The WBT Briarhoppers: Eight Decades of a Bluegrass Band Made for Radio

Sing Out! The Folk Song Magazine, Spring, 2008 by John Lupton

The WBT Briarhoppers: Eight Decades of a Bluegrass Band Made for Radio

By Thomas Warlick and Lucy Warlick

McFarland & Company (Jefferson, NC), 2008, ISBN 078643144X, 215 pages, pbk., $29.95

It may be an exaggeration, though not by much, to say that the radio spectrum in any given major American city of the 21st Century is crammed with more stations than existed east of the Mississippi in the years when radio was becoming the first great mass entertainment medium. And, while there are plenty of 50,000 watt stations around today, the simple fact is that none of them can match the "footprint" of the behemoths of the airways back in the 1930s and '40s, when giants like Charlotte, North Carolina's WBT could be heard, as they were fond of boasting, "from Maine to Miami." It was during these years that Charlotte was also rivaling Nashville as a burgeoning center for what came to be known as "country" music, but was commonly referred to at the time as "hillbilly" music.

It was in this environment in 1934 that Charles Crutchfield, hired the year before as an announcer for the station, began shifting the programming away from the "high brow" classical and popular music common on most stations (even in the South) in favor of the sort of down-home fare that was proving popular on stations like Chicago's WLS (home of the "National Barn Dance") and Nashville's WSM (where the "Grand Ole Opry" was in its ninth year). Enlisting the aid of colleague and musician Johnny McAllister, Crutchfield assembled the Briarhoppers with himself as announcer for the show and McAllister as "Dad" Briarhopper, head of a musical "family" that would entertain millions of listeners at home (and, during the war years, thousands more overseas troops via transcriptions) for decades, and after an Elvis-imposed interlude, would continue into the new century.

Cobbling together a mosaic of interviews, old newspaper articles, concert programs, promotional photos and other artifacts of those early days of the marriage between the broadcasting and music businesses, the Warlicks present an in-depth picture of an emerging industry that was complex, wacky, riddled with competitive and personal jealousies and conflicts, and usually as entertaining behind the scenes as it was on stage. Wisely, though, they tell most of the story through the words of many of the people who actually lived it, particularly key members of the band such as Billie Burton (Daniels), who was hired as a child early on in the band's run to be one of the Briarhopper "children," and Roy "Whitey" Grant who, with longtime partner Arval Hogan as "Whitey and Hogan," served one of the longest tenures. Along the way there are cameos by many of the great names of country music: Ernest Tubb selling defective spare tires to one of the traveling Briarhopper units; Jimmie Rodgers picking up Grant's nephew hitchhiking to New York City; and Grant himself dropping a quarter into the cup of a young blind guitarist named Arthel Watson whom he would meet again years later when the world had come to know the boy as Doc.

As much as bluegrass fans love to argue about what bluegrass actually is and when it began, the Warlicks' description of the Briarhoppers as a bluegrass band that preceded Bill Monroe's 1946 edition of the Blue Grass Boys is likely to prompt some indignant dissent, but they make their case by pointing out that for much of the early 1940s Monroe was also in residence at WBT and was exposed--as was another onrushing talent well within the station's "local audience," Earl Scruggs--to the emerging two- and three-finger banjo styles of players like Wade Mainer, Snuffy Jenkins and Shannon Grayson, the latter of whom would become a key, longtime Briarhopper.

The Warlicks' prose is a bit dry and matter-of-fact in places, but in their defense, they are telling a story that's hard to relate in a linear, direct fashion, and as already noted, they rely mostly on first-hand accounts to carry the narrative along and provide the drama. Overall, it's an interesting and entertaining read that will appeal to more than just those with a taste for the arcane and obscure facets of the early history of radio and country music.--JL