Charles K. Wolfe - A Good-Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry

A Good-Natured Riot

A GOOD-NATURED RIOT

The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry

Charles K. Wolfe

The Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press
NASHVILLE

1999 by Country Music Foundation Press

All Rights Reserved

Published in cooperation with Vanderbilt University Press

First edition 1999

First paperback edition 2015

Printed on acid-free paper

Manufactured in the United States of America

: In 1935 the cast of the Grand Ole Opry posed on the stage of the Hillsboro Theater for this group shot. The clock was set for 8:00, the time the Opry usually took to the air every Saturday night. Bottom row, from left: Bobby Castleman (accordion), Jack Shook, Nap Bastien, Dee Simmons, unidentified, Rabon and Alton Delmore (checked shirts), Amos Binkley, Gail Binkley, Claude Lampley, Tom Andrews, unidentified, DeFord Bailey. Second row, seated, from left: unidentified, Walter Liggett, Dr. Humphrey Bate, (across the fireplace) Uncle Dave Macon, George Wilkerson, Paris Pond, Robert Lunn, Sam McGee. Third row, standing, from left: unidentified, unidentified, Lewis Crook, Bill Etter, Herman Crook, Roy Hardison, Bert Hutcherson, Paul Warmack (in hat), Charley Arrington (with fiddle), Buster Bate (with tiple), Oscar Stone (light coat), probably Jimmy Hart, Sarie and (across the fireplace) Sally, Judge Hay, Honey Wild, Roy Hardison, Dorris Macon, unidentified, Sid Harkreader, Arthur Smith, Kirk McGee, and Oscar Albright (bass).

Unless otherwise indicated, all photographs are from the archives of the Country Music Foundation. Publication of this book was supported by a subvention from the Society for American Music.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

LC control number 98-40104

LC classification number ML3524.W64 1998

Dewey class number 791.44'72ddc21

ISBN 978-0-8265-1331-1 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8265-2074-6 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-8265-2075-3 (ebook)

To Alcyone,
who got me started in the right direction,
and to Mary Dean,
who kept after me until I got it done

Contents

Illustrations

Frontispiece

Gallery One

.

Gallery Two

Preface

On a cold day in February 1973, I walked up to the porch of Herman Crooks house on Russell Street in historic East Nashville. I had with me a notebook full of questions, a Sony cassette recorder, and a lot of curiosity. I knew that Herman and his band, the Crook Brothers, were one of the last of the authentic string bands still playing on WSMs legendary Grand Ole Opry and one of the few acts that had been on the show from the beginning. I had heard and admired the old Victor 78s that the Crook Brothers had recorded back in the 1920s, and it was hard to believe that their sound had been virtually unchanged in the years since. By 1973, the band was using a fiddle and harmonica lead and had a light skipping sound unlike any other band. Herman was featured on harmonica and the genial Ed Hyde on fiddle.

Herman had agreed to talk with me about the early days of the Grand Ole Opry. For several years I had been listening to talk about those pioneering days, but not many of the people doing the talking actually spoke from firsthand experience. More legends about the early Opry seemed available than facts. Little had been written, and the vertical files at the newly opened Country Music Foundation had only begun filling. Hermans wife invited me into their sitting room, and I got a chance to meet Herman himself, a tall, stately man with a strong sense of history. On his television rested an old framed picture of the very first group photo of the Opry cast, made in 1926 or 1927the first such picture I had seen. Throughout the morning, Herman talked about what it was like in the days when Judge Hay was forming up what was then called the Barn Dance, and when legends like Uncle Dave Macon and Uncle Jimmy Thompson ruled the Saturday night airwaves. At the end of the interview, Herman brought out his harp, and gave me a concert of some of the old songs he used to play on the show in those days: Put My Little Shoes Away, Lost Train Blues, and Amazing Grace.

At a party a couple of weeks later, I met a man named Ed Shea, then the editor of Music City News. He too was interested in the history of the Opry and offered to publish an article about the Crook Brothers if I would write it up. I did, and Herman called me to tell me he was pleased. He also said I needed to talk to some of the other old-timers in the area. I was a little surprised: were there that many original members left? Yes indeed, he said, and started rattling off names. At about the same time, I began to get letters from people who had seen my article: one was a great nephew of Uncle Jimmy Thompson asking if I would like to talk to his daughter-in-law. Another was a friend of Sam McGees who would be happy to take me out to meet him. Soon I had a notebook full of leads, and I was off on a quest that would span some twenty years and result in this book.

What I had embarked upon was, at first, the tracing of an oral history of the worlds most famous country radio show and how it got started. Stories about those days had been passed down in oral tradition through three and even four generations to the 1970s, each year leaving fewer and fewer of the veterans who knew about the Oprys history firsthand. Although the legends and myths about the show are in themselves revealing, at some point a factual body of data must be created, something with which to measure these legends.

That became my goal, and this book is my attempt to provide such a standard. The only detailed history of the early days, George Hays little book A Story of the Grand Ole Opry, was colorful and engaging but full of Hays disclaimers that he was not a historian and that he was informally writing from memory. There was a need for someone to collect the oral histories and then verify them with written or printed data from other sources.

Soon I had met and begun to interview many of these radio veterans: Sam and Kirk McGee, who rode with Uncle Dave Macon and Arthur Smith; Jack Jackson, the Strolling Yodeller, who recorded with the Binkley Brothers and on his own; Arch and Dorris Macon, the sons of Uncle Dave; Elizabeth Hale, daughter of Theron; DeFord Bailey, the shows great harmonica soloist; and especially Alcyone Bate Beasley, the daughter of Dr. Humphrey Bate. Alcyone was especially important to the project. Not only did she sit for numerous interviews, but she also gave me references helpful in arranging to interview other subjects, opened up her huge scrapbooks, and kept urging me on when I got discouraged about the research or over the fact that few on the modern Nashville scene seemed to care about the old days. She also played me some wonderful country ragtime on her big grand piano, songs her father used to play, like Waltz Me Around Again, Willie.

By 1975 I had met and started writing for Tony Russell, the editor of the British quarterly Old Time Music. Tony took early country music more seriously than anybody I had met, and had, even that early, an encyclopedic knowledge of it. We routinely shared information and discoveries from our research, and I kept him up to date about my Opry work. In 1975 the Opry was to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, and Tony felt that the event might provide a good opportunity to publish some of my research. The result was the Old Time Music publication The Grand Ole Opry: The Early Years, 19251935, which made its debut at Fan Fair that year. Though it was published in England and sometimes hard to find in the states, it received very good reviews and made its way onto numerous bibliographies and Selected Reading lists. Tonys superb editing and sense of layout made it an appealing book, and working with him showed me how to weave interviews, newspaper data, company files, discographical data, and song histories into a readable and accurate account.