Well I grew up, ah, in a, in a small Southern town, Gallatin, Tennessee, ah, in the late Twenties. I was born in '22 and, ah, grew up during the late Twenties and as, as it is in, in Southern towns of those days, ah, you lived on, in my particular case, East Main Street but all the lots went all, I lived with my grandparents and the lots went all the way back to what we called the back street and that's where the colored folks lived and, and that's where I usually hung out. We had this black lady who raised me who worked in our, in our home, her name was Anna Day and, ah, she had a house on the back of our place. It fronted on Smith Street which was the back street. And I was down there playing in the back lot all the time and playing mostly with, ah, black kids, colored kids, as we called them in those days. And all, all of these little homes, these little shacks had, ah, old wind up Victrolas on the front porch. And why they kept them out there, they were out there in the summer and the winter. But they'd wind them up and I would, I would hear these sounds, I would, they would get records somehow, you could order them, ah, about the only way they could get records was mail order through the Pittsburgh Courier, a newspaper that came once a week in the South or the Chicago Defender. Now, ah, if, if a store sold Duke Ellington or Cab Calloway, of course those things weren't even available, maybe, maybe Duke but some of those old sounds, they couldn't go in the stores anyhow to buy them so they had to buy them by mail. But I, I, I heard these sounds and I'm sure they stuck with me and then of course the sounds of the church, Anna Day used to, my grandfather who had been a regular army officer and retired was with the farm bureau and he traveled a lot and he took my grandmother with him. And so Day, as I called her, would keep me and, and on Sundays she'd take me to church with her. And, ah, the Baptist Church on Baptist Hill there in Gallatin, Tennessee and I remember Doctor Rucker was the preacher, Doctor Rucker was the preacher, he was the principal of the high school, he was also the dentist and the doctor but he was a big man in the community and I looked up to him and I remember him preaching but I could hear, I could hear, hear him singing all night, I'd be there. And then sometimes in the summer, I'd have all the windows up in this little room I had upstairs and as the crow flies, he was probably only three or four hundred yards over the Baptist Hill and I could hear, I could hear him singing. I go to bed maybe at 8:30 quarter to 9. And they would sing 9, 10, 11 o'clock at night. And I'd lay there. And I didn't think anything about it then but it must have, it must have made some sort of impression on me because the sounds came back to me forty years later when I started playing gospel music. And, ah, but, ah, it was, it was, it was quite a, quite a wonderful way to grow up. I mean you could, you were safe anywhere in, in a town like Gallatin and everybody knew you, both black and white and the blacks especially knew me 'cause I hung on the back, back streets so much.

Okay, Hoss, why don't you pick it up there.

We had a black housekeeper, a cook and housekeeper whose name was Anna Day and for all practical purposes, she raised me. I mean, ah, she told me what to do and I did it and, ah, she used to take me, take me to church with her sometimes on Sunday when my grandparents were out of town. And, ah, we would sit and they would sing all day long. And even as I grew older I could lay in my bedroom at, on Sunday nights and the Baptist church was, ah, probably only six or seven hundred yards away as the crow flies. And, ah, I, I could hear them singing, sometimes until 10 or 11 o'clock at night when I was, when I was just a kid. And I, I know that must have had some impression on me because I always had a great love for gospel music, although they weren't singing gospel in those days, they were singing spirituals. Gospel didn't come in until later on, the late Thirties with Thomas Dorsey and things like that, but, ah.

Let's talk about your beginnings at WLAC. Tell me the story about how WLAC first started playing rhythm and blues, about the students from Fisk coming in. Maybe you could start by saying what kind of music LAC played in those days and how that changed.

Well WLAC was a 50 thousand watt CBS radio station here in Nashville, Tennessee and like most CBS affiliates of the day, they rode the network all day long up until 10 o'clock. Had, ah, 15 minutes of local news and then played, for the most part, pop music, popular music of the day: Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, things like that, until midnight and signed off. And, ah, and WSM here in town of course had the country music and they were a little different and people knew them. But we, we had coverage, we were 50 thousand watts but we weren't doing anything different than any other CBS affiliate whether it be in Beaumont, Texas or Winston-Salem, North Carolina. So it, it was, it was not unusual until, ah, this guy, Gene Nobles who had the 10:15 till 12 o'clock shift of playing music was on one night and all of a sudden he looks up and here two, stand two black dudes. And, ah, Gene was an old carney, had been with the carnival before he got in radio and he had gotten into radio when everybody was drafted in '41. And so he was a nice guy. And he, he said, well, you know, hello fellas, or something to that effect, no telling what he said. But I mean he was nice and, ah, at any rate, ah, they said, - you know we came up and we brought some records. We wondered if you'd play some of our music. And so he said, - what have you got? And so he said, we got some boogie and blues. So he said, he said, great, let me, let me see them. And in those days he was in a studio here and then the operator was in another studio and he was playing the records in there, went, didn't run your own board in those days, so he told him to take them in. And they had some Meat Lux Lewis and some Pete Johnson, maybe Duke Ellington. I don't know exactly. But Gene played the records. And, ah, he like them. And these, these two guys were GIs who had, had been in service and were returning to go to school at Fisk University here in Nashville. And, ah, sometimes we wonder how they got to the 12th story of a downtown bank building in 1946 in the middle of the night but I mean, you know, they made it somehow, maybe they, maybe they'd been in combat. But at any rate, ah, it, it was funny, in, in about, oh a week or ten days, we started getting this mail. I wasn't here then but Gene, Gene started getting this mail. And it was really hard to read it. You wondered how it even got to Nashville 'cause it was a lot of scribbling. And it got bigger and bigger. But they were asking for these black records, this Albert Amberson, Peter Johnson and, ah, I don't know T-Bone Walker or whoever that came in. Ah, and the Duke, ah, maybe Cab Calloway, to play some more of that. And so Gene started looking around to see if he could find some more black music. He'd worked at a, at a record shop, Buckley's Record Shop and Buckley was a juke-box operator and he had boxes in the black sections of town. So Gene went down to Buckley and, and got some of the records that, ah, he had and started playing more and more. And this, this led to a, a complete new, ah, wave of listening throughout the South. And the mail got bigger and bigger. And, ah, so the sales people were able to sell, ah, the 11 to 12 hour to Sterling Beer. And Gene, as I say, was a carney, he talked in carney talk a lot and Sterling Pilsner Beer he 'cause he as earl pizio beers ear. And things like that and he would he called all the girls that rode in, he called them little fillies and the guys he called jerks. And, ah, carneys all over the country because he would talk in carney talk all the time. Carneys would listen and they would send him, they would write him messages to pass along to other carnival or carney people in other parts of the country. And he'd do this in carney talk. Nobody knew but the carneys what he was saying. He was, he was quite a character.

Tell us about how strong the station was, how far away you could hear it.

Well as I said we were 50 thousand watts but we weren't doing anything different until Gene started playing this black music. And then we started getting mail from everywhere from El Paso to D.C. from Detroit to New Orleans and all throughout the Southeast, the Bahamas, from Jamaica and the ships at sea. We had sailors on, ah, battle wagons off the coast of, East Coast of Africa that were writing in. I mean the signal was, was phenomenal because we were 50 thousand watts directional which meant ...

Set the scene, what you'd hear on the radio around the country in those days and then how different it was when you started playing black music.

Well, ah, Gene, Gene Nobles came on at, ah, ah, 10 o'clock, 10 o'clock at night after we, ah, in those days you rode the network, up with network shows and productions up until, ah, 10 o'clock then you had 15 minutes of local news and then you had the pop singers and the pop bands of the day which would be Perry Como, Frank Sinatra and Patti Page and Al Veno Ray and the King Sisters and Artie Shaw and Tommy Dorsey and things like that, you know, Jimmy Dorsey, Bob Eberle and, ah, so that was just, that was just what everybody around the country was playing the same thing. And, ah, so while we were 50 thousand watts and we had this fantastic coverage, nobody knew it until Gene started playing this black music. And then it was something completely different. And people started writing in from El Paso to Richmond and from Detroit to New Orleans and from the Bahamas and all over. And we were 50 thousand watts directional so we were actually protecting a station in Boston and a station in Seattle. So we, at 6 o'clock we would pull the signal back and that would throw us Southwest and Southeast and direction North and South with almost a hundred thousand watts. As a matter of fact we got mail from in, in the late Forties from sailors on ships off the coast of Africa. And, ah, you know, we had guys that were up on the Arctic Circle with DX and with little shortwave radios and under the snow. They were here in the summer and, you know, it was amazing. And, ah, but it was all because of, of course those guys up in the Arctic they were looking for anything they could get I guess but most of them was because of this black music. And, ah, especially the sailors, they were, they were on these battleships. They would write and ask for a particular tune and the big thing, it was so hard to find black music. Gene had the advantage because he'd worked for this guy Buckley who had a record shop and but he also was a juke box operator and he had boxes in the black sections of town. So he went down there and he picked up all of the stuff he could find, King Records, ah, at that time had quite a collection of artists. King at one time had the Ink Spots, they had the Ravens, they had, ah, Jackie, ah, Jackie Wilson and, ah, they had all, a lot of the groups. And, ah, Sid Nathan who had both country and R and B

Let’s stop here for a second.

The response that was coming for the black music was it coming from black listeners or was it white people?

Ah, the initial response and, and, ah, the way we knew that, ah, we had this tremendous coverage was the mail that was coming. And a lot of it or most of it was hard to read which meant that the people who were, were writing weren't too well educated and hadn't been writing a whole lot of cards and letters. And, ah, so we surmised practically that, possibly that we were tapping into a, to a black audience. Now this got the attention immediately of the sales department. And one guy, Easy Blackman who was the sales manager started looked for products that would appeal to our black listening out there and of course you, you ran into price problems there, so it had to be something that, ah, possibly they couldn't get at the corner drug store. Well, how many times could they even go in a corner drug store so they might be able to go into a grocery store or something like that but. So we had products like we'd sell Weight On for six months and then turn around and sell Weight Off. And we would sell various products for the hair: pomades and petroleum jellies and things like that. And Gene Nobles, even for, for a Freedman's Loan Shop, it was a pawn shop in Nashville, sold a Gruen wristwatch for 6.95. He'd say, give your wife a Gruen for Christmas and, ah, - a little play on words - but, and, ah, things like that. Gene was great at double entendre. And he was one of the few guys in the world that could walk right up to the line and stop and never get in any trouble. A lot of guys who followed him and tried to do the same things ended up in trouble and ended up getting the station and license trouble and ended up losing their jobs but.

How did you start knowing that there was a white audience for black rhythm and blues music?

This didn't come along until really the Fifties.

How did you become aware of the white audience for this music?

Well, ah, we, we knew that white kids were, ah, were picking up on, on, on the music because of the type of mail we started getting, I mean it was a little more legible and, ah, also, ah, by this time in, by 1948 we had, ah, Randy Woods who had a little record shop in Gallatin, Tennessee. Randy's Record Shop had come on the air and after initially not doing so well, ah, he found the formula and, ah, started, instead of offering Artie Shaw and Tommy Dorsey and records like that for mail, for COD orders, he, he started offering these black records. He got a hold of some black product. And he, he could tell by, ah, everything was, you know, like five records for ___, for 2.98 cents plus COD and handling charges, he, he could tell by the writing, by the letters that were coming in and also by the calls, people would call the Randy Record Shop and want to order. And he could tell that they were kids. And then he got a back lash from a lot of mothers out there who didn't particularly care about these blues records coming into the home because face it, the lyrics at best, were a little rough, ah, be., because, ah, especially, you, you, you, you take, ah, some Muddy Waters or some Sonny Boy Williamson or Lightening Hopkins or T-Bone walker those, those guys were down and dirty, I mean. And, ah, so, for one reason why, why Randy came up with the idea of covering black music with white artists and he found this young guy here in Nashville, Pat Boone. And Pat initially covered Little Richard's "Tootie Fruity" and sold something like a million eight hundred thousand records on it while Little Richard who had the original and he heard his record for the first time, he was home in Macon, Georgia, he was listening to WLAC and he heard "Tootie Fruity". He sold about 650 thousand which was an enormous amount for a black artist at that time. And but he never got over the fact that Pat Boone sold more of his tune than he did. But Pat covered everything that Richard did and everything that Fats Domino did. And then later Randy added Gale Storm and the Fountaine Sisters. So that he, his music, now Elvis came along about this time and, and made, ah, so-called rhythm and blues, ah, ah, more acceptable because he, he had a black sound to him and of course he had this sexy wiggle and stuff where in, in, in his personal appearances but since he was white it was a little more acceptable for the kids to bring Elvis records home, so.

Tell me again about white kids ordering black records from Randy's and the backlash and how they got around that.

Well, ah, kids of course heard this music eventually and, and were blown away by it. It was something brand new. And so they started ordering the records. Now there was a little backlash from the mothers because they didn't want this double entendre lyrics and really down and dirty type music in the home so much. So they, they had the records sent to their auntie's house or to their grandmother's house or things like that. Anyway to get around it. And Randy could, Randy could tell, ah, by, by the way the, these records were directed to so and so and so and so. But, ah, it, it was a, it was a phenomenon. It was something that was happening, it was completely new. Now it had been black music forever and all of these songs had been around, blues had been around forever but they'd been in the black community and nowhere else and all of a sudden it, it became, ah, in the early Fifties it became okay more or less because of Elvis. Elvis really changed the whole thing around with his shenanigans on TV and, and in his personal appearances and what not, in his suggestive moves while he was dancing and what not. So long it was, it was a white kid but if it was Lightening Hopkins or T-Bone Walker singing these things or Sonny Boy Williamson, you know, then the mamas weren't too hot about that.