The Hugh Cherry Story: Part One

Nashville’s Premier Post-War Hillbilly Platter Spinner Tells All

Hugh Cherry and friends

Broadcaster-historian-folklorist Hugh Cherry was Nashville’s premier post-war hillbilly platter spinner, and his career in country music radio became a calling, a crusade, a cause. He leapt into it with vigorous dedication, quickly gaining tremendous airwave currency and the confidence and fellowship of the genre’s topmost stars, Hank Williams Sr. chief among them.

“Hank and I became very good friends,” Cherry said. “Our common ground was hillbilly music and booze. We had a motto: ‘if we couldn’t drink it, smoke it, snort it, shoot it or fuck it—we didn’t want it.’ Of course, it damn near killed us both.”

The hard-drinking WWII vet was at once a swaggering bad boy and a polished, eloquent gentleman, a self-made scholar who pursued knowledge and experience with the zealot’s passion. His remarkable rise from Kentucky farmboy to airwave potentate—only to walk away from it all at his professional peak—is one of country music’s great, untold insider sagas.

Hugh was a friend, and this previously unpublished 1995 interview, conducted as background for Cherry’s entry in the CMF’s Encyclopedia of Country Music, covers far more than would ever fit into that 500 word assignment.

“I was born in Louisville, Kentucky on October 7 1922—just about 4 months after the first commercial hillbilly record was made, which I find interesting since I made that field my business,” Cherry said. “My father was a railroader, we had a little farm outside of Louisville so he was a railroader and a farmer and it was a case of he didn’t make much money at either one of them.”

The old man did make enough to furnish their home with three radios (one for the barn) and a phonograph—which soon became critical elements in Cherry’s otherwise standard issue, bleak Depression-era upbringing.

“I grew up with Jimmie Rodgers and Carter Family records playing on the old wind-up Victrola in the house. Coincidentally, I had the good fortune, when I was very young, of seeing both the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. I saw the Carter Family in performance at a church in Warrant County Kentucky, well it was a schoolhouse during the week and a church on Sundays. And I saw Jimmie Rodgers in performance in 1931 or ‘32 on the stage at the Rialto theater in Louisville. I was ten years old and went with my father and I remember him in his Stetson and his gray stovepipe leg suit, standing on the stage with one foot on the seat of a cane bottom chair under a pin point spot, just singing, no microphone, no nothin’.”

“I grew up listening, on radio, to Clayton McMichen and Cousin Emmy and Asher Sizemore and Little Jimmy, on local radio and of course we had the National Barndance broadcast. I wasn’t particularly crazy about it. My family listened to it, it was a part of my life. By the time I got into high school, why, I was a big band aficionado. I started high school in 1936, a rural high school, a combination grade and high school in Jefferson, Kentucky not far out of Louisville.”

“You’ve got to remember, back in those days, anything rural had a great stigma on it and that has to do with the basic cultural influence we have in this society, that very strong distinction between the rural American and the urban American. It was a very distinct line of social demarcation and when I was in high school, I worked very hard so I could buy a decent suit, some Arrow shirts and neckties and a decent pair of shoes, so that when I went to town I didn’t look like what I was—which was a shitkicker.”

The self-possessed teenager had initiated what became a lifelong pattern of examining, challenging and re-defining his own self-image, but the process took a kingsize detour after Pearl Harbor:

“I enlisted in the Army in ’42, I wound up as a clerk in a counterintelligence detachment, and from that I went on to investigation. It was pretty good duty. I went to Europe, we were in on some of the early stuff,” Cherry said. “I wasn’t a big combat soldier but I was one of the troops that went in and liberated Dachau—in fact, I just participated, at the Simon Weisenthal center, as a liberator of Dachau, we were there with the survivors, it was quite an experience. But anyway, since I served in Army counterintelligence, my job was interrogation, investigation and the denazification process. I did almost 5 years in the military and had a pretty good deal—all the booze and pussy I wanted. It beat the hell out of working.”

“When I got home from the Army, I was very deeply enmeshed in alcohol. That just about covers it, my wife divorced me because of the alcohol, and I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Cherry said. “I mean I was short, I wasn’t an athlete, the only real ambition I ever had was to be a forest ranger. I never thought of myself as having particular talent that would lend itself to . . . anything.”

“But one of the things I could do was learn to articulate and enunciate, so I set out to do that—I had a particularly good ear for language,” Cherry said. “Early in my military career, I was assigned as clerk at HQ because when I answered the phone they could understand what I said. People used to be amazed when they found out I was from the South. But I never had any ambitions to go into radio.”

“In Louisville, we had four radio stations, CBS, ABC, NBC and later, Mutual—you had to be a network affiliate. After WW2 the FCC opened up a lot of new licenses and created something that was almost unheard of—the independent radio station, and little towns with an 8000 population could come up with their own radio station, and all of them did.”

“Then, a friend get me a job at WKAY in Glasgow—you did a little bit of everything, it was an independent station with block programming, you had live hillbilly performers usually early in the morning and also at noon, and you introduced fundamentalist preachers and your sponsor and your block programming: 15 minutes of Glen Grey and 15 minutes of Duke Ellington and so on and so on, sponsored by your local grocer, your local furniture store and that sort of thing.”

Cherry moved on to Louisville’s WKYW, whose owner instituted a fateful program note.

“He wanted me to do a hillbilly show,” Cherry said. “I told him ‘You’ve got the wrong dude’ and he says ’Well, I need you worse for this than I need you for anything else.’ Of course, I did what he wanted, and it was through that I met Pee Wee King.”

Hugh Cherry in 1951

King, who got his start with Gene Autry, was fresh off a high-profile ten year run at the Grand Ole Opry with his Golden West Cowboys, where he established himself as a significant, distinctive force, one who introduced polkas, cowboy songs and waltzes into the country canon. King’s mid-day show (on a rival station) preceded Cherry’s and the pair inaugurated a friendly on-air feud that led to a real life alliance.

“Pee Wee was my mentor,” Cherry said. “I didn’t know a lot about the music—there wasn’t much printed on the music— and Pee Wee gave me access to his basement in Louisville, where he had songbooks, a few magazine articles. Maurice Zolotow had one of the first articles on country music and the Opry in the Saturday Evening Post. There were several others, and a lot of newspaper clippings and so on and I just availed myself of it.”

What Cherry did next was nothing short of extraordinary—he educated himself, as comprehensively as possible—on the history of commercial country music and the cast of characters who embodied it. The perspective he gained allowed Cherry to assign and place an evolutionary context and to help chart a popular course for the hillbilly music which was by and large scorned by the general American public. He was primed and ready and, after a falling out with WKYW’s program director, Cherry abruptly walked.

“So, I quit the radio station, called Pee Wee and said ‘What am I gonna do?’ He said, ‘I’m going to send you to Nashville,’” Cherry said. “He called his father-in-law, who was JL Frank, the only manager who is in the Hall of Fame.”

Frank had gone from managing radio stars Fibber McGee & Molly and Amos ‘n’ Andy to become one of the biggest promoters of pre-war hillbilly—he got both Pee Wee King and Roy Acuff onto the Opry and significantly boosted the early careers of Eddy Arnold, Minnie Pearl and Ernest Tubb.

“I got to Nashville in 1948 and JL Frank met me at the train,” Cherry said. “He took me to Tom Baker, who owned WKDA and knew about my success in Louisville, and he hired me. I was the nighttime announcer and went on after Larry Munson doing baseball, and if baseball got over at nine o’clock, I was on for three hours. I picked the records and Pee Wee made it possible for me to go backstage at the Grand Ole Opry and go to the Opry rehearsals at studio C and in a short time I knew everybody and they knew about my program and they would bring their records up.”

“Hank Williams brought his record—that’s how we met,” Cherry said. “They’d all bring these up on acetate, Uncle Dave Macon, Roy Acuff, Red Foley, Boudleaux Bryant, all these people would come up to have them played on my radio program. So, I had an opportunity to learn about this music from the people who made it. I’d be an idiot not to learn about it. I used to love to sit down with Uncle Dave Macon, who was in his eighties, and milk his fucking brain.”

To be continued . . .