A Code and a ConcernA Code and a Concern
Bob Cooper wanted the world to know that the 1960 DJ convention was on the level. The general manager of WSM radio knew that Congress was investigating record and radio ethics and that rock DJs like Alan Freed were being pilloried on a national stage. Besides outright payola (money in exchange for airplay of specific records), the government had accused record labels of financing junkets by DJs to music conventions. To avoid guilt by association, Cooper invited two leading congressional payola investigators to Nashville that November. He disclosed that WSM had spent about $16,000 from its publicity budget on the 1959 convention. WSM dropped its long-standing cocktail party in favor of a breakfast (only to have several record labels gladly step in and spring for bars and hospitality suites). Most conspicuously, WSM dropped “Disk Jockey” from the event’s official name, dubbing it the Country Music Festival. And in general, while there was another record crowd, the weekend was more subdued, with less boozy, brazen behavior and more seminars.
“On the level” aptly described Bob Cooper’s management style as well. D Kilpatrick called him the best all-around radio man he ever knew. Stocky and solid, Cooper sported a Johnny Unitas haircut and Army style horn-rimmed glasses that helped him only so much with his terrible eyesight. He favored bow ties and plaid or seersucker sportcoats, and he ran WSM with a steady tiller and low-key persuasion. He’d come out of an advertising agency background, and even then he had a way of breaking down ideas about what couldn’t be done. Or as one colleague said, he could sell you something without your knowing you were being sold.
Hank Fort, the songwriter, remembered a call from Cooper with some work.
“Mr. Shyer wants a jingle,” he said. Harold Shyer was a venerable local jeweler on Church Street. “He wants his full name in there once, and he wants his name mentioned three times. And he wants you to put in there about how many watches [he has], Bulova watches, Longines watches and Elgin watches, because they are his specialties.”
“Yes sir,” Fort said.
“Get their slogan in: ‘If Harold says it’s so, it’s so.’ ”
“Yes sir.”
“Oh, by the way, he wants you to put in there that he has Keepsake diamond rings, because that’s his big specialty.”
“Okay, Bob.”
“Oh, by the way, he has silverware as well as jewelry.”
This all had to come in well under a minute, but that’s what Fort was being paid $186 to do, so she put all that on a pad and sat at her piano until she had it. Snooky Lanson sang the resulting jingle, which ran for fifteen years.
In the 1960s Cooper was still quietly getting results. He swung another Carnegie Hall appearance for the Opry in November of 1961, a benefit for the New York Musicians Aid Society that sold out and drew warm reviews. He developed a Grand Ole Opry syndicated program, placing the show on some 350 radio stations, the most ever. And with the University of Tennessee, he worked out a distance learning program with complete college courses on music and Tennessee history that ran on WSM in the early morning and earned college credit for participating listeners.
Out at Channel 4, however, Irving Waugh was bored. “Nothing was happening,” he remembered in 2004. “I had the television station, Bob Cooper has the radio station. I don’t like the setup, but that’s the way it’s going. DeWitt and I can barely tolerate each other.” Waugh’s secretary Margaret Parker remembers him pacing like a caged cat during those years. “He would come out to my desk sometimes and literally hit the top of my typewriter pretty hard and say, ‘Margaret, it’s dull around here; let’s make something happen.’ So he often made things happen.” There was, for example, the time he tried to get new National Life President Bill Weaver (Edwin Craig’s son-in-law) to buy a professional football team. He got as far as a golf game with NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, but his dream sank when Rozelle told him only individuals and not corporations could own teams. What Waugh really wanted was for WSM to buy other broadcasters. They were cheap, he thought, and it would be so much more interesting to have a chain of television stations rather than just one. But ultimately, while DeWitt was in charge, and keeping him at a distance, Waugh was frustrated. “I [couldn’t] get to first base,” Waugh said. “DeWitt wasn’t interested in doing anything.”
Jack DeWitt actually had plenty on his mind, but his projects must have looked rather remote to some of his colleagues. In 1960, for example, he got a grant from the National Science Foundation to “investigate the possibility of using television techniques with telescopes,” a project that led to an associate faculty position at Vanderbilt University’s Arthur Dyer Observatory; a research trip to Flagstaff, Arizona; and the presentation of a paper at the Imperial College in London. But DeWitt’s hobbies weren’t entirely self-in-dulgent; many directly helped WSM grow as a broadcaster. His astronomical work, for one thing, introduced him to the new world of transistors. These miniature, literally cool devices replaced hot, fragile vacuum tubes and ushered in the electronic and computer revolution. DeWitt used them to develop a patented new amplifier that was deployed at his TV station and that sold briskly on the market. Though he was shot down once again in applying for 750,000 watts of power in the fall of 1962, DeWitt earned one of his highest career accolades when the National Association of Broadcasters gave him its Engineering Achievement Award in early 1964. As if to add a flourish to that accomplishment, he set off that summer on one of his signature engineering jags, a perfect marriage of science and station publicity.
For DeWitt, satellites combined his passion for astronomy with his knowledge about radio communications. In 1957 he’d stood with George Reynolds at Reynolds’s place on Kentucky Lake, had watched Sputnik go overhead, and had said, “See that? That’s our future right there.” Now, seven years later, he learned from some of the jiggers talking on a break that WLAC-TV, Channel 5, had announced it would soon be featuring the first-ever weather photos from space, via NASA’s new Nimbus One satellite. The engineers from WSM-TV and WLAC were friendly competitors who frequently shared gear and ideas in the field in ways that made both better broadcasters. But DeWitt had no intention of getting beaten on this front.
“Hell, we’re the space station!” he said. “Do we want to give those guys a run for their money?”
George Reynolds, Aaron Shelton’s best man and oldest friend, had died of a heart attack the previous fall, and George Jr. was now a bright engineer on staff. DeWitt drew up a circuit diagram and handed it to him. “Build this for me,” he said. Then, in the workshop, DeWitt and his engineers built, from scratch, a ten-foot high radio receiving dish, on a pivoting mount, with a large helical twist of copper tubing coiling out the front. Though it looked like a prop from a bad science fiction film, it was mounted on the roof, tied to Reynolds’s circuit board, an old FM police receiver, an amplifier, and a regular reel-to-reel tape recorder. Ten days after DeWitt’s having the idea, on the morning of August 29, a hillbilly picker, part-time preacher, and station hired hand named Blythe Poteet swept the huge antenna across the sky, according to timing and coordinates supplied by DeWitt. Out of the amplifier and on to the tape came a series of beeps. The beeps, played back through an oscilloscope, painted—one line at a time—a picture unlike any of them had ever seen: the white pinwheel of a hurricane bearing down on the Carolina coast from 575 miles up. They mated that with a transparency map of the eastern United States and interrupted the morning cartoons to show their work. They beat Channel 5 by two weeks and, indeed, everybody else virtually anywhere. While other TV stations waited for special gear to translate the Nimbus data, WSM-TV had broadcast some of the first weather satellite pictures in U.S. commercial television using shop surplus.
Jack DeWitt’s ingenuity was by then an accepted fact of life in Nashville. He was as prominent as any member of the Belle Meade establishment, albeit in his niche of local “genius.” When the Swan Ball became the city’s premiere society event of the year in the mid-1960s, Jack attended in formal white tie and tails, along with the Craigs and the other National Life board families. A lot of people did, and still do, view DeWitt with a sense of awe. But in his world and his time, he was different—different from his Old South peer group and different from the hillbillies. DeWitt seemed to have wished he could mix better with the country music crowd (“real hickories” he called them, attempting affection), but when he tried, it came tinged with incomprehension. He’d go to the Opry when he had to, sometimes out of sheer guilt. He once said, “I wanted to show them that I had a great interest in the Grand Ole Opry, which I didn’t at all.”
One of DeWitt’s hidden strengths, however, was his attentiveness as a mentor, and in the early 1960s, nobody could have known that he was grooming a future leader of WSM who would rank with Edwin Craig and Harry Stone in vision and character. E. W. “Bud” Wendell was a second-generation National Life Shield Man from Ohio who’d been transferred to the Home Office after spending the 1950s distinguishing himself in the field. His role was general troubleshooter, a man who for many years was sent out by train, car, or airplane to handle crises in the sales force. One day in about 1962, Wendell was summoned from the cafeteria to the office of Robert Musto, the executive who oversaw National Life’s entire sales force. Musto, who was there with DeWitt, said, “There’s an opening over at WSM, and we think that you’d fill that opening very well, and we’d like you to consider transferring over to WSM.” Wendell then asked a question that made him laugh years later. “Mr. Musto, I’ve come a long way now. I’m at the Home Office. Is there any room for advancement over at WSM?”
“Well,” he said, “Certainly there’s room for advancement. I don’t ever expect to be president of National Life and you should never expect to be president of WSM, but I’m sure there’s room for advancement.”
The future president of WSM said, “I’ll take it.”
By many accounts, the move was Edwin Craig’s way of supplementing DeWitt’s managerial shortcomings while retaining his strengths in the role of engineer/president. “Later on I was told that the decision was more Mr. Craig’s decision than Mr. DeWitt’s or Mr. Musto. He had felt that WSM was getting a little too far out,” Wendell recalled with bemusement, “and maybe a little too liberal, and that he thought that maybe somebody born, bred, and raised in the insurance side could bring a little of that over to WSM.” None of that set DeWitt against Wendell. Quite the opposite. Once Wendell got up to speed on the issues of the broadcasting business, he was given responsibility for a mid-1960s foray into the beginnings of cable television. But more important, DeWitt passed on the soul and spirit of what he and Craig had been trying to do since 1925. Wendell said, “He took me under his wing and really tried to impress me with the traditions of WSM, and of the good it can do, and that this is really a public service, not a high profit business. I mean, he felt that way.”
Despite its diminished influence over country music at large, WSM could—and did—take a major share of credit for sowing (broadcasting, if you will) the seeds of an industry that was growing, literally in rows, on Sixteenth and Seventeenth Avenues. A 1960 promotional brochure counted ninety-five BMI publishers, sixty-five ASCAP publishers, two hundred full-time songwriters, 750 union musicians, and fifteen recording studios. WSM was, it said, “the station that built a city—Music City USA.” By the end of 1962, music added $40 million to the local economy, and Nashville was the second busiest recording center in the United States, after New York. “Record Row,” later called “Music Row,” a quasi-campus of converted houses and storefronts, began attracting tourists. Bill Denny, Jim’s son, remembers working at Cedarwood and looking up from his desk to see families with their hands cupped to their eyes, trying to peer in his ground-floor plate glass windows.
At the end of the decade, Paul Hemphill—a freelancing former Atlanta Journal writer and son of a Tennessee-born coal miner, railroader, and trucker—wrote The Nashville Sound, arguably the first great work of modern journalism about the city’s music scene. His book counted forty studios, 1,500 union musicians, a similar number of songwriters, twenty-nine talent agencies, seven record pressing plants, four hundred music publishers, fifty-three record companies, and seven trade newspapers. He noted the BMI and ASCAP buildings standing at the end of Music Row “like twin Statues of Liberty.” The new Country Music Hall of Fame had gone up in 1967, virtually between them. The Row itself looked like “a montage of for sale signs, old houses done up with false fronts to look like office buildings, leggy secretaries swishing down the sidewalks, dusty Cadillacs parked close to the buildings as though they were stray dogs hiding under houses in the mid-August heat, Johnny Cash sneaking into a studio back door with his shades on . . .” Push-button phones, sixteen-track recording studios, Glen Campbell, and Charley Pride were hot. Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins presided as producer-kings (kindly ones to be sure), who guided the Nashville Sound to massive success. Chiefly, everybody seemed intent on making sure that whatever else they did, they had a good time. As Pride’s producer “Cowboy” Jack Clement has said, “We’re in the fun business. If we’re not having fun, we’re not doing it right.”
Musical crossroads were being paved in Nashville as fast as the intersections of its burgeoning suburbs. The range of influences at work in town sprawled nearly as wide as the roots of music and American culture itself, including the deeply rooted yet commercial folk songs of Bob Dylan, the whirl-wind of Elvis, and R & B artists like Ruth Brown and Clyde McPhatter. They, and scores of other musical pied pipers, came to Nashville seeking the studios, the producers, the pickers, and the vibe. Country music reached new plateaus of conventional popularity—playing the Today Show and other milestones of normalcy—while accommodating strong new ingredients. The folk music craze blossomed into a bona fide national musical movement that bolstered and deepened country. Many of the artists WSM had helped launch, especially the bluegrassers like Bill Monroe, Mac Wiseman, and Flatt & Scruggs, found their careers unexpectedly revived by the ardor of college students, including a counterculture that would have given Edwin Craig heartburn. Perhaps most extraordinary, Nashville also became a destination for a Shakespearian caval-cade of writers who emigrated as if in thrall with what songwriter/publisher Fred Rose had quietly birthed—a place where an elegantly written song for ordinary people was worth something. That list is long indeed, but it included no less than Harlan Howard, Roger Miller, Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, and Kris Kristofferson.
All this helped country music’s standing in the Nashville power structure only a little. Bill Denny said the conflict between Belle Meade and Music Row persisted. “The business community was happy to sell you a car, but they didn’t want their daughter to marry your son if you were in the music industry,” he said. “I think the real breakthrough was the banking industry. They were really the first business, other than the broadcasters, to kind of recognize the value and the substance and the business acumen within the industry. For a long time, if you said you were in the music business, you couldn’t get a telephone. You had to make a big cash deposit and keep ahead of your bill.”
Tennessean editor John Seigenthaler said the Opry remained a source of embarrassment for many: “Almost everybody in those days went to church downtown. On Sunday morning, people from the West End went down to Fifth and Broadway and turned left. And they saw the mess that the Opry had left there the night before. And much of that mess was on the street. And people were mad as hell about it. There came a time when National Life paid to have that street cleaned overnight, so there was not that problem. Country music was looked down on. It was more an eyesore, more an oddity than a complement to the community.”
Edwin Craig came to rely on popular performers, like Minnie Pearl and Roy Acuff, to help mollify civic disdain for the Opry, but with a cultural cold war on his hands and a massive insurance company to run, the last thing he wanted was trouble with his radio station’s non-Opry fare. He took a personal interest when things strayed from the polite and the acceptable. When DJ Larry Munson spun the breathy, sexy Julie London, Craig chewed him out personally. “Get that crotch music off my radio station!” he hollered over the phone. Once, in the predawn hours, Grant Turner played a Little Jimmy Dickens novelty record called “Just a Bowl of Butter Beans,” sung to the tune of the old hymn “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” Ralph Emery has related that “at that particular moment in time, the president of the Methodist publishing company was up early, shaving, to catch a plane. He heard ‘Just a Bowl of Butter Beans’ and thought it was sacrilegious. He was appalled. He called his good friend E. W. Craig. It was like the Army chain of command. It just came down all day, level to level to level, until it got to Grant, and I don’t think we saw that Jimmy Dickens record ever again.”
Most of the time in the 1960s, you’d have heard Perry Como or Pat Boone records, the safest of the safe, on WSM. But beneath the sleek patina of its daytime pop shows and buttoned-up, businesslike newscasts, the radio station retained qualities of the zoo that had cost DeWitt sleep. Noontime Neighbors was crossing into its third decade, with John McDonald, now a sort of baron of all things agricultural, still ringing the dinner bell before every show. He walked with a cane, weighed more than three hundred pounds, and always dressed in natty suits. A virtually ungovernable department unto himself, he sold his own show’s sponsorships and a lot more besides. “I was in a little glass cubicle, and right across from me was John. So I would talk to him every day,” said longtime Opry house manager Jerry Strobel. “He was always on the phone trading something. Buying and selling. Whether it be a tractor, a Cadillac, or whatever.” Strobel once went along with McDonald when he toured the Frosty Morn meat packing plant, got treated like a country star by his loyal sponsor, and drove his big car home with the trunk full of free steak.
“It was nothing we didn’t tease him about,” said Frances Williams Preston. “John always had an angle . . . But the farmers believed in him and what he said and the news that he passed on.” Indeed, he was a tireless broadcaster who did a 5:30 a.m. and noon farm report into the early 1980s. Noontime Neighbors ran for twenty-six years. And for decades, he had the respect and admiration of nearly everyone of consequence in the farming business. When he celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary with WSM, the secretary of agriculture came from Washington for the gala dinner.
In the 1960s, McDonald made the transition to WSM-TV with enthusiasm, if not always with grace. WSM producer Elmer Alley directed McDonald’s Sunday show, and “dreaded it all week.” One day McDonald came on the set with a piglet. “And he was cradling this pig much as you’d cradle a baby,” Alley recalled. “And he had a pill half the size of a golf ball. And he was going to show you ‘how to give a peel to a peeg.’ So he put that pill in the pig’s mouth and he rammed it with that ram-rod he had, and the pig urinated. And the stream went right up in front of his face and all over the floor and all over John. And I didn’t have anywhere to go, so I faded to black. And as I was fading to black, John was saying, “Somebody throw a tow sack over that wet spot, will ye?”
Musically, Noontime Neighbors could swing from pop chanteuses Dolores Watson or Dottie Dillard to country stars like Ernest Tubb or Red Foley, but one wouldn’t have heard any country music on the Waking Crew, a live, weekday morning free-for-all that became a WSM signature. It ran for thirty years, through the 1960s, the 1970s, and even well into the 1980s, eventually outlasting every other non-network live radio ensemble in the nation. It grew out of a show Jack Stapp launched in 1951 called Eight O’clock Time, with Beasley Smith conducting a fairly traditional musical variety hour. By the 1960s, host Dave Overton had transformed the Waking Crew into a daily event that was more a band with a show than a show with a band. “They told us, ‘You guys are going to have to talk,’ remembered Beverly LeCroy, a trombonist who played the entire thirty-odd-year run of the show. “I never talked much back then. I said, ‘Like what?’ They said, ‘Just talk.’ ” By 1969, Overton was paying homage to LeCroy as a “radio personality” whose impromptu stories on air had included “being attacked by 347 ducks in Centennial Park [and] comic interpretations of a department store detective, a bank robber, and a shoe salesman.”
Nonmusical regulars on the Waking Crew included a Vanderbilt linguistics professor named Maxwell Lancaster, known on the air as Dr. Philologue, who did a daily riff on the derivation of words. An elderly Nashville woman named Mrs. Fannie Earhart made herself a fixture, attending the show almost every day for a dozen years. Overton would visit with her and then have her read out of the paper some item she’d found amusing. Most remarkable may have been longtime WSM newsman Bill Williams. One of his signatures was to relate, not read, the news. Teddy Bart, who sang on the Waking Crew for years, said, “Bill would write his script, then take the script and write lead notes for himself, throw away the script, and bring in the notes and ad lib the news. He was always accurate. And it was amazing. It sounded like he was talking to you.” Williams was most famous, however, for his weather reports—delivered every day in rhyming verse.
The show lost its studio audience when WSM moved from the National Life building to the Knob Road studios, where TV and radio cohabitated after 1966. The building was cinder-block sterile, but piano player Joe Layne says the show’s personality loosened up on the hill. “When we got up there, it took on a new blend for some reason or other. Maybe it was too stuffy down there [at Seventh and Union]. The whole thing evolved into something that will never happen again in a lifetime. I was kind of the bad boy of the group. I’d come up with pretty weird things.”
One Monday, Overton asked Layne a simple enough on-air question: “How was your weekend?”
“Dave, I’m a new person.”
“Really what happened?”
“I’ve started a new church—the Power in the Blood Church.”
Overton went along with it. “Really?”
“Yeah, and we’ve got a theme song.” Layne got the band to swing into a few bars of the old gospel standard, “There Is Power in the Blood.”
“Where are you meeting?” Overton asked.
“Well, there’s a phone booth downtown on Third Avenue.”
At that point, everyone laughed and sort of moved on.
“That week I started getting donations,” Layne remembered. “Well when the first donation came in it was cool. But when we got five, six, seven, eight, then I got called on the carpet. And I really got reamed, big time [by] Irving Waugh—a sweet guy, still is. I had to get back on the air and tell ’em we were only kidding about the church. And I had to try to send the money back!”
The Waking Crew band was also directed by trumpet player and arranger Bill McElhiney, a WSM veteran who played jazz at night and extensive pop studio work on the side. The band had thirteen pieces until the mid-1960s, when it was slimmed to ten. It still had three saxes, two trombones, Jack Shook on guitar, and a full rhythm section. George Cooper, by then the most ancient of the ancients and still in charge of the musicians’ union, played bass. Two or more vocalists were always on hand, including at times Dottie Dillard, Dolores Watson, Carolyn Darden, Kay Golden, Marty Brown, and Teddy Bart. Bart, who played many roles at WSM in the 1960s, said Overton anchored the show brilliantly. “An extraordinary talent,” he said. “He had a Bert Parks type of quality to him. An entertainer and yet a broadcaster. A lilt in the voice. Jovial. The name Dave Overton was a household word.”
Bart had his own run-ins with the stodgy propriety of WSM on Nashville’s first free-form radio talk show—a legendary afternoon slice of chaos pairing Bart with salty sportscaster and DJ Larry Munson. A piano-bar singer from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Bart grew up wishing he were Arthur Godfrey. He’d never given Nashville a second thought before he landed there for a two-week engagement in the late 1950s, a few years out of high school. His base, the Voodoo Lounge, was in Printer’s Alley, Nashville’s block-long excuse for a red-light district, not five blocks from National Life. It had a burlesque club, the Gas Light, the Voodoo, and the Carousel. Bart noticed musicians from town making their way to the Carousel late every night after their own gigs. Some went to sit in with the remarkable house band, guitarist Hank Garland and his quartet. Most were there to have a few drinks, listen to jazz, and clear their heads of the work-for-hire music they’d made all day. Beegie Adair, a newcomer from Kentucky, played piano behind Garland on those late-night gigs. She remembered Waking Crew trumpeter Carl Garvin sitting in and playing like Chet Baker, as well as Louis Nunley of the Anita Kerr Singers offering swinging standards on the microphone.
“Nashville’s musical aura started to take hold of me,” Bart said. He met and wrote songs with Beasley Smith, by then enjoying the semiretirement of mulling over lyrical minutiae and fielding calls from Dinah Shore or Kitty Kallen saying hello or needing to consult on something musical. Smith recommended Bart for a job at WSM, and when he got one, Bart found himself overjoyed and underdressed. He was astonished to see a radio station where everyone still wore suits and ties. He flopped as a disc jockey, never getting a handle on the whole changing-records-while-talking thing, but loving the talk itself. And everybody liked the good-natured Yankee, so they figured out what to do with him. There was a piano in the studio, and he’d sit there and play to liven up Don Russell’s record shows. The hosts would kibitz, in a safe little coffee klatch. Then Bart got a new partner.
Larry Munson was one of WSM’s legendary sportscasters, a gravel-voiced tough guy who brought Vanderbilt basketball to 650 AM for the first time, back before the university even had a proper gymnasium. He’d been formally trained in the radio art of reenacting football, baseball, and basketball over the air, complete with sound effects, from crowd noise to thunder in the distance. For years, he multitasked at WSM, calling games, spinning records, and filming, in the field, a fishing show that ran for years on WSM-TV. He was the only DJ at WSM to play real jazz fans’ jazz—Count Basie, Nat Cole, and Duke Ellington—and this caused chin rubbing and knitted brows up the chain of command. It took an unexpected and timely award from the Women’s Advertising Council for the “best music in town” to get management off his back.
A new early-1960s show called This Is WSM was conceived to run from 1:00 to 5:00 on weekday afternoons. Initially, scripted discourses on public affairs and civic doings mingled with easy listening pop. Each announcer hosted a two-hour segment, including David Cobb, now heading into his fourth decade of broadcasting. Perhaps thinking that they both liked jazz, Bob Cooper chose Larry Munson’s two hours as the new showcase for piano-playing Teddy Bart. It was a hotter combination than he ever guessed.
“From day one, Larry and I hit it off just like Martin and Lewis,” Bart said. “There was a chemistry. He and I, about three days into this, discarded the script and just ad libbed. Ott [Devine] used to get terribly upset because we’d disregard the script. But we did our own thing.”
“The piano was turned to face me,” said Munson. “I was only about fifteen feet from him. And I had turntables on both sides of me. Bart was supposed to be just sort of sitting there diddling on the piano while we talked in between songs. That was the conception of the show. But the trouble was with the two of us we couldn’t look at each other without falling over on the floor laughing, because semi-consciously we were getting very close to a dangerous line.”
Bart sometimes lined up guests, including, one day, the newly crowned Miss Ohio on a postpageant goodwill tour. “She walks in that room and she looks like $900 million,” Munson remembered with a mixture of awe and regret. “She sits down in that chair. We had an album playing, and Bart blushed the moment she came in because . . . you didn’t see people like that very often. She sits right across from me. I’m looking at Bart and I’m trying not to laugh, because she is absolutely gorgeous. And when the record ends, Teddy introduces her, but he’s almost laughing, because he knows that I’m thinking something. And before I can say anything to get us in trouble, he says to her, ‘How is your diphthong?’ ”
A diphthong is a vocal segue from one vowel sound to another that classical singers, like the unfortunate Miss Ohio, study, but that’s not what it sounded like to anyone in the room or on the air. Munson continued, “I died right there. I couldn’t talk. She flushed a thousand shades of red. And Bart has crashed down on the piano. He got to laughing so hard he couldn’t play. I’ve never forgotten that particular incident. That girl was embarrassed right out of her shoes.”
One day, after a somewhat risqué interview with Eddy Arnold, the country star said, “You guys know they’re never going to let you continue this, don’t you?” Munson looked quizzical. Arnold said, “This is too good. The National Life people are never going to let you continue this.” But Bart and Munson felt that Cooper backed them up. “He was aware that WSM was probably a little straight laced,” Munson said. “He was in favor of the thing in the afternoon. It was more or less his idea to take a shot at it and see what happened.” When Munson left after about two years, Bart went on to host his own interview show, a more serious afternoon of talk that brought in heavy-hitting and controversial guests. By constantly pushing Cooper’s indulgence to the limit with on-the-fringe guests, from the Ku Klux Klan to Students for a Democratic Society, Bart added vividness and context to WSM’s news coverage of the tumultuous 1960s.
No WSM personality of the era came close to having the national impact of Ralph Emery. Between 1960 and 1972, Emery was an emperor of the night, commanding the fifty clear channel kilowatts with a low-key but almost evan-gelical dedication to country music. Third-shift workers, restless students, twenty-four-hour cafes, truck drivers, and others turned their imaginations over to Emery, both his wide-ranging choice of music and his casual, rambling interviews. Other DJs listened to Emery, as they had Eddie Hill before him, and shaped their own shows based on what was working for Ralph.
The nightly routine captured beautifully the stylistic dichotomy of WSM. From 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. David Cobb played classical music for his loyal, cultured listeners. The veteran announcer had a way with album liner notes, reading them so conversationally that his audience thought he was talking expertly off the top of his head. He drank espresso in the studio before anybody else had ever heard of such a thing. He grew his hair long and, by virtue of his longevity and night-time shift, he got away with wearing cowboy boots and jeans to work. He’d settled into a life on a farm in Franklin, and one night, Emery came in to find Cobb patiently skinning a snake he’d killed that afternoon on his property, while a classical album spun in the background.
After a news break, those of Cobb’s civilized listeners who kept their radios on heard Emery’s theme song crackle and cackle out of the speakers: Flatt & Scruggs playing “Shuckin’ the Corn.” “I’d work from 10:00 p.m. to midnight,” reminisced Emery. “Then we had a Bible tape—a paid religious spot—The World Tomorrow. We’d roll the Bible tape, which was a nice break for me. And at 12:30 when that was over, the engineer was gone till five in the morning. I was alone. I look back on that and wonder what they were thinking. There were no commercials. There was no prep work [or instructions] except to play records. And they gave me a blank log and a handful of public service announcements. And they didn’t say to read them. It just said if you read any of these, write down what time you read them. That was it. To turn a twenty-four-year-old kid loose on a 50,000-watt radio station that would reach forty states, Canada, and the Caribbean . . . as I look back, I think that’s wild.”
Emery’s one mandate came straight from the name of the show Tom Perryman had helped institutionalize—Opry Star Spotlight. Each night would emphasize a different Opry member. Emery would go down the cast list alphabetically to avoid the appearance of favoritism, playing a disproportionate amount of that night’s artist and perhaps even having him or her sit in on the show. Over time, he found he had to complement Opry artists with hotter newcomers, who might have looked forward to guest spots on the Opry, but who had no plans to become regular members. “My argument was, ‘I’ve got to play hit records,’ ” Emery said. “Now fortunately the Opry had a pretty good roster, [including] Marty Robbins and Jim Reeves. But I said we’ve got a lot of people who haven’t had any hits for years. If I sandwich Ernest Tubb between Buck Owens and George Jones, I’m okay. But [listeners have] got to know if they tune in they’re going to hear hit music. We went around and around with that a lot.”
That independence meant that before long, Emery began to have a measurable effect on careers. He doesn’t contest the widely held impression that he broke Buck Owens around 1960, when he became wildly enthusiastic about the West Coast singer’s twangy “Under Your Spell Again,” which reached the top five. When he received Owens’s “My Heart Skips a Beat,” which went #1 in 1964, Emery helped make a minor hit of the B-side, a Bakersfield classic called “Together Again.”
Whereas he’d initially tried to keep himself awake with coffee in the dark empty studio, Emery perked up the show with guests—artists from the famous to the obscure who came by to take advantage of Emery’s open-door policy. The most regular, Marty Robbins, the Western-influenced artist behind the smash hit “El Paso,” didn’t like to sleep at night, so he hung out regularly with Emery, sometimes talking on the air, sometimes lurking and conversing with the DJ only during records and commercials. Over the months and years, every country music artist of consequence spent hours with Ralph, talking away the night. Conway Twitty visited as he was trying to cross from rock and roll to country in about 1963. One night Merle Haggard, Crystal Gayle, Loretta Lynn, the Wilburn Brothers, and six others packed into a smoke-filled studio to talk and sing. Guests frequently dropped by after a night of drinking at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, across the Ryman Alley from the Opry. “Many nights I marked the closing of Tootsie’s by the arrivals of guests to my show,” Emery remembered.
In 1963 Emery took on additional duties for WSM-TV. Program director Elmer Alley was looking for an early morning show leading into NBC’s Today show. Channel 5 had Eddie Hill on in that slot, while Channel 4 was running college courses for credit at 6:00 a.m. So Alley invited Emery to host Opry Almanac, the first show produced in expansive new WSM-TV studios built on Knob Road, west of downtown. Emery’s very first television guest could have been no more sublime—a young Loretta Lynn who sang with only her own guitar as accompaniment. The show took about a year to became a hit, before it became an institution, attracting at its peak two-thirds of the television viewers in Nashville with a mix of wake-up talk, guests, and Opry star performances, prerecorded to video and dropped in. (Emery eventually convinced Irving Waugh to spring for a live band on the show.) Initially, Emery sat in a little faux-kitchen set wearing a red checked shirt (“I looked like a Purina box,” he remembered). What his viewers probably didn’t appreciate is that Emery had been up all night, doing his radio show from 10:00 p.m. until 5:00 a.m. He’d nap forty-five minutes on the lumpy commissary couch, then smile through his fog at the television camera.
The fatigue led to the low point of Emery’s career. One morning, about five minutes before air time, he complained to one of the show’s band members that he was so tired he wasn’t sure how he was going to make it. The picker produced a little yellow pill that jerked Emery to life like pushing a starter button on an inboard motor. For some years after that, Emery was unhappily hooked, as were many of the long-toiling musicians of the era. A local physician known as Dr. Snap wrote amphetamine prescriptions for songwriters on multiday writing sprees or bus drivers keeping the country tours moving. The most popular were “Old Yellers.” Emery remembered a favorite gag in which someone would press a yellow thumbtack in the floorboards next to the Opry mic, then watch in amusement as musicians walking by tried to pick it up.
Emery was already on an emotional skid. His marriage to Opry star Skeeter Davis was failing, and as his depression deepened, he asked to be let off of the all-night show. That break lasted about a year, and it prompted another inspired move by Bob Cooper. Tex Ritter was a veteran country music star who, in 1964, moved from California to Nashville to become a member of the Opry. Cooper thought Ritter’s sweet and salty personality would work on Opry Star Spotlight, so he proposed that Grant Turner and Ritter work together on the difficult shift. It worked for a time, but Turner’s wife grew impatient with her husband’s awful hours. By that time, Emery had steadied himself and was ready to come back. Cooper wanted Ritter to stay on.
“My first thought was I don’t think it will work. I’d always been solo and I’ve never worked with another on-air personality,” Emery said. But Ritter had been a boyhood hero of his, so he gave it a try, and the chemistry worked beautifully. Emery was inquisitive, impudent. Ritter was gentle and loving with a deep, gravelly, rolling-thunder voice. Sometimes he would doze off quietly in the wee hours, and Emery would just press on. Ritter “became a father figure to me,” Emery said. “We became big buddies. That was a fun time in my life.” The duo lasted about two years. Emery continued on, eventually getting his bad habits under control and reviving the spirit of the early Opry Star Spotlight.
The talk was peerless. One night, Emery sat up late with Opry star Jim Ed Brown in the creaky chair opposite. An Arkansan, and a walking sub-woofer like Ritter, he spoke in a low, velvet voice of how Elvis had rattled their world nearly twenty years before. He and Emery spoke of rockabilly music, of DJ Tom Perryman, and the great Hubert Long, the showman of Shreveport. Brown mentioned casually that, as a matter of fact, Elvis was in town recording, a name-drop that was sure to create a mini traffic jam on Music Row the next day. Emery punctuated the conversation by spinning a record: Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed making webs of lacy country counterpoint on a Merle Travis guitar tune called “Cannonball Rag.” The years rolled by, full of nights like this, guest after guest and star after star. Listeners grew closer to their favorite artists and heard the history of country music told in questions, answers, and stories. There was simply no end to the stories.
WSM maintained the essential qualities that distinguished it as a standard-setting AM broadcaster. Its large news department won the prestigious Radio Television News Directors Award in the early 1960s, and it kept a close watch on community doings. An actress and former foreign service official named Barbara Moore, WSM’s “Witness for Women,” appeared on a number of entertainment and public affairs programs. She became one of the station’s defining personalities in the 1960s and early 1970s. Bob Loflin and Hal Durham were important and versatile announcers, disc jockeys, interviewers, and personalities of the era. Teddy Bart summed up the station’s ethic nicely:
Profit was not a motive. It was a concern and an interest, but it was not the overriding motive. Nobody paid that much attention to ratings. It was almost as if there was an implicit understanding among the management of what the character and culture would be without it being written down or expressed. You knew when you crossed the line, but you almost knew implicitly that you were on a higher level than another station. It must be like playing for the Yankees. It was the tradition of those who had gone before you, the stories that you constantly heard in the hall. And you just knew. And no matter who was elevated to management seemed to absorb that special energy of knowing that it was special to be there. So the vision was almost inspired rather than dictated.
Profit mattered little because by 1963, National Life was one of the largest insurance companies in the country, and the radio station and the Opry amounted to a fraction of the firm’s income. But the parent company, so staid for so long, was about to go through the most dramatic and fitful changes of its life, with huge implications for the Grand Ole Opry and the broadcaster that built it.
For one thing, National Life had run out of room at the old Home Office. The company had purchased and occupied every property on its block, but still it was straining with 1,700 Nashville employees in six buildings. National Life had been eyeing new property outside of Davidson county since the 1950s, but a complicated negotiation with the city over taxes ultimately encouraged National Life to stay downtown. In late 1965, president Dan Brooks announced that the prestigious architects Skidmore Owings and Merrill would design new corporate headquarters—a white, thirty-one-story, stone and glass monolith on the same block as the old building. It was to be the tallest building in the Southeast at the time and (by design) one floor higher than the 1957 Life & Casualty building five blocks away.
Studio C had already been reclaimed by the insurance company in 1965, when National Life announced WSM would move. The Friday Night Frolics, now almost as coveted a ticket as the Opry itself, moved to the Ryman as the Friday Night Opry. The Waking Crew moved to the Grill Room at the Hermitage Hotel for many months. In April of 1966 National Life finally moved the radio station out entirely into a new addition at the TV studio on Knob Hill, clearing 13,000 square feet at Seventh and Union. It was an abrupt and costly uprooting. Photographer Les Leverett remembers talking to Ott Devine’s secretary in the program director’s outer office about a pushcart full of 78-rpm records that seemed destined for the dumpster. The secretary said they were throwing those away, so both of them began salvaging records. Suddenly Ott Devine appeared and bellowed, “Leave those things alone!”
“Now I knew somebody was going to put ’em on the elevator, take ’em down to the basement of the National Life building and dump ’em,” Leverett continued. “So after work that day I went down there, and sure enough, it was sitting back there behind the elevator. All by itself. And I salvaged some more.” Along with stacks of old records by everyone from Opry stars to Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey, the station threw away stacks of transcription discs with years of WSM air checks and syndicated shows. Another casualty was the music library—handwritten scores by Beasley Smith, Francis Craig, and Owen Bradley bound with string, tucked into walls of cubby holes. “I spent Saturdays for months throwing away sheet music,” said a rueful Ruth White, a music librarian and Opry ticket office worker in the mid-1960s. “It was disastrous to be honest with you.” She remembers one collection of very old 78-rpm records by the likes of Uncle Dave Macon that had, for some reason, been kept in a safe so forgotten that a locksmith had to be hired to crack it. This time capsule wasn’t investigated. It was tossed. Even with the first Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum being built at the end of Music Row as a repository for such items, National Life’s attitude toward its WSM archives appears to have been one of a stressed-out matriarch sick of looking at clutter, too tired to remember sentimental attachments, and all too ready to dispose of the old before moving into the new.
Not long after the move, WSM got new leadership as well. Jack DeWitt surprised Irving Waugh and everyone else when he announced he was taking early retirement in the spring of 1968. Edwin Craig didn’t want him to go, but DeWitt felt he had no choice. His new adversary within the company was Bill Weaver, son-in-law of Edwin Craig, longtime financial executive and heir apparent to the presidency of the company. Six-foot-five and brash, sometimes to the point of abrasiveness, Weaver unfortunately rubbed DeWitt the wrong way. Irving Waugh stood up to Weaver’s sometimes overbearing personality (“He loved to needle people,” Waugh explained) but DeWitt’s milder manners weren’t up for any more intracorporate jockeying.
“Well, I got headaches from it. I really did,” he told an interviewer. “I got stressful headaches from it. I’ll never forget going to my doctor about it, and he said I can give you some medicine. It helped me. He said you’ve really got to get out of the business you’re in, or you’ve got to retire.”
DeWitt told the newspapers he was planning to devote more time to designing and developing electronic equipment and to astronomy, though he remained on the WSM board. Edwin Craig said of his old comrade, “We could not have built WSM Radio and Television into the major voices they are without his pioneering engineering creativity.” George Reynolds Jr., who’d grown up in the thrall of DeWitt’s accomplishments and whose father did most of the president’s shop work, spoke for the dozens of engineers who’d kept the broadcaster broadcasting for so many decades. “Jack was a hands on guy. And he was a wonderful person,” he said. “He was an engineer first. The station was run by engineers until Dad died and Jack left. And the engineers wouldn’t think anything in the world about going to the shop and building something.” The Nashville Banner concurred and gracefully sidestepped some of the managerial drift at WSM in its editorial tribute to DeWitt by observing that he “is first of all a scientist” and predicting that the world hadn’t heard the last from Nashville’s renaissance man. Jack held at least four patents by this point and continued to work at night in his cabin workshop. Friends remember that his curiosity never failed him: he would take backlogs of scientific journals out on his boat, read them and, one by one, toss them into Kentucky Lake.
In sad punctuation to the changes at his company and his broadcasting stations, Edwin Craig died in June of 1969. He was hailed as a “giant” of the insurance industry and a radio pioneer, not merely for starting a powerful station but for guiding broadcasting policy through the Clear Channel Broadcasting Service and the National Association of Broadcasters. He was seventy-six years old and a paragon of business ethics and civic dynamism. He’d served on numerous boards, including Vanderbilt Hospital and the Chamber of Commerce. His résumé went on and on. “He embodied a code and a concern which are becoming all too rare these days,” said National Life chairman Dan Brooks. “He had untold thousands of friends at all levels in this company who looked up to him for special kind of inspiration and humanity.”
For DeWitt, Craig’s death was a profound passage. He told an interviewer in 1995: “Edwin Craig never let me down. If I had to name two or three people that have had a great influence on my life, he would be one of them. He was always a kind man. Not always agreeable, but he always trusted me.” He called him Mr. Craig, never Edwin, until the end. And late in his life he gave Craig a gift—an armillary sphere sundial—a band of copper oriented along the path of the traveling sun with an arrow through the middle pointing always at the North Star. It sits in the garden of the Craig estate on Belle Meade Boulevard to this day.