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| MUSIC INDEX • Ozarks Music • Music Memories PEOPLE • George D. Hay • Norma Jean • Harold Morrison SHOWS • Ozark Opry • Ozark Jubilee • The Plummers REVIEWS • Big Smith INSTRUMENTS • Fiddle • Dulcimer SONGS • Through The Night Culture Index • Agriculture • Book Learning • Cooking • Craftsmanship • Faith in the Hills • History • Music • People of the Hills • Storytelling • Tourism |
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from the Ralph Foster Museum archive)
George D. Hay was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1966.
Hay started as a newspaperman, a chronicler of the human comedy, and it was his deep interest in the study of people that brought him to country music.
He was only a young man — in his mid-twenties — when the Memphis Commercial-Appeal sent him to Mammoth Spring, Arkansas, in the foothills of the Ozarks, to cover the funeral of a Marine hero of World War I.
What he experienced was to change his life.
"I sauntered around the town," he would write later, "at the edge of which, hard by the Missouri line, there lived a truck farmer in an old railroad car.
"He has seven or eight children and his wife seemed to be very tired with the tremendous job of caring for them. We chatted for a few minutes and the man went to his place of abode and brought forth a fiddle and a bow.
"He invited me to attend a 'hoedown' that neighbors were going to put on that night until the 'crack of dawn' in a log cabin about a mile up a muddy road.
"He had two other old-time musicians furnished the earthy rhythm.
"No one in the world has ever had more fun that those Ozark mountaineers did that night. It stuck with me until the idea became the Grand Ole Opry."
| Top, vintage RCA microphone and Philco radio, on display at the Ralph Foster Museum. Above, detail of a 1924-era banjo and "tater-bug" mandolin. Lucky 13 Studios Archive © 2008. ______ In a world where the average farmer was isolated from neighbors, the advent of the "radio music box" put the individual in contact with the outside world. In 1927, Philco began mass-producing radios and became the first company to design battery-operated sets for the farm market. Farmers tuned in to listen to farm and weather reports, but perhaps just an importantly, they tuned their imaginations in to shows like Amos & Andy, The Lone Ranger, The Shadow and Inner Sanctum. Ralph Foster Article reprint — The staff of College of the Ozarks' Ralph Foster Museum has graciously allowed the reprint of these articles from their archive. |
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November 21, 2008
Articles reprinted with grateful permission from the Ralph Foster Museum.