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44 Originally published in the fall 2002 issue of Southern Cultures, required reading for southerners and those who wonder what makes the South the South. Charline Arthur The (Un)Making of a Honky-Tonk Star EMILY C. NEELY “She was a woman before her time” is the oft-repeated phrase used to describe Charline Arthur and her flash-in-the-pan career as a honky-tonk singer. In the early 1950s she was a charismatic, rising talent who sported an individualism unique to female country performers. She released singles through RCA, performed at choice venues, such as the Louisiana Hayride and the Grand Ole Opry, and toured with the big names in honky-tonk, all the while maintaining a bold and assertive stage persona. By 1956, though, Nashville and the country music audience had lost interest in her. While Charline was an anomaly in many ways, it is important to recognize her as a woman of her time when considering her inability to attain country music stardom. She and her personal experiences were grounded within a social and cultural context peculiar to the early 1950s. In this regard, Charline does not simply represent a martyred feminist felled at the hands of record labels preserving their status within a patriarchal establishment; while some chose to reject the assertive persona that Charline portrayed in her songs and on stage, others chose to support her, or at least give her a chance. The Nashville country music industry , despite its reputation for being “the tail of the dog . . . the most sexist of all the entertainment industries,” as Nashville producer Wendy Waldman said in 1992, was less an obstacle for Charline than were the popular fan media and the female listening audience.1 Like most of her honky-tonk contemporaries, Charline came from modest origins. She was born Charline Highsmith, the daughter of a Pentecostal, relatively poor couple in Henrietta, Texas. Her parents were both amateur musicians , and from an early age music and performance seem to have been the central motivating forces in her life. In 1945, at the age of fifteen, she left home to travel with a medicine show, and in 1948 she married Jack Arthur, who managed her early career and also played bass on several of her recordings. Her debut in Nashville came in 1952, when, during a stint as a disc jockey and singer at KERB in Kermit, Texas, Colonel Tom Parker, the man best known for his role in bringing Elvis Presley to RCA Records, introduced her to Hill and Range Publishing Company, which in turn led to a recording contract with RCAVictor Records. In early 1955 Charline appeared to have made it to the top. At RCA she recorded under the production direction of two moguls of Nashville, Steve Sholes and Chet Atkins. Country disc jockeys voted her second best female country performer (Kitty Wells being first) in a 1955 national poll.2 On tour she performed with Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Marty Robbins, Lefty Frizzell, as well as other country legends. After recording for just three years, though, Charline’s progression toward country stardom came to a screeching halt; her contract with RCA-Victor expired, and she did not receive another offer. Thereafter she spent her days performing in small, local clubs and recording for some minor record labels. When she died in 1987, she was surviving on a monthly disability check.3 In 1986 the German label Bear Family Records released Welcome to the Club, a compilation of singles that Charline had recorded between 1949 and 1957.4 It passed largely unnoticed. During the early 1990s, however, a rising interest in women’s participation in country music sparked her rediscovery. In 1991 Bob Allen, a journalist who wrote the liner notes for the Bear Family release, composed a one-page article about her for The Journal for the Society of the Preservation of Old Time Country Music. Historians Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann’s massive 1993 work, Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music, also included a segment on Charline’s life, in which they concluded that, “Charline fought for the right to become country’s first truly aggressive, independent female of the postwar era. Ultimately she lost.”5 Why did this charismatic and talented performer, who mingled with the stars of honky-tonk, slip so quickly into obscurity? Generally her failure is attributed to two factors. Like other women aspiring to honky-tonk stardom, Charline Arthur...

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