Mac Wiseman, the bluegrass balladeer and guitar player known as “the Voice With a Heart,” whose hallmark was crossing musical genre lines, died on Sunday in Nashville. He was 93.

The cause was kidney failure, his companion and caregiver, Janie Boyd, said.

Mr. Wiseman first made his mark in the 1940s playing with bluegrass legends, first as a founding member of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’s Foggy Mountain Boys, and then with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys.

As a sometime lead singer with Monroe’s group, Mr. Wiseman was featured on classics like “Can’t You Hear Me Callin’ ” and “Travelin’ This Lonesome Road.” He appeared as a headlining act on the bluegrass circuit in the 1950s and ’60s.

But his musical instincts were always too wide-ranging to rest comfortably within the sometimes hermetic confines of bluegrass.

“Not to sound too critical, but the ‘bluegrass’ classification was the worst damned thing ever happened to me,” Mr. Wiseman said, talking about his first decade as a solo artist, in an interview with the roots music magazine No Depression in 2006. “Up until then I was getting as much airplay as Marty Robbins or Ray Price.”

Mr. Wiseman’s biggest hits as a solo artist were “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” in 1955 and “Jimmy Brown, the Newsboy” in 1959, both of which reached the Top 10 of the country chart. His other early successes included interpretations of songs like “Love Letters in the Sand,” which had been a No. 1 pop hit for Pat Boone, and “I Wonder How the Old Folks Are at Home,” a parlor favorite recorded by the Carter Family.

Mr. Wiseman’s 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. “ ’Tis sweet to be remembered, on a bright or a gloomy day / ’Tis sweet to be remembered, by a dear one far away,” he crooned in a limpid tenor in the song’s waltzing chorus.

The record, his first release as a solo artist, was typical of the earnest, reverberating delivery that would sustain him in a seven-decade solo career, in which he released more than 60 albums.

Not merely a gifted singer, Mr. Wiseman was also a successful music producer and entrepreneur. He was the founding secretary of the board of the Country Music Foundation in 1958. Before that he spent four years as the creative director of the West Coast office of Dot Records. He also managed the WWVA Jamboree, a weekly barn dance and radio broadcast in Wheeling, W.Va., from 1966 to 1970.

Despite feeling hemmed in by the bluegrass label, Mr. Wiseman was elected to the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Hall of Fame in 1993 and was for decades regarded as one of the idiom’s elder statesmen.

Robert Shelton of The New York Times, reviewing an appearance by Mr. Wiseman at Carnegie Hall in 1962, wrote that he “used the penetrating, driving idiom of the bluegrass vocal leader in a most winning fashion.” Sharing the bill that evening were Mother Maybelle Carter, Johnny Cash and other popular country and bluegrass entertainers.

Malcolm Bell Wiseman was born on May 23, 1925, in Crimora, Va., in the foothills of the Shenandoah Mountains. His parents, Howard Bell Wiseman, a miller, and Myra Ruth (Humphreys) Wiseman, oversaw a musical household; Mac first performed in public as an adolescent.

Afflicted with polio at a young age, he went on to win a scholarship from the National Foundation for Polio to study piano, music theory and radio broadcasting at a conservatory in Dayton, Va., in the northwest part of the state.

In 1946, after a brief stint as a singer and disc jockey in nearby Harrisonburg, Va., the young Mr. Wiseman moved to Knoxville, Tenn., to work as a harmony vocalist and upright bass player for the country singer Molly O’Day. He appeared both on her popular radio show and on the recordings she made for Columbia that year.

In 1947 he began performing on WCYB in Bristol, Va., where he met Lester Flatt. A friendship ensued, and Mr. Wiseman joined the first edition of Flatt & Scruggs’s Foggy Mountain Boys in 1948, with Flatt on guitar and Scruggs on banjo. After that apprenticeship and his subsequent time in Bill Monroe’s band, he formed his own group, the Country Boys, who headlined the Old Dominion Barn Dance in Richmond, Va., from 1953 to 1956. He reunited with Flatt to record three albums for RCA Records in the early 1970s.

 

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