The Wilds, the Innocent, and the Grand Ole Opry

The story of Honey Wilds and his blackface comedy act is a lost chapter in Nashville's considerable musical past. His son, David Wilds, recounts his childhood memories of those days to No Depression co-editor Grant Alden for what amounts to an oral history of an era now etched in legend.

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We maintain a curious connection to the past, certain it has the power to reveal both the glory and the savagery that are inevitably a part of our humanity. For its part, popular culture – that post-industrial engine of economy – rarely spares a glance over the shoulder, and then only to bowdlerize some now-garish style, with little regard to context or content. Take country, that most traditional of musics. The current crop of Nashville hats are most galling not simply because of the bland insincerity of their music, but (in the main) because of their considerable disregard for its roots.

Mind you, country's past is a troublesome, nettlesome thing, full of drunks and broken dreams, fortunes made and stolen, and (in hindsight, at least) it looms replete with a kind of raw honesty that has since been wrung from all manner of cultural discourse. Not fit material for a music video, that.

Back in the 1920s, the music was called old-time, folk, or hillbilly, depending upon whether it was being marketed, collected, or mocked. The United States was rapidly becoming an industrial society, the Jeffersonian rural fabric of the nation already being transformed by the economic lure of urban factory work, and the arrival of radio for the first time made concrete the possibility of a national culture.

How different were the impulses of Henry Ford, who sponsored old-time fiddle contests to try to slow these changes, from the instincts of Alan Lomax, who went out into the field (a curious phrase) collecting blues and mountain music before their nurturing environs collapsed? Something was slipping away, and both felt its pull, the result being that some fragments of that culture remain for us to examine.

The Grand Ole Opry, the citadel of country music, emerged from just such an impulse. The show was launched on radio station WSM in December of 1925 not simply because it might promote the National Life and Accident Insurance Company (WSM, after some high-level finagling, was assigned call letters to match the company's slogan: "We Shield Millions"), but because there was a genuine interest in preserving rural folk traditions. This meant, much later, that the addition of drums (an issue Bob Wills forced in late 1944; full drum kits were delayed another 20 years) and electrified guitars were contentious, wrenching matters to be argued at length. That constant battle between art and commerce, and art does not grow in glass cages.

These are particularly trying, alluring and illusive issues for David Wilds, who grew up backstage at the Grand Ole Opry during the first golden age of country music. Roy Acuff was his godfather, Hank Williams was one of many family friends, and his father was a longtime performer and entrepreneur. Honey Wilds' name and visage seem curiously absent from the history books, though he and his partners were regulars on the Opry from 1932-1952, and Honey organized and promoted the first Grand Ole Opry tent tours. This may be because Honey was not principally a recording artist (he cut perhaps a dozen sides, none of them hits), and so left little behind for a reminder. It may also have something to do with the tradition to which Honey's career makes a kind of endpoint, for he was a blackface comedian, perhaps one of the last exponents of the minstrel style.

Honey Wilds was a Southern humorist, one point on an entertainment continuum that stretches back to traveling minstrel shows and vaudeville, part of a tradition that links Al Jolson, Two Black Crows, Emmett Miller, Abbott & Costello, and everybody on Comedy Central today. Doubtless Miller, a blackface comedian and singer active from the 1920s through the late 1940s, has a greater claim to lasting musical importance, for he was the first definitive singer of Hank Williams' signature "Lovesick Blues," and had an octave-wrenching vocal style that would be popularized by Williams and, earlier, Jimmie Rodgers. (Miller's accompanists on many of those sides included Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey.)

The minstrel tradition also includes a parallel black world, and humorists such as Butterbeans & Susie and Buck & Bubbles. That white audiences responded to white entertainers mimicking black comics is one of many indicators (Elvis Presley is another) that segregation was not only idiotic but dysfunctional.

Still, if you can name any black country musicians other than Charley Pride – and even if you can't – you can imagine how Honey Wilds' career might be a problem. His recorded sides are tame, rural-flavored stories of dice and women and not having enough money, and time has worn off many of the subtle racial indicators that may have existed when they were cut. (Tracks include the traditional country blues "Alabamy Bound" and Miller's "De Lion's Cage" routine, the latter recorded with Owen Bradley.) In segregated times, however, performers often meant – or said they meant – their work to be an homage to that other, otherwise unapproachable culture.

What follows is an oral history of that time and place. Because David Wilds was young, then, and his relationship with his father was uneasy (they did not speak for the last eleven years of Honey's life), it is bound to contain inaccuracies. It's still worth telling, if only for what it reveals about then and now, and what has been lost inbetween.

Most of the words that follow are David's, the product of two separate interviews six months apart. They have been edited and arranged into a narrative and condensed for clarity.

Honey Wilds was a very difficult personality to be around. His drinking led me to move away from him. There's my relationship with the stage persona, and there's my relationship with him as a father. And my relationship with him as a father was very, very difficult.

I know a lot more about why it was that way now than I certainly did then. I had no way to understand why he would be so impossible to be around when he got back from two-week, four-week or two-month road trips. Well, he was dealing with not eating speed every day.

Daddy grew up just dirt poor in Southeastern Texas. When the subject of race, bigotry or segregation would come up, he would say – even to people he didn't know very well – "Well, why not let 'em go to school together? Why not let 'em play together? I did. I was so poor I couldn't look down on a Mexican or (he would have said) a colored kid." That's all there was.

His father had a brickyard, The Wilds Brothers Brickyard in Holland, Texas, and died of pneumonia at 32. Daddy went through the one-room schoolhouse era where kids of all ages and all backgrounds were there. He didn't really like uptight pretentious white people very much. He would spend time with black people because he had more fun with them. He spent more time with Mexicans in South Texas because he had more fun with them.

In Dallas, he hung out at one all-black theater. That's where he learned to play blues, and he spoke about luminaries of the blues era that he knew from standing at stage doors. There's no question that he gravitated toward that culture, and that's why I've always been reasonably comfortable saying that the act was in part a tribute and an homage, it was not him looking down his nose. And he used to take it as a great compliment when people thought he actually was black from hearing his voice on the radio.

Both my mother and my father considered DeFord Bailey [the only black member of the Grand Ole Opry in those days] a family friend, as much as anybody could be black to white in the South in that era. He was part of a lot of things professionally that my father was associated, including the tent show. I don't know if he owned or could drive a car, but according to my mother and father he traveled with them.

Strange as it may sound, according to them they extended him courtesies that actually were above and beyond what you were supposed to do, black to white or white to black. I remember one time they said they got tired of leaving him in the car when they went into restaurants to eat, or dropping him off at the kitchen door to come back later. My father told the story that they knew the people who owned some restaurant, and that DeFord was going to go with them and sit at the table with him. DeFord steadfastly said no, no, he knew it was a bad idea, just please bring him a sandwich when they came out.

I'd love to read interviews with him [Bailey] now, because, at least on the surface, to maintain his position with the Opry, there was no problem. But who knows what he was really thinking, based on what we know now that a lot of black performers would say one thing to preserve their income. [Editor's note: Bailey died in 1982 at the age of 82.]

My father was born in 1902, and by the time he was 13 he was six feet tall. By the time he was 18, he was 6'4", so in terms of 1915-1918 America, he was a freak. To accentuate that, he learned to play ukulele. In the mid-1920s Daddy joined Lasses White's touring minstrel show. Later he got second billing to the star, and that's where Lasses and Honey came about.

In 1932, Lasses and Honey were given a six-week engagement on the Grand Ole Opry to come and do blackface comedy. Daddy didn't leave for another 20 years. During that time Daddy cycled three other partners through. He also took a short stab at Hollywood in 1939. Lasses was called Lasses as a kid because he liked sweet things. So when he made his blackface team, he would pair his name against something similar. That's where my father – Lee Davis Wilds – got the name Honey, which he actually used on his driver's license, it became so well-known. The deed to the house was in Honey Wilds' name.

In 1939, three guys who had grown up together left the Opry for a year. Lasses White became a B-movie guy, the sidekick to the guy in the white hat. Chill Wills had an OK career. Daddy came back to Nashville in 1940; Lasses stayed [in Hollywood], so did Chill. When Daddy came back he inherited the act, and switched it from Lasses and Honey to Jam-Up and Honey, and that's how he performed from 1940 until 1957. Most of that time in Nashville, most of it based around the Grand Ole Opry.

He left the Opry in 1953, because he apparently felt there were greener pastures at WNOX in Knoxville. Coincidental to the end of the act, they shifted out of blackface, simply because you couldn't be onstage as a white man mimicking a black person in what some considered demeaning humor. My father didn't, and he was nobody's racist. He did the act about a year, a year and a half in just regular straight whiteface. Then he and his partner had a falling out. It was Daddy's position that the partner had been working over the books, so Jam-Up and Honey ceased as a performing entity in about 1957.

He was completely out of show business then. We had a service station, he tried a couple of other things, and none of them ever really worked out. Then in about 1960 or '61 he started on a very small regional children's TV show that a grocery chain did every morning. He essentially dropped out of any performing by about 1967 or so.

The connection to country music was not obvious at all, as far as I'm concerned. [Editor's note: During the height of their popularity, Amos & Andy's 15-minute slot on national radio pre-empted the Opry. That may explain why WSM sought their own blackface act.] Lasses and Honey were booked only for six weeks. That tells me that somebody somewhere said, "Well, I know this stuff is popular, let's see what happens when we put it on." Something about the minstrel show atmosphere clicked, and they never left. I never saw any natural, obvious connection: "Oh, well, we've got Uncle Dave Macon, we've got the Fruitjar Drinkers, the next obvious step is blackface comedy."

Music was a part of their act, but they were comedians. They would sing comedic songs, a la Homer and Jethro. They would do odd lyrics to existing songs, or write songs that were intended to be comedic. They were out there to come onstage, do five minutes of jokes, sing a song, do five minutes of jokes, sing another song and say "Thank you, good night," as their segment of the Grand Ole Opry. Almost every country band during that time had some guy who dressed funny, wore a goofy hat, and typically played slide guitar. After Hank Williams, you needed a little comedy to offset the incredible connection to what humanity puts up with that Hank could demonstrate.

Hank was a close friend of my father's. My father always said – and I can't substantiate this and I've never seen it written – but according to Daddy, who had a penchant for names, when Hank Jr. was born, Bocephus was something he called him. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, but I never heard anybody dispute it when he mentioned it in front of people in Nashville.

Hank especially liked to talk to my mother about his troubles. We could always tell when Hank was having a tough time with Audrey, or whoever else, because about noontime he'd come dragging in, looking like he'd been beaten with a stick or crawled there on his hands and knees. He'd be in the kitchen for coffee and whatever we had in the way of fried pie or a cake or whatever. And he was part of an ongoing bunch of guys who would come by.

Like anybody that was middle class in the South, we had help, and Minnie had certain days that she cooked certain things. Tuesday was fried pies, Friday was chocolate cake because my old man loved chocolate. Daddy did a noon radio show, and the big joke was for guys like Hank, or Red Foley, or Ernest Tubb, Owen Bradley or whoever – because some of these guys lived in the same neighborhood – to see if they could get there before Daddy could get home from the noon radio show and knock down the fried pies and piss him off.

Recording and writing was not Daddy's thing. He was an entertainer, he was an accent to a show. Jam-Up and Honey had a noon radio show they did for 15 minutes for a long, long time. They always set the record on listener mail, because that was one of the ways they would demonstrate that they were well-received. They would offer contests in conjunction with this blackface soap opera that they did. In one case they set a record for listener mail when they gave away a Philco radio worth about $25. My father and his partner at that time, Bunny Biggs, could do a lot of voices, male and female, for an ensemble of characters. One of the female characters was going to have a baby on that show, and the contest was to name the baby.

So they were very popular, but performers weren't rich until they recorded something that clicked regionally or nationally. That was the big prize. That was also a separating point. My father never wrote a song that anybody would get interested in. He was not a writer, he just didn't think about writing; he was a personal appearance guy almost exclusively. If you were Eddy Arnold and had a hit record, you bought a bigger house, started talking to stockbrokers and you started buying land. Or, you started drinking and using and you figured out a way to lose it all.

Mother and I would be backstage at the Opry until the show started. What I remember most is the overriding openness and helpfulness. In many cases the business of touring – for days or weeks or months – was arrived at, money was decided, verbal contracts were set, and they were more binding than anything. There were always very important things to be done before the show. There was a bottle to be cracked, somebody to be sent for Cokes, and an incredible amount of on-the-fly, over-the-shoulder, "I gotta find a bass player for May and June," "Oh, yeah, I'll do that for you."

It was all open, it was all friendly, and nobody gave a damn that somebody had just had something break through. There was no short talk. I remember the genuine openness and friendliness, and the amount of things that got done on the fly that night. In the late 1940s and early '50s, these guys were only in Nashville from about 4 p.m. Saturday afternoon until the show was over. If they were going to have a living, other than records, and they were going to cause people to buy records, Sunday afternoon they were doing a matinee in Hattiesburg. Tuesday night they were in Oklahoma City, and Thursday night they were in Montgomery, Alabama. So there was information to be exchanged about what venues worked and what venues didn't, what booking agency was a shit, what hall would cheat you, and how the roads were going to Wheeling, West Virginia.

And they loved that music. It was a 7:30 p.m. showtime, and by six o'clock there would be five different songs being played, scattered around the backstage or in the alley behind the Ryman. Even playing six nights a week, there were still people in different bands they liked playing with, and ideas to swap. It was a bit of a party.

The Opry was done in half-hour segments, dominated by a sponsor: Purina Feed, Prince Albert Smoking Tobacco, Sherwin-Williams Paint. We never stayed for the whole thing. We would get there, get seated, watch the show, and when Daddy's half-hour was over, unless Acuff was up next, or somebody else Mother was interested in, we would typically leave.

There was so little room backstage at the Ryman that, when you consider there would be 15 or 18 entertainers on each half-hour segment, there were a lot of people. And with this interest in talking to each other and exchanging information, it was a madhouse. If you were in the front rows of the Ryman, you heard a lot of conversation.

The tradition with us was that there would be some kind of meal that required no preparation after the show; the nickname was "Night Lunch." You couldn't eat a big Southern meal and then be onstage an hour later. It was a tradition with us that after the shows friends would stop by. Mamie would roast two or three chickens, and there would be club sandwiches. And whatever went with it Saturday night, hanging out, laughing it up. I had just seen Red Foley stand up on that stage and sing something, and now he was sitting there, drinking a highball and eating a chicken sandwich. It was not lost on me that not everybody had Roy Acuff at his house that night.

Acuff lived about a mile down the street. It was a regular thing to have Acuff, Red Foley, Eddy Arnold, Flatt & Scruggs, and, later, Ernest Tubb, Pee Wee King, Jimmy Dickens, and certainly Hank around the house. And of course the fellow who was important to all of them, the boss of the station, a guy named Harry Stone, who was station manager until he lost an argument with Ernest Tubb about amplified instruments and drums.

The business dealings for WSM were handled out of the old National Life office building, which, for the convenience of the Opry stars, would open on Saturday afternoon. You would go over there to pick up mail, or to pick up checks. WSM was an NBC affiliate, and because of the coming power and interest across the nation in country music, WSM's "Grand Ole Opry" was picked up coast-to-coast on NBC for half an hour. That was a big step forward for the Opry. Out of that relationship came announcers and production people who were, in more contemporary terms, interns at WSM. They might be from wherever, and would just be astonished at these hillbillies and rednecks, and in many cases, would be openly snotty.

Hank Williams had a song about not being able to marry a woman going to the wedding and watching her marry somebody else. In the song he put a very common deep-South pronunciation on the word "invitation" – "invertation," which anchored him as being from south-central Alabama. We were walking down the hall, with Hank in front of us, when one of these announcers just lit into Hank. "Well there he is, the man that can't even pronounce the English language." My mother was horrified, and I'm just standing there, bug-eyed, watching. And Hank looked terrible, he'd just come off the road.

Finally the guy got tired of saying, "Hank, you don't know how to speak the language." And Hank said, "Well, that may be true, but some folks like it." He went in one pocket, and he went in another pocket, and he pulled out an uncashed two-month-old Acuff-Rose publishing check for like $40,000, and said, "How many of these do you have?"

After Daddy came back from California in 1940, he began looking for a better way to tour. Everybody was doing package shows with two or three acts, and he wanted to create a structure that did as much to pull the whole process along as who was on the bill. So Daddy created the first Grand Ole Opry-endorsed touring show. With his own money he bought an 80x200-foot tent, assembled a road crew to move it, and did one-nighters as the show promoter. In addition to having a good slot on the show.

From the first of April to Labor Day we weren't in Nashville, we lived on the road in a 40-foot house trailer that was towed behind a Pontiac four-door. Anywhere from eight to 10 trucks moved the whole thing around, and I still have some of the ledger books my mother kept. Once I started school, my mother dropped off the show. And the show only ran until '49, anyway, and went out a little bit in '50. They weren't making as much money, and there was a lot of competition by that time. Acuff had a show, there were probably others that I didn't know specifically, but he was not the only one doing it.

But that led to a whole series of adventures, too. Hiring roadies, bailing guys out of jail, to join the circus, essentially. Because that was what he did, just crossed carnival with the Grand Ole Opry and hit the road. The tent, the PA and the whole works was self-contained, it was like a circus. And you know what happens when anything like that is on the road: There's a mentality, a camaraderie, that's untouchable. Within that, though, there's a lot of spare time, lifestyles are broken up, things are knocked around, and there's a tremendous amount of joke-playing and rude, coarse humor.

We had (and I still have) an old black leather doctor's bag from those days, and that's what the cash went into. It was either my mother's or my father's job to watch that bag at all times. Now, in this era, there weren't ATMs on every corner. You didn't know who the bank was. To transfer money intrabank was a big deal, and you practically had to be known by the bank. So, even at 20 and 30 and 35 cents a head, come the end of a given week, my father could have a lot of money. This tent would seat 6-800. And maybe the routing was such that they couldn't get back to Nashville to make a bank deposit.

One day, my old man's not paying attention, and he sets the bag down. Acuff decides that, well, Honey, you shouldn't have set the bag down. So Acuff puts the bag in the trunk of his car, and then disappears. Obviously, with a week or ten days' worth of gate receipts, my old man is coming unstuck. And when my old man came unstuck, it was a bad, bad scene. Big and loud and carried a gun and whatever else. A 10-inch crescent wrench, always. You could never be accused of carrying a weapon, and a 10-inch crescent wrench makes a fine weapon.

So Daddy can't find the black bag, my mother's having a heart attack, and everybody on the show is going nuts. Acuff jokingly says to somebody else, "Don't worry, I've got the bag, it's in the trunk of my car." That fellow decides he wants in on the fun, and he goes to Acuff's trunk and takes the bag out.

Two more hours go by. By this time my old man and my mother are absolutely off the edge. Acuff comes in, laughing. "I got the money, what's the big deal?"

By this time it's no longer funny, and Daddy waves a pistol in his face. They go open the trunk of Acuff's car, and there's no black bag.

Now things really went into overdrive. Whoever took it the second time only let it go for about 20 minutes.

The tent show, like carnivals and circuses and, for all I know, Roman coliseum shows, had to have an advance man. An advance man does two things. He finds out what it takes to get the licenses in each and every city. Licenses were also a euphemism for payoffs – which cop had to have money to turn his head. And you had to advertise the show, which meant you took ads out and you posted bills.

Daddy's advance man was from Chicago, and his name was Jockey Foster. Funny little guy, wore navy blue suits, no matter what, with a vest. All the time, sweat-stained and all. The second or third year we did the tent show, he decided that he was busy enough that he needed help. The assistant's job was to post bills, to get a box of fresh cigars. He didn't have Colonel in front of his name, but for two and a half years Tom Parker was the assistant advance man on my father's tent show.

When Pee Wee King signed Eddy Arnold to his band, Parker started in on him, and that was the originating point with Colonel Tom Parker and Eddy Arnold. When Eddy realized he was smart enough to do everything he needed to do, and he realized what a guy Parker was, they parted ways. Eddy Arnold continued to become more of a pop star and buy land in every county in middle Tennessee off his recordings, and Tom found Elvis.

We never got to meet Elvis. We'd moved from Nashville to Knoxville in '53. When Tom and Marie went to New York to help put together the deal that allowed RCA to buy Elvis' contract from Sun, they stayed with us in Knoxville. Marie raved about this guy singing, this sexy hillbilly. My father hated it, my mother was offended by it, and I didn't quite catch onto it.

Tom asked Daddy, "You want to be part of this? I'm a little short on this one, you want in on this?"

"This?" Daddy said. "This guy? Get outta here."