by Kip Lornell
These relatively good times changed when the Great Depression hit in late 1929. Record sales, which were an important part of the Stonemans’ income, plummeted from their high in 1928. Before long Ernest Stoneman couldn’t interest a record company in his music, and both his live, local musical performances and his work as a carpenter all but dried up.
The Stonemans would have twenty-three children (only eleven of whom survived into adulthood) and most of them also played music, often in various family ensembles. By the early 1930s he was broke and saddled with rising debt, which apparently peaked at around $500, as well as a large family to provide for. Creditors eventually put a lien on their house, sold the house from underneath them and repossessed the furniture. When the sheriff came for their car in December 1932, the family drove north to Alexandria, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.
Because Ernest could find only occasional work as a substitute postal carrier, the family resided in an abandoned old house and lived in abject poverty. He and his son Eddie recorded several sessions for ARC in January 1934, but none of the six sides that were released sold very well. After Ernest lost his part-time job with the Railway Mail Service Hattie and nine of the children moved back to Galax for nearly a year, living in an old log cabin her grandfather owned. In the spring of 1935 Ernest finally located a house in nearby Washington, D.C., and the family moved back from Galax.
Ernest, Hattie, and their son Eddie occasionally played on Alexandria-based WJSV, which became WTOP in 1943, but music work remained scarce. The family’s peripatetic lifestyle continued for several years because they often couldn’t afford to pay the rent and moved around the Washington area. The Stonemans, now with eleven children, eventually settled in Carmody Hills, Maryland, barely one mile from the Washington, D.C., line in Prince Georges County.
Following the close of World War II, the older Stoneman children gradually found employment, got married, and moved from home. Ernest Stoneman continued working odd jobs until he finally found a more permanent position at the U.S. Naval Gun Factory. With Stoneman’s diminishing family and steadier employment, his financial distress eased somewhat. Moreover, by the early 1950s, the Stoneman Family (as they were now known) began getting more gigs playing a mix of old-time country and the newly emerging bluegrass.
The influx of southern-born servicemen during World War II and thereafter helped to cement the District of Columbia’s place in the field of country music. They brought their musical interests with them, most of which were satisfied by way of live performances on stage and on the radio. At the close of World War II, just as the world was beginning its slow return to normalcy, the local interest in country music increased dramatically—a change due largely to Connie B. Gay.
Connie B. Gay, born in Lizard Lick, North Carolina, in 1914, helped to change the shape of commercial country music during the period after World War II. Gay became one of the founders of the Nashville-based Country Music Association in 1958 and served as its first president (1959–60). He was elected into the Country Music Association’s Hall of Fame in 1980 and what was initially called the CMAFounding Presidents Award became the Connie B. Gay Award in 1988 and is widely considered to be the organization’s most prestigious award.
Pictured here are the Howington Brothers, Dub and Roy in front with the Tennessee Haymakers: Herbie Jones, George Saslaw, and Jimmy Dean about 1949. Dean would go on to become a nationally recognized television personality by the mid 1950s. Courtesy of Bruce Bastin.
Despite his longtime ties with the Nashville-based Country Music Association, Gay remained closely associated with Washington, D.C., for most of his adult life. Roy Clark, Jimmy Dean, and Patsy Cline were among the artists with strong D.C. ties that he helped to make household names across the United States. But, perhaps most important, Gay helped to shape the sound and the appeal of country music during the ten-year period after the end of World War II when it was veering toward popular music and when the sound of bluegrass (along with honky-tonk) was developing as a distinctive genre under the wider “country music” umbrella.
The televison version of “Town and Country Time” began airing over WMAL-TV on a late Saturday night—from 10:00 PM to 1:00 am. The premier show on the final Saturday of September 1955 included a wide cross-section of country music talent from across the United States. Among the highlights was the D.C. premier of western swing pioneer Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, who opened the show. Country music star and nascent rockabilly artist Marvin Rainwater (then a regular on Red Foley’s “Ozark Jubilee”) along with Autry Inman, who was in the middle of an extended “Grand Ole Opry” engagement, and steel guitar wizard Jerry Bryd rounded out the imported talent. Jimmy Dean and the Texas Wildcats (who included Joe Wheeler, Miss Dale Turner, Luke Gordon, Dub Howington, Jimmy Case, and the delightfully misnamed “Tiny” Jenkins) represented the local contingent and became the regular local “stars.” Some 3,000 enthusiastic fans attended the first television broadcast. While bluegrass was absent from the initial Town and Country television show, and local talent was not fore-grounded, the “Town and Country Time” radio broadcasts sounded very different.
In 1948 Jim[my] Dean made his recording debut with the Howington Brother on the locally operated DC label. Courtesy of Jay Bruder.
When Connie B. Gay persuaded the station manager of Arlington, Virginia’s WARL-AM that the newly launched station needed to capitalize on the interest in local country music talent, “Town and Country Time” was born on November 7, 1946. At first it aired for one-half hour, beginning at noon, but eventually proved to be so successful that it became a three-hour afternoon broadcast that stretched until 3:00. According to an article in the December 5, 1989, Washington Post, Gay “began broadcasts from the basement of his home in Arlington through a telephone hookup to the station’s transmitter,” where he “relayed country news and country views.”
Within one year, this energetic entrepreneur decided that country music on radio was not enough. By the spring of 1947 he expanded his local music empire into promoting live music programs. Building upon local radio listeners who tuned in each noon for Gay’s “Radio Ranch” he began a series of programs at Turner’s Arena under the “Gay Time” rubric. These proved successful and the November 7, 1948, Washington Post included this brief news piece under the “Gay Time Show Returning Here”: “Connie B. Gay has announced that Turner’s Arena will be the new home of Gay Time, the hillbilly show, which returns to Washington next Friday. Gay says he has signed Bill Monroe of “Grand Ole Opry” fame, for opening night. In addition to Monroe, there will be Clyde Moody, Pete Cassell (the blind minstrel), Chubby Wise and Grandpa Jones and Ramona. There will be the Radio Ranchmen and some added attractions. One of them will be Linnie Ayleshire of Springfield, Mo., who makes his music out of saws, balloons and bureau drawers.”
Gay took a major chance in the fall of 1947 when he rented venerable Constitution Hall in order to promote a show featuring Eddy Arnold. Much to the surprise of the local music establishment, it sold out. This unexpected success inspired Gay to increase his efforts to promote country music in D.C. at a major venue, and in 1948 his music shows in Constitution Hall sold out for twenty-six straight weeks.
Gay followed this coupe with a series of country music cruises on the Potomac. He began promoting them in 1950, following the formula that made his local radio show so successful: mixing local and national talent. On July 3, 1950, he promoted the “Grand Old Opry Cruise,” which included Cowboy Copas, Sugarfoot Garland & his Oklahoma Cowboys in addition to two local bands: Don Patton’s Swing Boys and Ralph Case and his Square Dancers.
At first Connie B. Gay’s WARL program reflected the trends in commercial country music across the United States. His radio shows, which ran from 1946 through 1955, often emphasized the “western” in the term “country and western,” with local groups such as Jimmy Dean’s Texas Wildcats. Likewise another group with a strong local following, Dub Howington and the Tennessee Haym
akers, embraced the newly emerging rockabilly sound. Record companies and radio stations alike were still trying to figure out how to label and market country music, so during the late 1940s terms like hillbilly, country, or country and western were often used somewhat interchangeably. In D.C., Gay traded on both the term “hillbilly” and the “western” connection, as witnessed by his “Radio Ranch” and the “Radio Ranchmen.” Dean had his first hit, “Bummin’ Around,” in 1953 on the 4 Star label, but had no other hits for the rest of the decade. He signed with Columbia Records in 1957.
In 1954, Dean hosted the popular Washington, D.C., radio program “Town and Country Time” on WARL-AM, and with his Texas Wildcats became popular in the Mid-Atlantic region. Patsy Cline and Roy Clark got their starts on the show. Although Cline and Dean became good friends, Clark, Dean’s lead guitarist, was eventually fired by the singer for his chronic tardiness. Dean replaced Clark with Billy Grammer. In 1955, Town and Country Time moved to WMALTV on weekday afternoons. Dean and the Texas Wildcats also appeared during 1957 on Town and Country Jamboree on WMAL-TV on Saturdays from 10:30 PM TO 1:30 am, which was also carried by TV stations in Maryland and Virginia on a regional network.
Also during 1957, Dean hosted Country Style on WTOP-TV on weekday mornings. CBS picked up the show nationally from Washington for eight months in 1957 using the rather generic title, The Morning Show. Then from September 14, 1958, to June 1959, CBS carried The Jimmy Dean Show on weekday and Saturday afternoons.
Roy Clark, who was born in south-central Virginia in 1933 and moved to Washington, D.C., when his father got a job at the Naval Yard, began playing banjo, guitar, and mandolin in 1947 and within a year placed first in the National Banjo Championships. He juggled a strong interest in baseball and boxing before settling on a career in music. At the age of seventeen, he had his first appearance on the “Grand Ole Opry” and five years later became a regular musician on “Town and Country Time.” After Jimmy Dean fired Clark, he never lived in Washington, D.C., again. By 1960 Clark landed in Las Vegas as the guitarist in a band led by former West Coast western swing bandleader-comedian Hank Penny, followed by a stint in a band backing rockabilly legend Wanda Jackson. He then found a home in Hollywood, with recurring roles in The Beverly Hillbillies and Hee Haw in the late 1960s before opening the Roy Clark Celebrity Theater in Branson, Missouri, in 1983. In 2009 he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Pop Stoneman’s second recording career began in 1957 when he was visited by Mike Seeger, a local musician, documentarian, and member of the famous Seeger family that included Pete and that resided in Chevy Chase, Maryland, less than one mile from the line separating the District of Columbia from Maryland. A 1957 Folkways album, Old Time Tunes Of The South, marked the first time in more than two decades that Stoneman had recorded and brought him to the attention of people caught up in the late 1950s–1960s folk music boom. In 1962 the Stoneman Family debuted at the “Grand Ole Opry,” which brought them a great deal of attention. In 1963 they cut an album for Starday entitled Ernest V. Stoneman and the Stoneman Family that included selections such as “In the Sweet Bye and Bye” and “The Sinking of the Titanic” that they’d first recorded back in the 1920s, followed a year later by an album of similar material, entitled Great Old Timer at the Capitol. With this emphasis on “old-time” country music and western themes, how does bluegrass figure into the Washington, D.C., music scene?
Bluegrass
It may seem odd, at first blush, that bluegrass music should flourish in Washington, D.C. But, like Chicago and San Antonio, you have to look at the people who made up the population of Washington, D.C., in the years following the close of World War II when bluegrass was developing. Many of these new residents moved from areas where this music initially emerged.
Bluegrass was initially marketed as country music, albeit a fresh form that sounded remarkably brash and innovative. To our twenty-first-century ears it might sound quaint, predictable, and even old-fashioned, but in the immediate post-WW II years bluegrass was new. Like most forms of twentieth century American vernacular music, which drew from existing genres, bluegrass meshed elements of country, blues, jazz (swing, really), and gospel, into a form that emphasized solo musicianship and improvisation.
The term bluegrass was not associated with this music until approximately ten years after the close of WW II, when the music began to be disseminated by way of recordings, radio, and touring musicians. Before the mid-1950s this music came under the rather generic categories of country or hillbilly. But by the late 1950s bluegrass became the term used to describe the music of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers, and Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys.
Bluegrass also was initially associated with southern, rural, or “down-home” music. More specifically this new music was associated with the upland southeast, where Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina meet. Bluegrass fermented in small venues in places like the Coeburn, Virginia, VFW and early morning live radio broadcasts over WOPI from Bristol, Tennessee, which provided an early media outlet for the Stanley Brothers.
Due to the migration patterns that followed in the wake of the Great Migration, many (black and white) residents of North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia moved toward the Northeast. While many of them stopped in larger cities like Richmond, Virginia, the lure of our nation’s capital, with its increasing urbanity and federal jobs, made the District of Columbia and its suburbs a prime destination for migrants from the southeastern states.
Multi-instrumentalist Ernest Stoneman, who moved his wife and family to the Washington, D.C., areas during the Depression, typifies this trend. Not only did he relocate to an urban area, the entire family brought the music of its native Galax County, Virginia, with them. While Stoneman settled near Washington, D.C., others moved on to Baltimore (a much more blue-collar town than D.C.) or southern Pennsylvania or even farther north. This very distinctive migration pattern, one that continues to this day, assured that bluegrass became part of D.C.’s musical vocabulary beginning in the late 1940s. Stoneman’s life story serves as the archetype for the transition from the southeastern rural states to Washington, D.C., and the emergence of bluegrass. Because these immigrants often identified with music from Appalachia and the musical roots of their own families, they tended to think of their music as “hillbilly” rather than “country and western.”
Fiddle-playing Scotty Stoneman emerged as one of the best of the family musicians and began playing with some of the most impressive local players, including fiddler and (Bill Monroe alumnus) Chubby Wise. In 1955 this ad hoc group played a multi-week gig at the Hotel Charles in Hughesville, Maryland. Guitarist Roy Clark and his band played a successful, extended engagement at The Famous, a club in D.C., which inspired owner Sam Bomstein to suggest that Scotty form a family-based band, “The Blue Grass Champs.” This name marks the first use by a D.C.-based group of the term “bluegrass.”
The Blue Grass Champs also included Jimmy Case in addition to various members of the extended Stoneman Family. Case had been honorably discharged several months earlier at Andrews Air Force Base, after serving four years in the U.S. Air Force and was “discovered” by Scotty while performing at Jo-Dels Supper Club in Washington, D.C. After playing just one gig at The Famous, Sanford Bomstein hired the band and they played there for the next three years.
The initial Blue Grass Champs lineup consisted of Scott Stoneman on fiddle and vocals, Jimmy Case on acoustic guitar and vocals, Ray Cross (a Stoneman cousin by marriage) on electric guitar, and Jimmy Stoneman on upright bass and vocals. Within a month Ray Cross was replaced by Donna Stoneman on mandolin. Porter Church joined the group in the summer of 1956 just prior to the group’s audition for the nationally broadcast Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts television show. On July 13, 1956, the Arthur Godfrey show producers sent the group a telegram inviting them to appear on the show on July 30, 1956. The Blue Grass Champs won the Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts show performing “Salty Dog Blu
es” and enjoyed two weeks of national exposure instead of the usual one.
Appearing on the Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts program opened the door for the group and Jimmy Dean quickly booked them semi-regularly on his local television show, which broadcast from Turner’s Arena in Washington. They also appeared locally with Patsy Cline, Roy Clark, Billy Grammer, and Grandpa Jones and on the WWVA Wheeling Jamboree in Wheeling, West Virginia, as well as on WARL radio, Arlington, Virginia, in addition to their weekly radio show on WEAM radio in Fairfax, Virginia.
By the close of 1956 the Bluegrass Champs played six nights a week and won the band contest at the Warrenton National Championships. The elder Stoneman occasionally performed with his children’s band but nabbed his own headlines after an appearance on The $64,000 Question, a popular TV game show in 1956, where he won $10,000. The group soon earned a regular spot on Arthur Godfrey’s daily daytime show, which continued to bring them national recognition. At this time they also played with Charlie Waller, John Duffy, and Bill Emerson, who formed the nucleus of the famous local bluegrass group, Country Gentlemen.
Van (the youngest son) learned to play and sing from “Pop” (Ernest’s newly aquired nickname) and eventually joined Scotty in the Blue Grass Champs as a lead singer and guitarist. They were regularly featured on WTTG Channel 5 in Washington, D.C., through the mid-1960s. The band played country favorites by Porter Wagoner and Johnny Cash as well as songs by Bill Monroe and other bluegrass bands.
Perry Westland (guitar) performing live on the air about 1950 at Connie B. Gay’s WGAY radio station in Washington, DC with Fiddlin’ Curly Smith, Charlie Fetzer on resonator guitar and Don Owens on bass. Owens would go on to become a nationally prominent disc jockey. Courtesy of Perry and Barbara Westland.