Radio: Opry Night

Uncle Dave Macon, age 70, has gold uppers, alfalfa on his chin, sometimes sports pink gates-ajar collars. He has a ready rube wit. an endless repertory of high jinks, and plays three five-stringed banjos at once. Uncle Dave sets the tone & tune of Grand Ol’ Opry, a radio program many plain folk in the South vastly prefer to Charlie McCarthy or Jack Benny.

Grand Ol’ Opry is a four-hour, mountain-music hoe-down broadcast every Saturday night by WSM, Nashville, Tenn., and carried in part over a network of 25 southern NBC Stations. It has been on the air 14 years, now has eight sponsors (main account: Prince Albert Tobacco; others: lamps, cough drops, chicory, even snuff). A half -hour of it is now recorded for Prince Albert, put on the air in Los Angeles, Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis.

Supporting Uncle Dave in the Grand Ol’ Opry Company are a half-dozen ensembles with sour-mash names like Fruit Jar Drinkers, Possum Hunters, Gully Jumpers, Roy Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys. Grand Ol’ Opry is no ordinary hillbilly show. It is opportunity night for all the balladeers, jug players, mouth-organists, fiddlers, washboard knucklers, accordionists, comb-hummers, etc. It is a weekly fiesta, Southern style, for hill folk from the Great Smokies, croppers, tourists.

In its time, Grand Ol’ Opry has coaxed out of the hills a great album of musty, hand-me-down folk songs. Some are fiddly old dances, like Tennessee Waggoner, Rabbit in the Pea Patch, Cross-Eyed Butcher, Give the Fiddler a Dram, Chittlin’ Cookin’ Time in Cheatham County. Others, plaintive and plunky like Maple on the Hill, Brown’s Ferry Blues, Nobody’s Darlin’ but Mine, have gone on to wide juke-box favor. One recent find was a fine old Fundamentalist allegory called The Great Speckled Bird, probably inspired by Jeremiah 12:9.

Last Saturday the Grand Ol’ Opry turnout was swelled by a delegation from up around Tellico Plains, in the Great Smokies, on hand to hear a straight-limbed, sixth-generation mountain girl sing a song her grandpappy taught her. The girl was 23-year-old Edith Haas Padgett, famed far & wide in the hills for once having bagged a charging 400-lb. wild boar with a single rifle shot.

Edith stood up with Roy Acuff, Uncle Dave, the Fruit Jar Drinkers, etc. and in a mountain-dewy voice sang The Broken Heart:

Farewell ’tis with a breaking heart

That I now turn to see you go.

But we are better far apart.

God bless you in your bitter woe.

The hand Edith got for this Smoky plaint was roughly comparable, in Grand O1′ Opry circles, to the way Lily Pons was welcomed to the Metropolitan. Right off, Edith was invited to join the Opry company. And Uncle Dave, Roy Acuff and the rest were pretty sure that The Broken Heart, properly whanged up, would be a juke-box hit in no time.