Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City

10 Jack, We Got a Real Problem

178 ten Jack, We Got a Real Problem “Howdy you’nses! This is your bald-headed, hand-spanked, corn-fed, gravysopping , snaggle-toothed, cross-eyed old country boy, Eddie Hill, telling you he crochiates your cards and letters and is a hawg about you!” In coat and tie,surrounded by records,he sat before an open microphone and a pair of industrial-weight turntables in a small studio on the fifth floor of the National Life building on a winter’s night in 1952. Wide-eyed and wired withenthusiasm,“Smilin’”EddieHillsoundedlikenothingthathadeverbeen broadcast from the Air Castle of the South. He was a thirty-year-old hillbilly singer, instrumentalist, and humorist from Benton, Tennessee, “just several ax-handles, five wagon greasin’s and a few cucumber vines from Nashville,” as he put it.And although he came off as a nut,he was a powerful man,a disc jockey whose nightly show was a 50,000-watt bully pulpit for country music made in Music City. “To me he was the most powerful DJ at that time in the business,” said Opry star Mac Wiseman.“Several times,[when] I’d record at Castle Studios, we’d run off an acetate dub,and I’d hotfoot it right up the hill with that acetate, and within two or three hours of singing into that microphone,Eddie had it on the air.It was a scoop for him.My advantage was that the other radio stations monitored Eddie all the time because they knew he got the scoops. I’d get it i-xx_1-286_Havi.indd 178 7/17/07 10:28:11 AM on Eddie’s show while it was still sizzling, because I knew how many other disc jockeys were waiting with baited breath for a new release.” By the early 1950s there were indeed hundreds of country DJs around the nation, as live radio gave way to the more economical format of a personality spinning records.Conservative WSM,habitually resistant to anything but live or network radio,came slowly to the new era.Nashville’s WMAK and WKDA had prominent country DJ shows by the end of 1948.And WSM did give some of its stars like Francis Craig and Snooky Lanson short pop-record shows as early as 1947. But not until the early 1950s did WSM come to grips with the reality that DJs were displacing barn dances like the Grand Ole Opry as the key star-makers in what Billboard magazine was now calling “country and western” music. Many in management and most of the station’s employees moonlighting in music publishing and record production had a strong interest in making sure that WSM’s cadre of artists were well promoted to these far-flung taste-makers.Much of WSM’s tumultuous 1950s was shaped by the steps it took to court and leverage the influence of this new army of country music evangelists. One exemplar, a rail-thin twentysomething named Tom Perryman, could be found barking over his microphone in Gladewater, Texas. He had been raised on a farm near the oil fields of East Texas, where his late father had been a field geologist. In 1943 he badly injured his back in a rough school yard game,and as part of a difficult recovery,he endured spinal fusion surgery, among the first ever done in Dallas. “After that surgery I was in plaster casts from my knees to my neck for about three or four months and laid up at the hospital and then later in a hospital bed out at the farmhouse,”he recalled.To endure the staggering boredom and discomfort (he once let his cat in his bed, and fleas got in his body cast), he listened to the radio, the Grand Ole Opry included, via NBC. He paid special attention to the announcers—to Louie Buck, David Cobb, and Jud Collins—and tried to imitate their commanding, resonant tones. He remembers it as learning to “illustrate with his voice.” After a brief stint in the Navy, where he received basic radio training, Perryman worked as a operator/announcer/disc jockey at KEBE in Tyler, where his first country record show was billed as the “KEBE CO-ral.”Next came the Gladewaterjob,wherehelaunchedthe“HillbillyHitParade.”Atthesametime, hebeganarrangingliveshowsinthearea,signinguptalentfromtheartistservice bureau of the Louisiana Hayride, an influential radio barn dance located just a few miles away in Shreveport,Louisiana.Perryman’s first show as a promoter 179—Jack, We Got a Real Problem i-xx_1-286_Havi...