The 1940s brought musical changes to the Grand Ole Opry. The old-time sounds were now joined by the modern country music of acts like Pee Wee King & The Golden West Cowboys. Segments by DeFord Bailey and the other Opry pioneers were shortened.
The Harmonica Wizard was also unwittingly trapped between the forces of the dueling musical-performance organizations American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI). ASCAP collected music licensing fees from radio stations and distributed money to songwriters exclusively until 1940. When it raised its rates, broadcasters formed BMI to rival it. WSM invested in BMI and instructed its artists to perform only music licensed by the upstart company. DeFord’s tunes were essentially folk songs, but they were licensed by ASCAP. In any case, he reasoned that his listeners wanted to hear “Pan-American Blues” and “The Fox Chase,” not new, unfamiliar tunes.
Unable or unwilling to change, DeFord Bailey was dropped from the cast in May 1941. For the rest of his life, he was wary of the music business. But he remained friends with his old Opry cohorts.
During World War II, he returned to the Opry to perform in a film made to boost GI morale. In the early 1950s, he toured with WLAC bluegrass star Carl Tipton and appeared regularly on local television and the nationally broadcast Chicago radio show Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club. Bill Monroe brought him back to the Opry as his guest several times, paying DeFord out of his own pocket.
In the 1960s, DeFord Jr. became a regular on the syndicated TV show Night Train, playing in a band that included the then-unknown guitarist Jimi Hendrix. At his son’s invitation, DeFord appeared on the 1963–1966 series several times. In 1967, DeFord was also filmed for the syndicated TV series National Life’s Grand Ole Opry.
By this time, the folk-revival movement was in full swing. It wasn’t long before folk enthusiasts approached DeFord and other old-time musicians about making coffeehouse appearances. He did several shows in the late 1960s at a Nashville club called The Marketplace. On these occasions, he not only played harmonica but sang and played banjo and guitar.
In 1967, producer Mike Weesner had encountered the well-known blind Nashville street singer Cortelia Clark. Blues in the Street, the album that resulted, won a Grammy Award as the Best Folk Recording of the Year. Weesner believed that a record by DeFord Bailey should be the natural follow-up. Despite repeated requests by the producer, DeFord declined. He also passed on recording offers from folk star Pete Seeger, harmonica ace Charlie McCoy, and singer James Talley. He turned down $2,500 to perform three songs in the 1975 Burt Reynolds movie W.W. and The Dixie Dancekings.
Urban renewal closed DeFord’s shoeshine parlor in 1971. It was torn down, and he moved into a federally subsidized high-rise for the elderly. Now divorced from Ida Lee, he lived alone in his memento-filled apartment.
Social worker David Morton became his friend and functioned as DeFord’s manager. He booked a number of concerts for the living legend in the early 1970s. He made tape recordings of the old man’s still-vibrant playing. DeFord returned to the Opry stage twice in 1974, celebrating his seventy-fifth birthday there on December 14, 1974. He appeared on the show again in 1975 and 1982.
His passion for music remained with him until his death. He played his harmonica daily and often picked on his banjo and guitar as well.
“A harp has been a mother and father to me,” he said. “This harp has carried me places money wouldn’t start to . . . and brought me back. It’s worth a million dollars just to have and play around on. . . . It’s company to me.
“I learn something new about a harp every day or two. You never learn everything about one. . . . Every day I’m alive, I hear a different sound.”
He called the instrument his “best friend” and summed up his career by noting, “I was a humdinger.”
DeFord Bailey died on July 2, 1982, at age eighty-two. But his fame survived him.
On June 23, 1983, a celebration of his life was held in Nashville. A commemorative plaque was installed at his address. Then a monument was dedicated in Greenwood Cemetery, where he is buried. At the ceremony, fellow Opry pioneers The Crook Brothers played old-time hoedown tunes. Bill Monroe plucked “Evening Prayer Blues” on his mandolin. James Talley performed “John Henry.” After the tombstone etched with the image of a harmonica was unveiled, Herman Crook played “Amazing Grace” solo on his harmonica. At a subsequent reception at the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Bailey family donated a number of artifacts to the museum.
In 1988, David Morton’s tapes became an album titled The Legendary DeFord Bailey: Country Music’s First Black Star. In 1991, Morton and Charles Wolfe published The Harmonica Wizard’s biography, DeFord Bailey: A Black Star in Early Country Music. In 2002 came the documentary film DeFord Bailey: A Legend Lost. In 2004, his remarkable life and music were saluted with a program at the Nashville Public Library.
On November 15, 2005, DeFord Bailey was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame during ceremonies televised nationally from Madison Square Garden in New York. Today, his plaque rests in the same room as those of his fellow Opry pioneers and touring partners Uncle Dave Macon (1870–1952), The Delmore Brothers, Roy Acuff (1903–1992), and Bill Monroe (1911–1996).
31
Sure Love
Hal Ketchum had achieved country stardom and had found the “Sure Love” he sang about, but just when he seemed to have it all, he nearly lost it all.
“I woke up on my forty-fifth birthday—April 9, 1998—with little feeling in my right arm,” Hal recalls. “I was admitted to Seton Hospital in Austin, Texas, on Easter Sunday. I was paralyzed from the neck down.
“Gina and I had only been married a couple of months. In a way, I think that was a bonding experience. Gina was there with me every second. They put a cot in my room. The nurses were opposed to it. They said, ‘He needs absolute total silence and rest for these batteries of tests, until we know what this is. We’re losing him.’ Gina said, ‘Well, take it or leave it—I’m staying.’ She never left my side.”
The singer credits his wife’s steadfast love for his miraculous recovery. His medical condition was eventually diagnosed as multiple sclerosis in 2002. This disease involves the deterioration of nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord. Some patients become permanently disabled. There is no cure.
Today, a rehabilitated Hal Ketchum remains one of the Grand Ole Opry’s most charismatic performers and a widely beloved figure throughout Nashville’s music community. Yet his road to Music City and the Opry’s stage was anything but typical.
Hal was born April 9, 1953, and raised in Greenwich, New York, a hamlet of 2,500 in the shadow of the Adirondack Mountains, near the Vermont state line. His father worked as a production manager for a newspaper, played banjo, and was a member of the Buck Owens fan club.
“My mother had multiple sclerosis,” Hal says, adding quickly, “Typically, it’s not hereditary.
“She was sick all of my childhood. She was institutionalized—they thought she was nuts. They put her away, gave her shock treatments. In the dark ages of medical science, they didn’t know what was wrong with her.
“She was in a wheelchair when I was in high school and then bedridden. It ended up she spent the last five years of her life in a nursing home. My father and my brother and sister and I were incapable of doing full-time nursing care.”
Hal left home at age seventeen and moved to Florida to learn carpentry. He relocated to the Texas hill country to ply his trade in 1981.
Musically, Hal was a late bloomer. He’d played drums in local bands as a teenager but did not focus on music until he fell under the influence of the singer-songwriters of the Lone Star State. Captivated by troubadours such as Townes Van Zandt and Lyle Lovett, Hal taught himself to play the guitar and began writing tunes. Soon, that was all he thought about.
“I had to do it. There was never a day that I didn’t wake up thinking about making a living as a songwriter and a singer. It was truly an obsession.
> “My home life deteriorated because of my obsession. It cost me a marriage.”
Hal Ketchum completely walked away from his steady profession of nearly twenty years as a cabinetmaker to enter the uncertain world of music making. In 1986, he recorded a small-label album called Threadbare Alibis. The following year, he was scouted by Nashville music executives when he performed at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas. Hal turned thirty-five in 1988. He figured it was now or never and headed for Music City.
The handsome, prematurely gray–haired Hal Ketchum burst on the country radio airwaves in 1991 with “Small Town Saturday Night.” The national music-trade publication Radio & Records named it the top country single of that year. Music Row magazine named its clever video the Breakthrough Video of the Year. Inevitably, the giant hit led to an invitation to appear on the Grand Ole Opry. Hal made his debut on the Opry stage the day after Thanksgiving in 1991.
“I wasn’t raised listening to the Opry,” he admits. “I didn’t really know that much about it, but my father was a huge fan of the Opry. It was through him and his record collection that I knew about it. The first time I was invited to play there and stood on that circle of wood on that stage . . . was the first time I felt like a star.
“It was a really spiritual thing. After that first time, I was completely hooked. I love being around all those guys. There are so many stories. For me, the essence of country music is there. So I really kind of lobbied to become a member. After I’d been there three or four times, I said to [then–Opry manager] Hal Durham, ‘Look, if there’s any way I can participate on a higher level, I’d be honored to.’ I became a cast member on January 22, 1994.
“I can still remember every detail. It was the Standard Candy portion of the show. Marty Stuart, Jan Howard and, a surprise to me, Vince Gill were on with me. I sang ‘Wings of a Dove’ with Ferlin Husky. I had never met him. About three minutes before I went on, I saw him. My dad was in the wings, and he was a huge Ferlin Husky fan. So I asked Ferlin if he would join me on ‘Wings of a Dove.’ He said, ‘I don’t want to steal your thunder. This is your night.’ But I insisted. So it was a great moment.”
Hal’s father was in a wheelchair that evening, terminally ill with lung cancer. Witnessing his son’s induction was one of the last things he ever did.
“I finished up onstage and said, ‘How’d I do, Pop?’ He said, ‘Good. Now take me home. I’m done.’ And he died two days after I was inducted into the Opry cast. He stayed alive just so he could come and see it.”
His father’s memory was recalled in the poem that Hal wrote for his Opry induction. It was printed in that evening’s program booklet:
A long time ago,
In my very childhood,
Marty Robbins told me
Of trouble in El Paso.
I was in the kitchen,
I remember it was wintertime.
Summer was for play,
Winter for reflection.
More time underfoot,
More time to listen.
The snow piled up,
The little house hummed and shook.
Ray Charles was Busted.
Buck and The Buckaroos
Had a Tiger by the Tail.
Patsy Cline descended like an
Angel on a staircase of strings.
I loaded Sixteen Tons with Ernie Ford,
And studied the written word
With Roger Miller.
My father brought these people home,
One by one,
And they all stayed.
They told me even then
That I was welcome,
They knew I understood.
A thousand souls and singers
Have reckoned me to this
Hallowed place,
And tho’ some would say
I’ve come a long way,
I would say simply
That tonight, I arrive.
Hal’s “Past the Point of Rescue” (1992), “Five O’Clock World” (1992), “Sure Love” (1992), “Hearts Are Gonna Roll” (1993), “Mama Knows the Highway” (1993), “Stay Forever” (1995), and other hits kept his career rolling. His personal life derailed again when his 1991–1997 marriage to a Nashville music publisher ended in divorce. Hal figured he’d stay single after that. But within weeks of his second divorce, he fell in love with Nashville stylist Gina Giglio.
“If I hadn’t met her, I don’t know if I would have ever married again,” he comments. “She was doing hair and makeup for a Ricky Skaggs TV show at the Ryman Auditorium that I was on as a guest. I walked in, and there she was. She was the first person who walked up and said, ‘Hi’ to me. We just started a conversation. About five or six months ensued where we just talked every once in a while.
“I remember I was shooting a video [“Hang in There Superman”], and I wanted her to do the hair and makeup on it. I already had my sights on her. Then I asked for her again for a photo shoot, and that was it. We’ve been together ever since.
“I proposed to her in the Austin airport. I walked up to her holding a bunch of flowers with one iris in the middle. I had put a ring on the stem of the iris. I didn’t say anything. I just handed her the flowers and made sure she did sniff from the iris.
“I’d asked her to marry me a few times before that, and she said, ‘Where’s the ring?’ which apparently you’re supposed to have when you propose—I’m a little slow.”
They married on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1998. Almost immediately afterward came Hal’s diagnosis of MS. Interestingly, it was not his first near-death experience. When he was twenty-two, he was in a construction accident that nearly killed him.
“I’d fallen on a pile of rocks from about 20 feet in the air. I fractured my skull and broke my collarbone and broke my arm in two places and broke my leg. The term ‘multiple abrasions’ doesn’t even come close. I left my body, and I remember actually flying along behind a truck.”
When he was in his thirties, he nearly drowned while snorkeling in the Caribbean. Again, he came back.
“I’ve come close a couple of times. But it’s been important to stay. I wouldn’t have the joys I have if I had left earlier.
“I’ve always healed remarkably well and quickly from any injuries. I’ve had some other illnesses in my life. I’ve always bounced back.
“Anyway, I faced the horror of that diagnosis. So I was traumatized and fearful of what was going to happen to me. Gina and the people she surrounded me with were so positive. She has a lot of holistic sense. This certain serenity of her presence was healing.
“I was taken home from the hospital after about a month. Gina would drive me to occupational therapy, physical therapy—things like learning to tie a shoelace, making a bow. Ironically, it feels exactly the same as it did when you were a child when you finally get the loop through the hole. It’s the same feeling, and it’s a beautiful feeling. When I learned to make a C-chord on the guitar again, it was exactly like being thirteen again.”
During his recuperation, the Ketchums moved from Austin, where he had lived since 1997, to Chicago, and then to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There, Hal took up painting, and his works have been shown in Santa Fe galleries. The couple moved back to Nashville in 2001 and decided to start his second family. His children from his first marriage—Sarah and Graham—were both grown and living in San Antonio. Hal and Gina adopted Fani (born in 1997) and had daughters Ruby and Sophie in 2001 and 2004.
“Ruby was eleven days old the first time she was on the Opry stage. I had a Gibson guitar in a felt-lined case. I opened the case, built a little bassinet in it, and laid her in the case onstage while I performed. That’s a pretty good introduction to the Opry.
“It’s such a beautiful place for my girls. It’s so welcoming. It’s such a family environment. Where else in the world can you take your kids and let them run around backstage? Sophie kind of soaks it all in. She’ll wander onstage. Fani has developed a real love of anybody with an upright bass. She loves
going into the Riders in the Sky dressing room, because there’s always music in there. Ruby’s the one who really enjoys being onstage and singing with me.
“They’re all really infatuated with Little Jimmy Dickens. They love The Whites—Buck White is kind of like a grandfather to them.”
Gina and the girls have changed Hal Ketchum’s personality profoundly. They give him hope and optimism, he says.
“Gina says, ‘You had multiple sclerosis, and you don’t have that now.’ She is exceptionally strong. It’s not denial. It’s the power of mind over body. And I’ve always had that approach, myself.”
Hal adds that Gina’s grace and love are also responsible for his new outlook on life. Hal is much sunnier and far less subject to dark mood swings than he was ten years ago.
“I don’t think I was ever really joyful before,” he agrees. “I always felt like I was under a cloud in some way or other. That’s my depressive nature, I guess.
“I think that being capable of being happy is being capable of being loved. I think those two things go hand in hand.”
32
Behind Every Great Man . . .
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Randy Travis has had the same record producer since 1985. Kyle Lehning was behind the country superstar’s breakthrough hits two decades ago, and he is still producing Randy’s records. Jeff Davis, the singer’s road manager, has been with him for twenty years. Fiddler David Johnson was in Randy’s band back home in North Carolina in the 1970s, and he’s still there today. The star’s lead guitarist is a veteran of more than twenty years. His bass player has also been a confederate since Randy’s earliest days in Nashville, and his drummer has been with him for more than fifteen years.
Most significant of all is the steadfast love and dedication of Lib Hatcher Travis. She is both his wife and his manager.
“It’s hard to believe, but we’ve known each other for thirty-two years,” marvels Randy. “Can you believe that? We’ve been married seventeen years now.
Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain Page 34