master Bootsy Collins."

Born along the Blue Ridge in Northern Virginia, Wiseman made his way south in the Great Valley of Appalachia, to Roanoke, Bristol and Knoxville before jumping the Cumberland Plateau to Nashville, where he became an institution. "Wiseman was the last surviving original member of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs' Foggy Mountain Boys," Thanki notes. "Yet, until his last days, he remained active in Nashville's music scene." After Flatt and Scruggs, he was with Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, and as musical genres were sorted out in the 1950s and '60s, he was stuck with the bluegrass label.

“Not to sound too critical, but the ‘bluegrass’ classification was the worst damned thing ever happened to me,” Wiseman told the roots-music magazine No Depression in 2006. “Up until then I was getting as much airplay as Marty Robbins or Ray Price,” two country crooners who had crossover pop hits. Wiseman's biggest hit as a songwriter and performer was "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy," a 1959 tune that reflected his deep roots in traditional music that preceded bluegrass. His "signature song, '’Tis Sweet to Be Remembered,' was written in 1902, and his version owed as much to vintage pop and swing music as it did to country or bluegrass," Friskics-Warren writes.