DJ Chet Atkins

Born in 1924, Chester "Chet" Atkins is known today almost entirely for his country guitar picking.  He was also a lifetime radio man and that is no exaggeration. He was an ARRL member, and earned a Ham Radio General class license in 1998. His first call sign was WA4CZD, but he traded that in for a vanity call sign contianing his initials W4CGP in 1998.  That's a radio man.

He was born in  Luttrell, TN on the distant outskirts of Knoxville. He landed his first radio gig on WRBL-AM at the age of 17 in 1941. It was a 30 minute Saturday morning program at 10:00 AM, hosted by Parson Jack, a local preacher. Parson Jack had actually heard Atkins playing on at a farm and spontaneously invited him to perform on the program.

He next appeared on the radio closer to home, at WNOX-AM on the Bill Carlisle program. He played for Jumpin' Bill Carlisle regularly and became a studio musician for the station. There he met the Carter Family and became their guitarist.  In 1945 he relocated to Cincinnati to play on WLW. His reasons for leaving are unclear but one biography said he lost his job to "cut backs." In his autobiography he just flatly said he was fired. Regardless, he lasted only six months and moved on to Raleigh in 1946 and WPTF-AM. That was short lived as well and he moved on to WRVA in Richmond and played the Old Dominion Barn Dance. He lost his job too, this time due to missing work over asthma attacks.

He auditioned in Chicago, for Red Foley, and later made his first appearance at the Opry in 1946 in Foley's band. The Opry gig wasn't a stayer so Atkins moved on to KWTO-AM in Springfield, Missouri.  There VP Si Siman nicknamed him "Chet." Apparently it stuck. In 1947 Chet went back to Knoxville and had a regular slot on the WNOX programs the "Tennessee Barn Dance" and the "Midday Merry Go Round". Two years later he left

WNOX to re-join the Carter Family back on KWTO. He was briefly fired there was well and ended up playing with Saddle Rockin' Rhythm on KOA-AM in Denver. The Carter Family, then including Chet, relocated to Nashville in 1950. Atkins began performing on WSM-AM regularly and became a member of The Opry thereafter.  In his later years he went back to radio, appearing on Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion radio program, and other public radio programs. He died of cancer in 2001.

The Thinking Man's Hillbillies

 They were called the Thinking Man's Hillbillie. I'm not making that up. That's their actual marketing lingo from the 1950s.  Does a thinking man needed a different  kind of hillbilly than anyone else? Henry D. Haynes and Kenneth C. Burns performed as Homer and Jethro just to keep up appearances. In reality they had more in common with Weird Al than Bill Monroe. Their career was largely built on twangy parodies and original silly tunes. My personal favorite is "She Was Bitten On The Udder By An Adder."  You don't get tunes like that any more. Chet Atkins produced many of their recordings.

They were the same age, both born in 1920 with Haynes being a mere month older. They first met at WNOX-AM during a 1936 audition. (Yes, they were both only 16.) They were paired up with the house band, the String Dusters, and earned their nicknames when Program Director Lowell Blanchard forgot their names. By 1939 they were regulars on the Renfro Valley Barn Dance which was broadcast from the Memorial Auditorium in Dayton, Ohio. It was carried locally on WLW-AM. It was a good year to make the leap. Late that year the show relocated to a venue in Kentucky and was picked up by  NBC. Homer & Jethro missed out on some good years there as they were both drafted. They returned to the US afterward and found work at WLW, but were mercilessly purged by new management at WLW in 1948.

 They went on tour for a year and then relocated to Missouri for a year performing regularly on "Corns a Crackin" with Chet Atkins on KWTO-AM. That show eventually evolved into the ABC TV show "The Ozark Jubilee" but they left before it made the leap. They jointed the cast of "The National Barn Dance" on WLS-AM  in 1950 and stuck around  playing silly songs dressed in night gowns for 2 years. They later toured with Spike Jones, which if anything made them even zanier. They had a string of parody hits in the 1950s mostly on RCA.

Haynes died of a heart attack in 1971.  Burns tried to carry on with a new partner but the magic was gone. He started a solo career embracing his longtime love of jazz mandolin. He died in 1989 of prostate cancer. Homer & Jethro were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001. With some irony I must point out that the man who forgot their names Lowell Blanchard was inducted in 1977, over 20 years before them.

Hard knocks at WNOX

KDKA-AM is almost always credited as the first radio station in America. Despite the meager veracity of the claim it's become the accepted history. But after there was a first, there was a second, and a third... so on and so forth. Interestingly Nobody advertises their status as number two, there is something about the American character that prohibits that. Number ten however, 990 WNOX-AM takes the title proudly. (Though in print they sometimes claim they are number eight.)

Sixteen-year-old Stuart Adcock first signed on the 50 watt station as WNAV-AM in 1921.  He worked for People's Telephone and telegraph Co. the station lasted three years and was then destroyed in a fire. Adcock rebuilt, that same year.  He sold it about a year later to the Sterchi Brothers Furniture Company. In 1929 he bought another local station 1450 WNBJ-AM, it was two years old and owned by the Baptist church of Koxville.  He bought a 2-year old station and  set up WNOX's first local competition. Sterchi sold more than furniture, they also sold records. They leveraged that to get better bookings. In 1926 the brothers changed the calls to WNOX-AM and bumped the power to 100 watts.  In 1929 at WNBJ-AM PD Caswell "Cas" Walker created a variety show known as the Farm and Home Hour. In 1930, the station was bought by the Stuart Broadcast Co. and moved to 1310 AM. In 1931 they changed calls to WROL-AM.  More here.

In 1935 WNOX was sold to the E.W. Scripps Company which also owned the local newspaper, the Knoxville Sentinel. The Scripps Company hired announcer Lowell Blanchard in 1936 to and told him to hire more hillbilly performers. It was probably their plan to compete better with the upstart WROL. He began the variety program called the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round. It became an institution. It mixed comedy, dixieland, swing and live Hillbilly performers. It was not a pure country program by any stretch but it went head-to-head with the Farm and Home Hour on WROL. In 1936 it's star Roy Acuff quit to work at WROL. They were now rivals, not just competitors.That would last into the 1940s.  In March 1941, WROL moved to 620 AM;  they changed calls to WATE and began doing more news.

1936 was also the year they hired Archie Campbell.  He graduated that Spring from Mars Hill College in North Carolina and got a job at WNOX. He performed on a program called on the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round with country music artists like Roy Acuff, Cowboy Copas, Flatt and Scruggs, and Carl Smith. He left for a job at WDOD in Chattanooga a few years later. He stayed there until 1941 when he began his service in WWII under the U.S. Navy.  It is sometimes written that he created the Tennessee Barn Dance.  That program debuted in 1942, a which time he had already left WNOX, but also had left war.

It seems incongruous but actually the way the program began was as an outgrowth of the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round.  It's performers were rounded up to play an evening program on Saturdays at Market Hall. It was initially called the WNOX Carnival. It was merely renamed in 1942. By then he had already made his "Grandpappy" character famous. After WWII ended Campbell returned briefly to WNOX before moving to 1490 WROL-AM in 1952.  He developed two more country variety shows: Country Playhouse and Dinner Bell. It went well enough that on WROL-TV he helped produce Knoxville's first country music TV program; the Country Playhouse, that premiered in 1952 and ran until 1958. He left in 1956 for the Grand Ole Opry. (He wrote a very readable biography in 1981) More here.

In 1962 WNOX dropped country for Top 40. Lowell Blanchard stayed on and focused on emceeing and announcing.  He began doing play-by play on local baseball games. He died following one in 1968.  In 1977 he was inducted into the Country Radio hall of Fame. In 1971, WATE became WETE and they moved to an AC format. In 1976, WETE-AM became  WRJZ-AM and they went top-40 going back to their old fight with WNOX. In 1981 WNOX was sold and it flipped back to a country music format. It was a return to their roots as they had pioneered the format in the1930s. In 1982 WRJZ followed suit. But then it sputtered and went off air. WNOX had won.

In 1988 WNOX flipped calls to WTNZ-AM and it was sold to Dick Broadcasting who changed the calls to WIVK-AM. They segued in the 1980s into an all News Talk format which persisted for decades. Shamefully WNOX-AM changed calls to WNML-AM In May of 2005 as part of a Sports Talk re-branding.  It simulcasts on 99.1 WNML-FM.  The WNOX heritage calls live on at 100.3 the old WOKI-FM, formerly a AAA outlet.

Who was Rex Miller?

Most disc jockeys would be pumping gas if they couldn't be at the mic. As a group they are generally uneducated, but charismatic. But we one-dimensional people make the best on-air talent apparently. Rex Miller wasn't like that at all. Bright, industrious and multifaceted. the big question is why he bothered with radio at all. More here.

He was born in 1939, Miller became a radio announcer before he finished high school in St. Joseph, Missouri. He dropped out of junior college to attend Elkins Institute of Radio in Dallas. It was there he went back to radio. He studied both as an announcer and engineer. By all reports his career started at WNOX, but it didn't end there.

 

His resume includes KLIF and KBOX in Dallas, WQXI in Atlanta, WITH in Baltimore, KWK in St. Louis, WPRO Providence, WUBE in Cincinnati, WNOX in Knoxville, KQV Pittsburgh, and both WNUS and WIND in Chicago... he left his stamp in a dozen major cities. As a radioman he was unstoppable. While at KLIF he released a series of 45s in Dallas just to show off his musical talents.

He left radio in 1971 to pursue a writing career. Beginning in the 1980s he started publishing horror novels. The novel Slob was his debut. He published half a dozen horror novels including Slice, Savant, Butcher, Iceman and the 5-book Chaingang series, maybe others. Steven King was a fan. He also had a successful mail-order business dealing in collectibles for comics and superheros. In some circles Rex was referred to as an expert in the field of juvenile-related collectibles.

Rex died on May 21, 2004 at a hospital in Sikeston, Missouri. He had been in a nursing home for six years, after a debilitating stroke. More here.  [Nevermind Some deletionist prat deleted the article on Rex Miller, try this one on the Jeff Roteman page here. ]  I took some time to parse his bibliography. Some of the dates are dubious, because of reprints and e-books —but have at it.

Title	Year	Publisher	X
Saint Louis Blues	1995	Maclay & Associates	XXX
Iceman	1990	Onyx	XXX
Profane Men	1989	New American Library	XXX
Slob	1987	Signet	XXX
Frenzy	1989	Pan Books	XXX
Stone Shadow	1989	Onyx	XXX
Slice	1990	Onyx	XXX
Chaingang	1992	Pocket Books	XXX
Butcher	1994	Pocket Books	XXX
Savant	1994	Pocket Books	XXX