I checked an encyclopedia of country music out of our local library yesterday, and it makes interesting reading (especially while Willie's Place plays classic country in the background). And then I ran across an entry about Knoxville's legendary live-radio program, the Midday Merry-Go-Round.

Oh, man. I can remember Dad talking nostalgically about the Merry-Go-Round. In its day it was practically a springboard for people who went on to be great stars on the Grand Ol' Opry, along with Shreveport, Louisiana's Louisiana Hayride.

The Merry-Go-Round's story begins with a tiny station called WNAV, founded in 1921, one of the first ten stations founded in the United States and originally owned by Knoxville's First Baptist Church. Even that early, the station made extensive use of live performances by local performers; a major sponsor of the live shows was Sterchi Brothers Furniture. (I mention this because, although Sterchi Brothers Furniture is no more, there were WAY up into my lifetime barns out in the country who proudly had advertisements for Sterchi Brothers painted on their roofs.)

In 1936, the station, purchased by Scripps-Howard a year earlier and with the call letters WNOX, began to present a live noon show. Hosted by Lowell Blanchard (1910-1968), the show was called the Midday Merry-Go-Round and would be, for some nineteen years, the most popular radio show in East Tennessee. It originally was broadcast from the WNOX studios at the Andrew Jackson Hotel; later, as live audiences grew larger, it was moved to the Whittle Springs Hotel.

The list of performers who appeared on the Merry-Go-Round in those years could fill a hall of fame all its own, and indeed many of them are in the Country Music Hall of Fame. A partial listing takes my breath:

Roy Acuff, Chet Atkins, Archie Campbell, Bill and Cliff Carlisle, Martha Carson, Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters, Flatt and Scruggs, Don Gibson, Homer and Jethro, Pee Wee King and the Golden West Cowboys, the Louvin Brothers, Kitty Wells. . .

There are other names known more readily to fans of oldtime and bluegrass music: The Tennessee Ramblers, Carl Story and the Ramblin' Mountaineers, Carl and Pearl Butler. . .

The saddest of all stories from the Merry-Go-Round's glory days was the songwriter Arthur Q. Smith, who sold songs for drinking money and about whom I wrote in "Ode for a Songwriter" some time ago (May 22, I think).

For much of the same time period Lowell Blanchard also hosted a live Saturday night show; called the Tennessee Barn Dance, it aired from the Lyric Theater.

Several things conspired to bring an end to the Merry-Go-Round: WNOX, broadcasting at only 10K watts, could not compete with superstations like WSM in Nashville and WLS in Chicago, who broadcast at 50K watts. Not only that, but in the mid-50s Lowell Blanchard left the show and became involved in Knoxville politics. The most fatal blow, however, was the advent of rock and roll; in 1962, the station's format changed to that musical form.

I was privileged to know two performers who appeared on the Merry-Go-Round, both of whom are no longer with us: Ross Steele and Carleton Scruggs, one a banjo player and illusionist, the other a singer, guitarist and newspaper publisher. They both carried on the tradition of live music, one in the back room of a service station and convenience store, the other in an abandoned country schoolhouse, for years, and both told great stories of their days on the Merry-Go-Round.

WNOX is nowadays no longer a music station; it's a news/talk format, broadcasting the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

I find that an insult to the memories of the Merry-Go-Round, Lowell Blanchard, and a generation or more of great country performers--but that's just me.

Till next time, fair thee well.

...he restoreth my soul.

My mom turns 70 today.

And she says she has the best of all possible presents--IT'S RAINING HERE THIS AM!!! The first we've had in so many weeks that Blackadder is sitting on the back porch, totally bemused.

Happy Bday, Mom. Love you.

My sister was over awhile ago and set my mouth watering talking about having some pie apples. She has never made an apple pie before, but being far more adventurous a cook than me, she said she thought she'd go home and try to make one.



I've been reading Ruth Ann Musick's THE TELLTALE LILAC BUSH AND OTHER WEST VIRGINIA GHOST TALES (1965) this afternoon, and shortly after Sis left I ran across this story. It involves pie of some sort--

(Actually, the first thought I had when I came across Musick's story was of Uncle Dave Macon's song "Chicken Pie":

Oh bake that chicken pie
Oh put on lots of spice
Oh Lordy how I'd like to have
Just a piece of that chicken pie.)

For purposes of my blog, though, I'll stick with apple pie.

In the old days pies were kept in a cabinet called a "pie safe."



Dating back to colonial times (and perhaps farther), the pie safe was made of wood and punched tin. The tin pieces had holes punched into them to allow air to circulate through the whole cabinet and keep pies fresh--not that any pie, especially in large families, was likely to sit long enough to get stale. Although the above is apparently a reproduction, the elaborate pattern punched into the tin is very much in keeping with antique pie safes; they were works of art as well as kitchen cabinets.

In Dr. Musick's story, a family living in a house in Archie Fork, a community in the mountains of West Virginia, were getting ready to move. The house they had been living in frankly gave them the willies. The father in particular claimed that when he walked around the house after dark, he had the feeling he was being followed.

Just how accurate that feeling was he didn't find out until the night before the scheduled move to another house.

The whole family had worked all day, finishing the packing of clothes, furniture and general paraphernalia that goes with moving. Just before bedtime, the husband mentioned to his wife that he was feeling hungry and would like something to eat before they went to bed. She reminded him that there was a pie downstairs in the kitchen. He thought that would do--a decision a hillbilly would render as "he 'lowed as how that sounded awful good" --and went downstairs to cut himself a piece.

He had just set the pie out and picked up the knife when without warning a skeletal hand reached out and took the knife from him, cut a piece of pie, laid down the knife, picked up the piece of pie, and left with it.

Instead of cutting his pie, the man rounded up the family, got everything into the moving vehicles, and left the house that night.

Well, we really didn't expect him to phlegmatically cut his own piece of pie, take it upstairs, and tell his wife, "I just seen somethin' funny downstairs," did we?

But I do wonder if he took the pie with them when they left, or if he left it for the obviously hungry ghost who had bothered him into moving.

And on that culinary conundrum, until next time, fair thee well.

No, no, no, no, NO, I've not lost my marbles and begun babbling about a half-human, half-bee monster that divebombs people buzzing frantically for help, or looking to make a body into a beehive, or whatever such a critter would do. I'm talking about a particular kind of haunt.

Of all the ghost story collectors whose work I've read, my favorite is probably Charles Edwin "Ed" Price. Born in 1941, a graduate of ETSU in Johnson City, he specializes in folklore from upper East Tennessee and southwestern Virginia. He has published a number of books, including THE DAY THEY HUNG THE ELEPHANT (1992), based on a true incident in 1916 Erwin, Tennessee, and THE INFAMOUS BELL WITCH OF TENNESSEE (1994), based on the world-renowned Bell Witch case of 1817-1821.

His first book was HAINTS, WITCHES AND BOOGERS: TALES FROM UPPER EAST TENNESSEE (1992), and it was in this book that I first heard of the manabee type of haunting. A manabee is a ghost attached to some particular object. It appears to whoever has the object in their possession at any given time, and continues to appear to them as long as they own the object. For this reason, it was not uncommon at one time for a person's possessions to be destroyed after death, to prevent the deceased from haunting the next owner.

Ed Price had the good fortune to meet up with a man named Guard Banner, a native of Unicoi County, Tennessee. Guard Banner told Price, among other really good stories, one which Price recounted in HAINTS, WITCHES AND BOOGERS as "The Adventures of the Haunted Gun."

The gun--to be strictly accurate, a pistol--was purchased around the turn of the twentieth century by a young man from a family in Erwin, Tennessee. He bought it from a man from North Carolina, who did not tell him the gun came with its own ghost. He found that out when he was escorting his girlfriend home from a prayer meeting. In those days upper East Tennessee was still a fairly wild place, with animals still roaming free--not to mention humans who weren't exactly upstanding citizens, so most men packed heat when they went out at night.

The young couple had just started their walk home when a man, a complete stranger, showed up on the girl's opposite side. At first the couple thought that it was kind of nice to have extra protection on the way, although they hadn't seen this man at prayer meeting. He made them nervous, though, because he never spoke and kept staring straight ahead. He stopped when they stopped, started walking again when they started, but otherwise they might as well not have been there for all the attention he paid them.

The young man dropped his girl off at her home and found the man had vanished into thin air. He looked around for him, fearing he may have hidden in the bushes and planned to rob or otherwise harm the family in the house, but found no trace of him. He went on home, only to be kept awake all night. Although he bolted the door to the home he shared with a brother, the door opened anyway, over and over again, to admit the stranger who had walked him and his girl home. At first angry, then freaked out by the odd experience, the young man eventually fired several shots at the man, who disappeared as each shot was fired but, the moment the smoke cleared, reappeared, fresh as a daisy.

Some weeks later, after a series of farcical episodes in which the young man loaned out the gun to unsuspecting relatives, he sold it to Henry Banner, Guard's father. While it was in Henry's possession, further hilarity ensued, at one point involving the county sheriff, who borrowed the gun one night when he and his wife were going home from visiting the Banners, only to be forced to put it out on the back porch after the ghost kept appearing in their bedroom.

Henry Banner swapped the gun with a man for some suckling pigs; the man was so terrified by the ghost that he let Henry keep the pigs and paid him a dollar on each of them just so he would take back the gun.

A week or so after that piece of good fortune, Guard Banner sold the gun to a man who was leaving for California, and the Banners never knew what became of it and its--uh--sidekick. It's entirely possible that somewhere between Erwin, Tennessee and the West Coast, there's a gun floating loose that comes with its original owner in tow.

Whoever has it, if it's still out there, don't bother shooting at the man. It won't faze him a bit.

And until next time, fair thee well.