Whitey & Hogan and the Briarhoppers

 

 

I found a Whitey & Hogan LP in the used bin. The DAHR reports [SOURCE] the duo was active for 66 years which was strange because I didn't recognize their names: Roy "Whitey" Grant and Arval Hogan. They were born in 1916 and 1911 respectively.  But Grant was born in Charlotte (Mecklenburg county) . Even in 1916 that was a city: population around 35,000. Hogan was from Robbinsville population was around 400 then. Robbinsville (Graham county) peaked in the 1970s and has fallen to a population of around 800 today. By comparison, Grant was the city kid. I had to do some reading to realize what I had in my hands.

They met in 1935 working at the Firestone cotton mill in Gastonia, NC. It was also called the Loray Mill and nicknamed the "Million Dollar Mill."  It's about 30 miles from Charlotte. At its peak in the early 1900s, it employed over 750 workers. The building abutted he south side of the Southern Railway tracks. That building is still standing today but as a mill, it closed it's doors in 1993. Today it's a hipster office space today owned by the Thrasher Group. But back in 1935 it was the largest mill in the south. [SOURCE] All of that to say Whitey and Hogan were 24 and 19 when they met at the Loray Mill.

They began performing as a duo, playing mandolin and guitar locally. Initially they played under the name The Spindle City Boys, no doubt for the textile boom town they worked in. Then their radio debut was on WSPA in Spartanburg, SC on Scotty the Drifters weekly program. Scotty is fairly obscure because he also recorded as the Singing Soldier. His real name was Benny Borg. He recorded about 17 sides, less than half were issued. He was still on WSPA as late as 1942. 

Whitey and Hogan eventually got their own sponsorship from Efird's Department Store and a radio spot at WGNC radio in Gastonia in 1939.  There is a small confusion in the timeline in 1939 as the book The WBT Briarhoppers by Tom Warlick has Whitey & Hogan on the Rustin Radio Show in Gastonia, the show was sponsored by Rustin Furniture. The show was broadcast from the main storefront at 278 West Main Ave. (That building is also still standing, and was renovated into condos in 2023.) The book does not cite the station, but in 1939 in Gastonia that had to be 1420 WGNC-AM. There was a prior station application in Gastonia, WJBR which was granted in 1937 and deleted over it's CP and delayed construction. I do not think WJBR was ever actually on air.

 

1939 was a big year for Whitey & Hogan. They recorded sixteen sides for Decca Records in one marathon session on November, 8th 1939 in the Decca New York studio. They eventually recorded a total of 30 for Decca. It was at WGNC they met another even more popular act, The Briarhoppers. At the time the Briarhoppers had 8 members "Dad" Johnny McAllister, Jane "Minnie" Bartlett and Billie Burton, Homer Drye, "Big" Bill Davis, Clarence "Elmer" Etters, Thorpe "Zeb" Westerfield and Don "Ham" White. (Don was actually named Walden "Don" Whytsell)  That's not the only line up but that's the troupe that Whitey and Hogan joined in 1941. 

The original Briarhoppers were put together by Charles H. Crutchfield in 1934 as a platform to sell snake oil tonics and quack medical treatments. He too had previously been at WSPA but also WIS-AM in Columbia, SC.  They claimed in Billboard that the Brirarhoppers increased ad sales 18% on WBT. That program was so successful that Crutchfield was named WBT's program director in 1935, having only been at the station for 2 years.

The Briarhoppers were big before 1939. Their show ran from 3:45 to 4:45 in 1937. They sold a lot of ads and a got a big write up in 1937 in The Mirror (below) and another in Billboard.  Billboard was a bit classist about it and wrote "[The] redeeming condiment is announcer Charles Crutchfield, WBT program director, whose suave comments and humorous ad libbing prevent the program from being just another hillbilly affair..."  The Mirror write up was more even handed:

Way down South in Charlotte, NC everybody agrees upon one thing. That is an old saw which, when set with new teeth, goes like this: Versatility, thy name is Briarhopper. And to prove it, in case you seem skeptical or perplexed at their assurance, they simply tell you to tune in WBT at four o'clock any afternoon and judge for yourself. And then is when you agree they are right. At five o'clock, we mean, after you've spent an enjoyable hour listening to WBTs Briarhopper Band. Led by Dad Briarhopper, Johnny "Mac" McAllister, these eight hill billies just don't give a hoot which instrument they happen to fish out of the pile before the program starts, because any Briarhopper can play any instrument well, and does before the program is over. And if that isn't proof enough of their versatility, they all sing in the same gifted manner. The mature-voiced male members can step to the microphone and do a pleasing job whether the script calls for a twanging hill billy rendition, a quartet part, solo, or opera. While the girls' voices are surefire in any type of song, in both solo and combination singing. Who are these talented Briarhoppers? Well, there's Dad and Minnie and Billie and Homer and ...but why not take a peek at the picture and really meet the folks. Fans, the Briarhoppers. 

At the height of the Briarhoppers’ fame there were two touring versions of the band, dubbed Unit One and Unit Two, at different time including Marty Schopp, Sam Poplin, Fred Kirby, Garnett B. "Hank" Warren, Shannon Grayson, Hank Warren and Claude Casey to name a few. In 1945 WBT started their own Hayride-style jamboree called the "Carolina Hayride."  It broadcast coast to coast on CBS. It was succeeded by the Dixie Jambouree and Carolina Calling all of which included in some form, the Briarhoppers. The Briarhopper show finally ended its run on WBT in 1951. Before it wrapped, Whitey and Hogan recorded more sides for Sonora records in 1945 and Deluxe in 1947. (Sonora also did some Fred Kirby sides in 1946.)

In the dust of the Briarhoppers Whitey and Hogan stuck together and both worked for the post office.  Then in the 1970s, seeing a resurgence in the popularity of country music, Whitey and Hogan reformed the Briarhoppers as a 5-peice band. That line up included Shannon Grayson, Don White, and "Fiddlin’ Hank" aka Garnett Warren. An LP compilation of their Decca sides and unreleased transcriptions was released in 1977 on Homestead records. That record must have sold OK because it was followed by two volumes of new recordings; releasing Vol I in 1981 and Vol II in 1984. JEMF regular, Ivan M. Tribe wrote the liner notes on all three. Lamon records released two other Briarhopper LPs "It's Briarhopper Time!" came out in 1980 and Hit's Briarhopper time Again in 1981. 

In 2003, Whitey and Hogan, along with Don White, as the only surviving former members of the Briarhoppers received the North Carolina Arts Council Folk Heritage Award. The book The WBT Briarhoppers came out in 2007 and while assembled from a mountain of original research and interviews, already enough folks had died that  we don't know what happened to several members. Tom Warlick has done more research than anyone else alive and his blog remains a great source: https://wbtbriarhoppers.blogspot.com/

Clarence Etters died in 1960, he was only 59. Johnny McAllister died in 1967, born in 1903 he was only 64. Homer Drye died early in 1983, Bill Davis in 1989, then Shannon Grayson died in 1993, Fred Kirby in 1996, Hank Warren in 1997, Charles Crutchfield in 1998, Claude Casey in 1999, Sam Poplin died in 2000, Arval Hogan in 2003, Don White died in 2005. Marty Shopp in 2009, and then Roy Grant in 2010. But despite the great power of the internet, the fates of Jane "Minnie" Bartlett, Billie Burton, and Thorpe Westerfield remain unknown.

Miss 930

930 WSAZ radio no longer exists.  The only remnant is WSAZ-TV on channel 3 serving Huntington, WV. The original WSAZ-AM permit was applied for by radio engineer Glenn Chase in 1923 to operate in Pomeroy, OH. The city of license moved across the Ohio River to Huntington in 1927. At that point in time the Dept of Commerce was assigning call letters alphabetically and they were assigned after WSAX in Chicago, IL and WSAY in Port Chester, NY.

Fast forward to 1943, Miss 930 was hosting a very successful weekday program called the Women's 930 Club.  It was sponsored by Heiner's Bakery. The daily half-hour show aired at noon. From 1943 to 1950 Miss 930 was Charlotte Garner, aformer Fine Arts student at Ohio Wesleyan University. She was host until about 1950 when she left WSAZ to be a commentator on the short-lived Mary Monroe Show on WCKY Cincinnati, OH. Broadcasting Magazine carried the below blurb in it's March 1950 issue:

For the 7 years the show aired, it programmed a combination of music, and interviews with both celebrities and local. Content focused on typical women's show content of the era: recipes, cleaning, and home-making. Crossley gave the show a 10.0 rating with a 67.6 per cent share of the audience. Garner had about 7,000 listeners on her mailing list. After that marketing success, Garner left radio to work in advertising in Cincinnati. She was employed by the S. Fabian agency, the H & S Pogue Co. and in 1962 the Menderson Agency.

Pat Barnes Pablum

Patrick Henry Barnes wrote trite, mundane,  piffle. Correspondingly it was pretty popular. People like trite fluffy crap. Poetry was common radio fare in the content-strapped 1920s.  Really very little of it survived into the golden era.  Pat Barnes was the Program Director of WHT-AM. By all reports he was also the announcer for this show which collected poem he liked and tried to popularize. By all reports, it was all rather flowery and unremarkable... I'll name a few:

A Son's Letter to his Dead Father
The House with Nobody in it
Is there a Santa Clause
Letter From the Trenches
The Beautiful Snow

WHT-AM began in 1925 on 1260, later slipping the day and broadcasting at night on 750 (possibly 720). It became a dayshare on 1480 with WJAZ-AM and WORD-AM starting in 1928.  That was a big year for the FRC who was re-allocating stations trying to put an end to the chaos. That lasted until at least 1931. In that year pleading for an under-served northern Kentucky all three stations were forced off air for WCKY-AM in Covington. They ;later moved to Cincinnati, negating the argument but by then it's 3 adversaries were long gone.  All those call letters were re-used by various entities, WJAZ by Zenith actually... except for WHT.  There is no 1480 in Chicago today, nor is there a 1260... a legacy effect of the frequency shuffling almost a century ago.

In 1930 Radiophone Broadcasting Corporation changed the calls to WCHI-AM on 1490, then changed calls to WSOA in 1931 right before the end. Transmitting from Deerfield, IL the Radiophone Broadcasting Corporation did what they could with the crowded 5,000 watt station. In sum, WHT existed for no more than six years in Chicago land radio history. It was a veritable blink in the context of heritage stations like WMAQ, which started earlier and lasted. In between organ concerts and other local programs Pat Barnes found time to read poetry and essays on the air.  The book was published in 1927.. possibly at the height of the briefly lived station.

Radio On Strike

 It used to happen in this country. People used to band together and go on strike and it was a good thing. In the 1930s it was to stop pay cuts, limit child labor, end company scrip, and so many other inhumane practices of industry in that era. In the 1980s it sort of fizzled after President Regan [R] went to war against the middle class. I was reading a back issue of a trade magazine and found the image below and it got me thinking. These days the only strike that shuts down a radio station is a lightning strike.

My gut feeling was that they were very rare. Strikes are traditionally the tool of people that perform manual labor, blue collar workers. In general, white collar workers don't strike. It's a generalization, but it's fairly accurate. So to that end I have compiled a list of Radio-related strikes and their dates. This is limited to white collar staff: writers, producers, announcers, musicians etc. I have excluded the strikes of TV staff, radio manufacturers, and telegraph operators as those are not strictly radio-related. This is an incomplete list, but I have hopes that readers may make a few additions. I found many of these in the book The Encyclopedia Of Strikes In American History  By Aaron Brenner. Also excluded are the occasions when a union threatened to strike and management made concessions. Those events are poorly recorded, and I am not confident I coulld make a proper list of those.


2011 - AFTRA strike on record labels [here]
2005 - CBC Radio Strike
1982 - AFTRA strike on WINS-AM
1978 - AFTRA strike on advertising agencies
1977 - WBAI Pacifica Radio strike
1974 - WAOK-AM
1974 - AFTRA strike WWDJ
1970 - KZAP-FM staff sit down strike
1968 - KMPX-AM
1967 - AFTRA100 radio station strike
1965 - WSIM-AM, Radio and Television Broadcast Technicians
1962 - KFWB-AM
1958 - CBFT(Radio-Canada CBC) Radio producers strike
1958 - MGA Studio Musicians  (later re-merged into AFM)
1948 - AFM recording  ban
1948 - The Radio Writers' Guild
1947 - WCKY-AM Radio technicians strike  (IBEW)
1944 - NABET engineers at NBC
1942 - AFM recording  ban (2 years)
1941 - ASCAP radio strike
1936 - Marine Radio Operator Strike (MEBA)
1938 - WTCN-AM News Staff
1935 - ARTA strike at Macay Radio & Telegraph Co. 
1921 - Marine Radio Operator Strike (MEBA)

**************UPDATE**************

I  keep this list updated at a static page here

Asher Sizemore & Little Jimmy

I bought this from an 85-year-old man who remembered listening to Little Jimmy as a boy. he sent away for their songbook and 80 years later sold it to me with an Ernest Tubb record. In 1931 Asher Sizemore & Little Jimmy started broadcasting from WSM-AM in Nashville. Little Jimmy was a child star. On his own Asher lacked star power, but with Little Jimmy in tow, there was a revolting cuteness that sold songbooks like the proverbial hotcakes.

Asher had played his own cowboy ballads on WCKY-AM in Cincinatti, and WHAS-AM in Louisville as early as 1931. By 1933 Little Jimmy was big enough to join him and even to harmonize. Early on they split time between the Grand Ole Opry and WHAS but as they began syndication that all came out of WSM. Some of those segments are presenved on 16" transcription disc. By 1940 they had added his younger son, Buddy to the act and were on NBC syndicated across the midwest. By 1950 a third child, Nancy a daughter this time, was added to the act and they were working out of WKLO-AM in Louisville.

Things didn't last much longer than that. Buddy was drafted and killed in the Korean war. The cuteness wore off as the kids grew up. That left nothign behind but Asher's songcraft which had never been enough to get the job done solo.

You can get all 35.8 MB if you
DOWNLOAD HERE

Hadacol and radio

One of the FTC's least favorite "customers" during the summer of 1950 was a Louisiana state senator named Dudley J. LeBlanc, an opponent to the infamous Huey P. Long. He had a scheme, involving the massive power of radio advertising and Hadacol. It became the most popular snake-oil [non-homeopathic ] product ever.

It proved to be an elixir of 12 per cent alcohol, plus some of the B complex vitamins, iron, calcium, and phosphorus, dilute hydrochloric acid, and honey. he claimed the alcohol was a preservative. LeBlanc mixed the first batches in big barrels behind his Abbeville, Louisiana, barn, nearby farmers' daughters stirring it with boat oars. He charged $3.50 for a bottle of Hadacol. (With 12% alcohol by volume In some areas of the South, dry by local option, druggists sold Hadacol by the shot)

Dudley decided to bombard rural America with Hadacol advertisements and endorsements on the radio. Hadacol sponsored Hank Williams on Health and Happiness shows, broadcast daily across the airwaves in the early 1950s. The senator boosted sales for his own product throughout the Cajun country by reading testimonials in French over a radio stations like KAOK. LeBlanc even guested on Groucho Marx's radio program...

Half a dozen bands were "inspired/bribed to write odes to it. Country music recording artist Slim Willett wrote a song about Hadacol Corner, about an Upton County, Texas town supposedly almost named for the elixir. Bill Nettles and his Dixieland playboys wrote a big band tune about it as well. The Treniers wrote Hadacol (That's All), Professor Longhair wrote Hadacol Bounce, Little Willie wrote "Drinking' Hadacol", the Cajun artist Harry Choates even wrote a tune in french called Valse de Hadacol... you can hear that one here: http://npmusic.org/Happy_Fats_Valse_de_Hadacol.mp3

In entering new markets, LeBlanc blanketed the area with radio spots before he shipped any of Hadacol to the city. He ran a radio contest, which required the listener to identify "Dixie," and winners were sent coupons good for a bottle of Hadacol...

The Hadacol bubble began to expand enormously, growing out from the romantic delta land to cover the broader South. Lafayette became a boom town, as LeBlanc tore down houses and a school to enlarge his plant. Experts at promotion were hired from major proprietary concerns in the East. And as sales grew fast, LeBlanc's advertising campaign grew faster. Toward the end of 1949, he found he owed a tremendous tax bill which be did not have the ready cash to pay. So LeBlanc told his advertising manager to wipe out the bill by plunging the whole sum in new advertising. LeBlanc's advertising bill ran to a million dollars a month running ads on as many as 528 radio stations including WCIC, WSM in Nashville, WWVA in Wheeling, WCKY in Cincinnati in addition to a slew of stations in LeBlancs own Arcadian backyard.

Toward the close of the year, LeBlanc's advertising bill ran to a million dollars a month, taking in about 700 daily papers and 4,700 weeklies and 528 radio stations. Then Leblanc sold the whole company to the cash to run for Governor of Louisiana against Huey Long. More Dudley here.