Celebrating his 96 years around the sun and during his overall 70 year-plus career, Leroy Van Dyke has recorded more than 500 songs, dozens of them making the charts. A mere 70 years ago, in 1956, Leroy’s first single was released – a song he wrote while stationed in Korea during the Korean War, and first performed it to troops on the same bill as Marilyn Monroe – “The Auctioneer.” The song was entered into a Chicago talent contest after Van Dyke finished his time in the military and garnered him a record contract with Dot Records. “The Auctioneer” subsequently reached the top 10 on the country charts and the top 20 on the pop chart, selling 2.5 million copies. Now, 70 years later, the trio of brothers known as the AJR Brothers Band have sampled the song in their new recording “The Big Goodbye” drawing new attention to an old favorite. The Kody Norris Show’s recent bluegrass cut of “The Auctioneer,” won ‘Song of the Year’ at the 2026 SPBGMA Awards in Nashville, Tennessee, also taking the song into a whole new genre.
“The Auctioneer” talks of a young Arkansas boy who would skip school and visit a local auction barn. Becoming mesmerized by the auction chant, he decides he wants to be an auctioneer, regularly practicing the chant behind the family barn. Though his parents are initially displeased with his career choice, they eventually relent, but (not wanting their family name to be tarnished because of poor auctioneering skills) they send him to auction school to properly learn the trade. He returns home a full-fledged auctioneer. Gradually, he becomes a top-quality auctioneer, to a point where he ends up purchasing an airplane just to keep up with his sudden business demands.
“The only artistic license I took with writing the song was changing my cousin’s home state from Missouri to Arkansas for scansion purposes,” says Van Dyke. “Nothing rhymed with Missouri.”
In addition, his recording of “Walk on By” (1961) was named by Billboard magazine in 1994 as the biggest country single of all time, based on sales, plays, and weeks in the charts. It stayed at number one in the U.S. country chart for 19 weeks, and in all, charted for 42 weeks, reaching number five on the pop listings. It sold more than 1.5 million copies.