When Charlie got harvesting work in Modesto, the family followed and became what they called “fruit tramps.” They settled and resettled in various towns, with their situation once so dire that Lula had to place Rose with another family - but Rose acted up so often that the family gave her back. And after crossing over the state line to Mississippi and encountering another family who explained train-hopping, the seven Maddoxes rode the boxcars all the way west. The two oldest children stayed behind, while the youngest five and their parents set out for the Golden State in the spring of 1933. They sold everything they had and stashed away the proceeds - just $35. After getting stiffed for a job chopping wood, Charlie decided to skip town and finally indulge his wife Lula’s lifelong dream of living in California, panning for gold. Rose’s father, Charlie Maddox, worked as a sharecropper and hired hand. Her paternal grandfather was a fiddler and roaming preacher, while her uncle Foncey gave lessons to locals and performed in blackface.

Her incredible rags to-riches story touches on boxcars and sharecropping, the Grand Ole Opry and Buck Owens, and finally the Father of Bluegrass Music himself, Bill Monroe, who laid the foundation for that seminal 1962 Capitol Records LP, Rose Maddox Sings Bluegrass.īorn on August 15, 1925, in Boaz, Alabama, Roselea Arbana Maddox arrived in a family with some musical heritage. Rose Maddox, the lead singer of the Most Colorful Hillbilly Band in America, made a significant mark in bluegrass, too, as the first woman ever to record a bluegrass album.

Who sang hillbilly rock