Hi Dusty,

I’ve been doing a fair amount of work the past month or so, indexing another piece of the 50-60 year old collection of  country music magazines I have and use for my “hillbilly-music.com” web site. While doing this, I noticed there were  quite a few familiar names credited for writing the articles on a regular basis. Perhaps fans know them better when they hear them sing or know the songs they wrote. But these talented folks from a past era also had another way with words. So, here’s a bit of a walk through of  the pages of country music history with some of these authors / journalists in no particular order - see how many you remember...

Doc Embree

He and his wife Esther were long time entertainers in the midwest, working an extended stint at WIBW in Topeka, Kansas. Doc did more than the daily radio shows and personal appearances with his wife. He was the editor of the monthly WIBW Round-Up magazine they published. It started back in April of 1945. But that wasn’t all Doc chronicled. He also contributed semi-regularly to the old Mountain Broadcast and Prairie Recorder magazine as well.

Pee Wee King

The man who co-wrote Tennessee Waltz with Redd Stewart had a regular by-line in Country Song Roundup that ran for many years. The column was called “Pee Wee King’s Corn Fab.” It was a bit like a newsy column of the artists he regularly ran into in his travels. It sort of gave you an insider’s view, though without the tabloid-type of news that seems to be common today. You could read about many of the famous acts of the day in that column. In the first 75 issues of Country Song Roundup, his column appeared in 63 of those issues. His last one appeared in January 1961.

Bill Anderson

Another Country Song Roundup contributor. For many years, he contributed a regular column where he basically answered questions from the fans. I haven’t documented how long that column ran as it covers a period I haven’t gotten into yet on the site, but it could rival Pee Wee King’s run. That type of column seemed to be quite popular in that magazine, for another artist before Bill had a similar column.

Buddy Starcher

His career took him through several decades and many miles. His radio career was typical of the early country music entertainer - always on the move to the next radio station, trying to advance his career, trying to find that magic ingredient that sets him above the rest of the entertainers. Buddy wrote a regular column in the old Mountain Broadcast and Prairie Recorder magazine as well. Like Doc Embree’s and other regional columnists in the magazines of that era, he wrote of the acts in their geographical area and where he was currently playing. We’d often read about Buddy’s latest troupe of entertainers he was working with, documenting their comings and goings - little did they know that historians and researchers in future decades would be thankful for such details.

Hank Williams

Could there ever be enough written about Hank and his music? Well, he didn’t write a column, but he did work with Jimmy Rule to publish a book called “Hank Williams Tells How To Write Folk and Western Music To Sell.” Now it would have been enough to maybe just write about how to write a country western tune. But that little booklet he and Jimmy wrote (it was only about 28 pages) went one step further - how to write songs that would SELL. You have to appreciate where Hank was coming from on that one. And one chapter’s title, “Song Sharks” maybe gives you a thought he was trying to relate a bit of his experience and what he’d seen in the industry. When Hank wrote, folks took a listenin’ to.

Alton Delmore

Part of the legendary Delmore Brothers duo. I mention him because he wrote a book called “Truth Is Stranger Than Publicity” that took a roundabout way of getting published. It seems he wrote it but it took many years of effort and tracking down edits to the manuscript by Charles K. Wolfe and the Delmore family to finally get the book published. It told us about the Delmore Brother’s career from their vantage point, the ups and downs they experienced in the industry, giving you pause for thinking about the industry’s inner workings. You wonder if its really changed that much today. Alton wasn’t confident his writing would be acceptable, but the book stands up quite well and is a good one to read.

Faron Young

While not known as a writer, he did provide a venue to report on the country music industry in Nashville, The Music City News. This was one of the longer running publications, that ended in about 2000 when its partnership with the TNN network dissolved over the fan-based awards. I still recall when I first discovered the publication during a trip to Nashville and being a subscriber for a number of years, when it was still a newspaper tabloid style type of publication. You found details you just don’t see today or back then in other publications. The artist itineraries were a feature you didn’t get elsewhere so you could find out when your favorite artist was going to appear in your home town. Or in my case, where I was traveling to as my early career had me on the road about as often as an early hillbilly music entertainer traveling to personal appearances. And I had the frequent flier miles to prove it. Sometimes you’d get an extra section or two to cover the annual country music convention in October.

George D. Hay - The Solemn Old Judge

In the late 1930s, The Solemn Old Judge had his own monthly one-page column in the Rural Radio magazine that was published in Nashville. Fans will know the legend of his being a newspaper reporter when he stumbled upon a musical hoedown at a cabin home he was visiting. Of course, he later went on to start not only the WLS National Barn Dance in Chicago, but the WSM Grand Ole Opry that is still heard every Saturday night. But even after becoming associated with the Opry, the journalist in him still had an itch - he was the editor and publisher of the Pickin’ and Singin’ News publication in the early to mid-1950s also.

We could go on, but you see that country music has had quite a few talented people who did a bit more than what you saw behind the microphone or listened to on records. There are many others that also come to mind, but we’ll wait for another time to write about them.

Cheers,

Dave Sichak

Hillbilly-Music.com