Different Times, Different World, Same Country Boys and Girls…

by Stan Hitchcock

I grew up in the 50’s in a different world than what we are living in today.  My connection to the world outside our little valley was my radio, upstairs in the attic room that was mine to enjoy in the old farmhouse that my dad had built and where we lived.  I would lie in my bed at night and listen to the steam locomotives whistle as they curved through the Ozark Mountains pulling passengers and freight to the great cities of my imagination.  My radio stayed tuned to the all night stations that played real country music, interspersed with old time gospel music and built the musical foundation that have stayed with me my entire life. 

We worked hard on the farm, but it was good, clean work where you could see the positive results in the growth of the cattle herd, the hay fields growing, the garden that Mom harvested or the new colt running in the pasture with his momma.   Working in the hay fields, on hot summer days, hay chaff, dust and sweat mixed together with sweat bees, that came off so cleanly in the creek that ran through our farm, with the help of a big bar of lye soap that would have cleaned the grease off of a tractor axle.  Yes, there was a fresh, spring fed creek that ran all through our 400 acres that held some small mouth bass, lots of water snakes and other objects of a young boy’s fancy, including a great swimming hole for skinny dippin’.   These items were essential to a young boy growing up in the country.

Red Foley 1954

Telephones didn’t come out to our part of the country and television hadn’t started spreading to rural areas and wouldn’t for years to come.  My Grandma Johnson still cooked on a wood stove in the old farm house across the road from our house and she would bake Pineapple Meringue pies that I still dream about sometimes.  Grandma would buy her baby chicks, every spring, from the radio tuned to XERF, Del Rio, Texas, but which really blasted out of the Mexican side of the border.   The announcer always  said, in the ad, that sex wasn’t guaranteed, a fact that has stayed with me to this day, and which I still believe as a fact of life.  It wasn’t till years later I realized they were talking about the baby chicks, not our love lives, which explained why, when they arrived in the box by mail, that over 60 percent of the chicks were roosters.  Grandma never got discouraged, and continued to order her chicks every year as long as she was able.  You think about it, how powerful the radio wave to the good folks in rural areas who didn’t have access to big city shopping, nor the money to spend if they had. 

My Uncle Bud  and Aunt Norma would come down to visit our Ozark farm from Kansas City and bring his Gibson electric guitar and I would stare at his fingers and try to learn the secrets of finger placement that made those beautiful sounds.  By the time I turned 12 years old I had picked it up and started picking myself and have never stopped.  Music has been the driving force in my life, and still is. 

Stan & Ferlin - 2006

When I graduated from Pleasant Hope High School, in 1954, I left home to join the Navy.  I got to travel to those exotic locations around the world that I used to dream about and a few years later I got to stand on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry and sing my songs in the exact same spot on the Old Ryman stage where Roy Acuff would sing, “Wabash Cannonball” and “Great Speckled Bird” with me listening on the radio back in the Ozarks.  In fact Roy Acuff introduced me the first time I sang on the Opry in 1961 and in later years he actually became my friend, just as he did to so many other young artists.  To have actually been friends with those heroes of our music such as Acuff, Minnie Pearl, Red Foley, Faron Young, Marty Robbins, Ernest Tubb, Bill Monroe, Stringbean, Jumpin Bill Carlisle, The Louvins, The Wilburns, Carl Smith, Johnny Wright and Kitty Wells, Jimmy Dickens, Ferlin Husky, Jean Shepard, Hank Thompson  and all of that generation that I grew up on, well, it was just awesome and such a blessing.  Those were the people that shaped me, taught me, made me laugh, made me cry when they passed and remain today the foundation of which our music business is built on.  Largely forgotten by contemporary radio, today’s record companies and the big money movers in today’s modern music leadership, they still live strong in the hearts and memories of the audience that allowed country music to prosper and grow.  Sadly, the audience never left classic country music, the music industry left their audience.

Meanwhile, in the 1980’s, a new breed of singer/songwriters started to emerge and I was at the right place at the right time to not only enjoy, but to participate in the movement as I directed the course of the new video network, CMT.  This new breed were setting off in new directions of country music, writing songs that reflected their generation, but still had respect for the classic music of the ones who had gone before to blaze the trail.  Dean Dillon, Lacy J Dalton, Allen Jackson, Michael Johnson, Garth Brooks, Billy Joe Shaver, Skip Ewing, Randy Travis, Paul Overstreet, Rodney Crowell, Mark Collie, Guy Clark, Michael Martin Murphey, Dan Seals, Earl Thomas Conley, Kevin Welch, Nanci Griffith, Tim McGraw, K T Oslin, Doug Stone, David Lynn Jones, Becky Hobbs, Deborah Allen and others like them along with some of the old school writers who have continued to be creative even to a new generation.  It was exciting times to watch this new movement as they broke through traditional walls and created their own sounds and sights with cd’s and video’s .  One of the great writers of our time, Bill Anderson, who started having hits with Ray Price in the late 50’s, hits of his own all through the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, then started writing with newer generation writers to create hit songs still today.  He is amazing.  Another great writer and singer, Sharon Vaughn, started singing and writing in the 60’s, wrote such great songs as “Y’all Come Back Saloon” and “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboy’s”, has never stopped her creative output and today is writing worldwide hits, far, far from Music Row, living in Stockholm, Sweden, working on Broadway musicals and living her music dream following where it takes her.  These people don’t try to follow trends, copycat someone else or let the Establishment tell them what to write or sing.  They are the creative soul of music and you either take them at their music or get out of the way, cause they are not stopping for anyone.

I love ‘em all, the old ones, the younger ones and the ones in between that have the hunger to write and perform their original music, from Jimmy Rodgers and Hank Williams, Sr to the new kid trying out for American Idol, they’ve got something to share that is unique to them alone, and they will always have my respect and support when I can give it. 

Find the talent in your home town, encourage them, embrace their music and further their dreams of music.  Good music deserves to be heard, shared and loved by an audience somewhere, sometime and someplace, for that is what feeds the minds of the creators and keeps their passion alive. 

I wish for you good health, happiness and the good Lord’s protective hand upon your shoulder in a troubled world.  God bless us everyone. 

Stan

"She's Looking Good"-Stan Hitchcock 1967 Epic Records
Written by Autry Inman-Produced by Billy Sherrill
Owen Bradley's Quonset Hut session

You can go to my website:  www.hitchcockcountry.com for my blog, “View From The Front Porch” and to order product, or write me at stan@bluehighwaystv.com

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