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.