Notes

The following originally appeared in the GRAND JUNCTION FREE PRESS:

The travails of the working class have often proven fruitful territory for American pop music. 

In 1962, for instance, Roy Orbison lamented “Workin’ for the Man.”  Twenty-one years later,  Donna Summer scored big with “She Works Hard for the Money,” her paean to the service employee.  And while Lee Dorsey sweated his ya-ya off “Working in the Coalmine” in 1966, the ultimate exultation of hard labor was another song about coal-mining that spent eight weeks perched at the peak of BILLBOARD’s pop charts more than a decade before Dorsey’s descent down the mineshaft. 

With its dark combination of violent braggadocio and fatalistic class consciousness, no other hit has limned the paradoxical pride of the American laborer like “Sixteen Tons.”  Although the song was written by country great Merle Travis, it was the deep, mellifluous voice of Tennessee Ernie Ford that first made the song a crossover hit, and eventually a national standard.

In truth, Ernest Jennings Ford never lugged number nine coal, and while he often described himself as “a little ol’ pea-picker,” he didn’t grow up on a farm either — although he did spend the summers of his teen-aged years working on a relative’s acreage near his hometown of Bristol on the Tennessee-Virginia border.  Upon graduating from Bristol High School in 1937, Ford landed a job as staff announcer at local radio station WOPI, the first of many gigs that would draw on his unique baritone voice.  From there, the young radio personality moved to a station in Atlanta, and then Knoxville, Tennessee.  Ford enlisted in the Army following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, rising to the rank of captain in the Army Air Corps as a bombardier trainer stationed in California.  (It was while there that Ford met military secretary Betty Heminger, who would soon become his wife until her death in 1989.)

Upon his discharge in 1945, Ford’s career shifted into overdrive.  When he was hired to host a country music show for a San Bernardino, California radio station, Ford developed the fast-talking, hopped-up hillbilly persona of “Tennessee Ernie,” which caught the ear of California radio mogul Loyal King, who brought him to Pasadena’s KXLA.  It was there that the fledgling singer and announcer first teamed with Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant (the guitar duo who would give his forthcoming boogie singles their rockin’ oomph) in the orchestra of popular disc jockey Cliffie Stone.

Stone’s connections at Capitol Records knew talent when they heard it, and signed Ford to a contract on January 21, 1949.  That same day, he cut his first hit record, “Tennessee Border.”  Within a few years, Ford had charted over a dozen hits, including two songs that made it into the Pop Top Ten in 1955: “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” and the forementioned “Sixteen Tons.”  In 1953, Ford initiated a new phase of his career when he first appeared in the reoccurring role of “Cousin Ernie” on the popular “I Love Lucy” sitcom.  Ford would eventually host his own popular variety show from 1956 until 1961.

We’ll talk more about the bucolic baritone Tennessee Ernie Ford — and his guitar cohorts, Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant — in this space in future weeks.  Bless your pea-pickin’ hearts if you can join us then.