On May 2, 1923, country songwriter Ruby Nell Allmond was born in Fannin County.
Almond hailed from a musical family, performing in church from the age of four and forming a band with her siblings in high school. She established herself as a distinctive player in North Texas and Oklahoma and soon joined a trio with fellow fiddlers Georgia Slim Rutland and Gowdy Forester.
Allmond worked the family farm as her day job, while Rutland and Forester held down a Dallas radio program as theirs. Allmond listened closely to Rutland and Forester’s daily show, as they’d advertise where she’d need to show up later that evening to play.
In 1948, Allmond won the title National Champion Lady Fiddler at a contest in Greenville and expanded her horizons with a new, fuller band. By 1950, this group would garner greater visibility, campaigning for U.S. House Speaker Sam Rayburn and appearing on the program Big D Jamboree.
She still held a day job, though, as a bank teller in Bonham, where she would work from 1956 to 1988. Allmond credited that job stability with freeing her up to focus on songwriting.
Allmond’s process was to compose songs in her head during her bank shift and then go to her neighbor Audra Brock’s house in the evening to record in a makeshift home studio.
By 1968, Allmond and Brock were confident enough in their work to strike out for Nashville, where they met with legendary Texas songwriter Cindy Walker.
Walker saw something of her own unlikely career path in the pair and introduced them to folks at RCA. This launched a national career with regional roots, as the drive-thru teller from Bonham topped the charts with songs she wrote for Dottie West in 1968 (“Reno”), Stu Phillips in 1969 (“Speak Softly, My Love”), and Ferlin Husky in 1971 (“I Mustn’t Pass This Way Again”).
From those chart-topping years on, Allmond worked at the bank, wrote her songs, fiddled around North Texas, and made a twice-yearly business pilgrimage to Nashville to renew contracts and royalty agreements.
Her two albums came only posthumously, Today I’ll Think About the Rain and A Little Home Cooking, a fitting capstone to a unique country career.
Sources
John Hanners In Laurie E. Jasinski, Gary Hartman, Casey Monahan, and Ann T. Smith, eds. The Handbook of Texas Music, second edition. Denton, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 2012.
Jerry B. Lincecum. “’Today I’ll Think About the Rain’: The Music of Ruby Allmond.” February 9, 2021. https://www.ntxe-news.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi?archive=84&num=121331
Carol C. Taylor. “Ruby Allmond, the National Champion Woman Fiddler.” Personal blog. March 13, 2019. https://carolctaylor.com/wordpress/?p=1467
