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  13. SUWANNEE TO CINCINNATI When Arnold Brim was a boy growing up in Live Oak, Florida, his parents sent him to what he called “music school.” He did not want to spend the time to learn how to read sheet music, but his teacher happened to have an old guitar. “Every time he would put it down, I would pick it up,” Brim recalled.1 “I would hit a note, and I thought it would sound like what people were singing. At least that’s what it sounded like to me.” Before long he wanted to become a musician. When he was ten, Brim’s parents paid three dollars to buy him his first guitar—a Sears and Roebuck Silvertone much like the inexpensive mail-order guitar that Carter Stanley learned to play on. As he grew older, Brim developed a love of old-time country music and skill on two similar instruments: the pedal steel guitar and the dobro. Both used a metal slide to form chords. As a performer, Brim was a late bloomer, making his stage debut around age 30; but he enjoyed performing enough to organize a group called the Suwannee River Playboys—named after the river made famous in song by Stephen Foster that flows just north of Live Oak. In 1950 an ambitious new manager, Norman Protsman, arrived in Live Oak from Melbourne, Florida, to take charge of radio station. He and one of his on-air hosts, Clarence S. “Cousin Clar” Parker, offered the Playboys the opportunity to play on WNER. Two years later, Protsman bought the station. He decided the time was right to introduce a new program to Live Oak, which was located between Jacksonville and Tallahassee. “Local people would come out and do little skits on the radio,” Protsman recalled .2 “I had the idea to get them all together and put on a little country show . . .” He called his new program the Suwannee River Jamboree. Protsman decided that the most suitable building to host the Jamboree would be one of several tobacco market warehouses in the area. “One of the markets was off the ground and had a wooden floor,” he recalled. “The others were on the ground and had concrete floors, which would be  Suwannee to Cincinnati terrible. We put benches on the wooden floor and made a stage. It was a homemade sort of thing, but it worked.” Cousin Clar [pronounced Claire] Parker loved hosting the Suwannee River Jamboree. “We had a great show here for a while,” he recalled. “People had to pay a lot of money to get in. . . . I think the admission was fifty cents. Live Oak was a small place then. There were no motels. But people came from south Florida and Georgia. We filled the place every Saturday night.”3 Parker was the resident comedian. On one occasion, he joined cowboy entertainer Smiley Burnett’s act without consulting Burnett. “He was on stage telling stories and singing songs. He had his gun slung down low on his hip. I creeped out on stage and lay down on my back and looked right at the barrel of the gun. I made all sorts of faces and the people laughed. Somebody told me later that it bothered him.” Parker’s antics made him popular with the local audience. When RCA held a contest to see which of the region’s disc jockeys could generate the most mail, Cousin Clar finished second despite working in a much smaller market than his counterparts. Parker joined WNER in 1949 to get the station ready to go on the air in June. It was his first job. Fresh from earning his first-class broadcast license after technical school training in Louisville, Kentucky, and Jacksonville, he thought he would take the job for a little while to build his résumé. As it turned out, he never would need one; he worked for WNER for the next thirty-three years. During the summer months, when the wooden-floored warehouse was filled with tobacco for the market, the show moved to a new warehouse addition that was not in use. Arnold Brim and the Suwannee River Playboys played on the program from its inception. “At one time there were forty entertainers on the Suwannee River Jamboree,” Brim recalled. “We had 1,200 people in attendance every Saturday night. It was pretty warm.” The Jamboree was on the air for three hours, making it Florida’s largest and best-known...

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