DJ Skeets McDonald

In 1959 Skeets McDonald recorded the tune "Don't Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes."  It was written by Slim Willet in 1952. At least half a dozen other country singers tried to do it justice, but McDonald did it better. Skeets performed it live on an early TV program, Town Hall Party, on KTTV-TV in Compton, CA. If any single of his could be classed as a hit this was it... and looking back it wasn't much. But today it and many of his other ballads are considered rockabilly classics. His profile on Hillbilly-music.com is woefully slim.

He was a regular on Cliffie Stone's Hometown Jamboree on KXLA-AM in Pasadena and in addition to KTTV he also appeared on the Ozark Jubilee at KWTO-TV on the ABC network. He had several minor hits on the Billboard country chart, including "This Old Heart" in 1960, "Call Me Mr. Brown" in 1963, "Big Chief Buffalo Nickel in 1966, and "Mabel" in 1967. Then he died of a heart attack in 1968.  He was only 53. It cut short his career. A country artist still having hits of any kind in his fifties was a clearly stayer.

Born in Arkansas,  his music career actually began in Michigan. It was not exactly the epicenter of rockabilly cool.  His brother moved to Detroit and he followed along. Nick Tosches summed up the beginning "With the help of several other displaced rednecks, which were plentiful in that land, Skeets formed his own Hillbilly boogie band, the Lonesome Cowboys."  The man has a way with words. Their first regular paying gig started up in 1937 in a slot on 1340 WEXL-AM in Royal Oak. The band moved to 910 WFDF-AM in Flint, then to 1100 WCAR-AM in Pontiac. (Tosches gets the WEXL calls wrong. Try to look past it, he's a writer not a radio geek.)

In 1953 I found a record of Skeets performing on Rhythm Roundup on KUGN in Eugene, OR.  In 1956 he showed up on KBOX in Modesto with a festival of country heavy hitters: Ferlin Husky, Bob Wills, Marty Robbins, Cowboy Copas and others. McDonald signed with Columbia records in 1959 and added guitar rocker Eddie Cochran to the studio line up. That when that string of singles began. 

WEXL first went on air in 1925 though some versions start it in 1924. The station began as WAGM but was sold to Rev. Jacob B. Spark in about 1929 who changed the calls and flipped it to block programming mixing gospel and country music. The station expanded its country music programming to a 24-hour format in 1963 becoming the big country outlet in the Detroit metro for a time. But Skeets had already moved on to other pastures. The station flipped to religious talk in 1974. Thankfully Skeets wasn't around to see it.

Dude Martin on KLX

The Dude Martin band was pretty popular in Northern California and the North West. In various incarnations he recorded several records for RCA-Victor. His biography, The Dude martin Story is well worth reading, there is also a documentary film. As you may know, much rockabilly originated not in Nashville, but the Sacramento Valley and the San Joaquin Valley in California. Dude Martin first was on air at 910 KLX-AM in 1932 with his first band, The Nevada Nite Herders. Martin’s show was called the “Round-up.”

KLX-AM shared a frequency, staff and equipment with KZM-AM in the 1920s. KZM had come up as experimental station 6XAJ getting the calls in 1921. The Tribune Newspaper was deeply involved with the station and through inexplicabel logic, was convinved to get it's own license for the share-time by KLX founder Preston Decker Allen in 1922.

In 1928 Allen wanted to sell his license and rather than sell to the Tribune, he sold out to a lcal buisnessman Leon P. Tenney. Tenney moved the station to 1300 as a share time with KRE-AM then 1370. By 1930 Tenneywas bored and sold out to Julius Brunton who already owned KJBS-AM. That last transfer was not authorized by the FRC (this is pre-FCC) and bang the FRC deleted the license. The void of KZM is what allowed KLX to flourish.

So in 1932 when Dude martin does his first mic break on KLX they have the new frequency of 880 to themselves and are running at 1000 watts from the 20th story of the Tribune building. For the era, this was a big stick.

The Nevada Nightherders were Martin's highschool band. The Nightherder name went away as the shows popularity grew. The band ballooned to 10 members and the band was known as 'Dude Martin's Roundup Gang.' Around then they At this point they moved over to 1260 KYA-AM in San Francisco where they stayed for a decade. On KYA his sponsor was Gene Compton's Restaurant. By 1939 he changed the name again to the Wild West Show Revue Gang.

In 1949 Martin took at stabe at television and hosted The Dude Martin Show on KGO-TV. It was popular enough that he eventually moved to Los Angeles to host the Hoffman Hayride taking over for the erratic and possibly manic Spade Cooley on KTTV-TV in that much larger market. That show ran into the 1950s. He died in 1991.