Notes

The following originally appeared in the GRAND JUNCTION FREE PRESS:

On July 20, 1969, American television audiences watched enrapt as a human being walked for the first time on the surface of the moon.  Mankind’s successful voyage off his home planet was a milestone in humanity’s march of progress, and the greatness of the event was amplified by the fact that Neil Armstrong’s bouncing first steps onto lunar terrain flickered across tv sets in millions of earth-bound living rooms. 

But while it may not have matched the landing of the Apollo Eagle in historical import, a CBS program broadcast just over a month earlier offered millions of Americans their first glimpse into another alien world… the exotic milieu of country music.  For it was on June 15, 1969 that HEE HAW hit the airwaves for the very first time. 

Surely no one watching that night could know that this country variety show — signed by the network as a summer replacement for THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS COMEDY HOUR – would continue to provide its oddball combination of barnyard burlesque with country-western chart-toppers for nearly the next 30 years.  From 1969 until 1997, the regulars of HEE HAW served up heaping platesful of cornpone cracks, cowboy crooning and countrified cheesecake… and America kept coming back for more.

Practically every great name in the field of country music guested at least once on HEE HAW, but the show also featured important musicians as regulars and behind the scenes.  The program’s hoe-down theme song was composed by Sheb Wooley.  Wooley is best remembered nowadays for his 1950s rock n’ roll novelty, “The Purple People Eater,” but he was also the genuinely talented composer of country and pop hits like “Little Green Apples” and “The Green, Green Grass of Home,” as well as a cowboy actor whose screen credits include HIGH NOON and RIO BRAVO.  In the early 1960s, Wooley also scored a number of country comedy hits recording under the nom-de-plume of Ben Colder.

In 1971, HEE HAW faced its first major crisis when CBS axed it from its schedule, despite constant high ratings since the show’s debut two years earlier.  But HEE HAW soldiered on in syndication. 

Two years later, the HEE HAW cast experienced real “gloom, despair and agony” when one of their own met a particularly gruesome fate.  David “Stringbean” Akeman had been a staple of the country music scene since starting as a banjo player with bluegrass great Bill Monroe’s band in the 1940s, and his long, lugubrious features and deadpan delivery had made him a comedic favorite on the HEE HAW set.  So it hit very hard indeed when, on November 11, 1973, fellow HEE HAW regular and long-time friend Louis “Grandpa” Jones discovered the bodies of Stringbean and his wife where they lay after being shot to death by burglars in their Tennessee home.