|
![]() |
About The Artist
Harpo Kidwell: |
![]() |
![]() |
After about a year-and-a-half in Columbus, Harpo returned to Cincinnati where he helped form a group called the Roundup Gang that performed for about a year and a half on WKRC Among the artists composing the Roundup Gang were a husband and wife team, Glen and Jean Hughes; a high yodeler and bass player called "Little Joe" Isbell; and three fiddlers: "Fiddling Red" Herron, who later worked with Pee Wee King; Carl Cottiner, who went to work for Gene Autry; and Winnie Waters, who is remembered in the Columbus, Ohio, area as a one-time fiddler with Hank and Slim, the Georgia Crackers. At times, the Roundup Gang was composed of as many as sixteen musicians. Al Bland was the emcee of their show which was sponsored by Peruna and Kolorbak.
In 1939 when Harpo went to Atlanta, Georgia, he was accompanied by part of the Roundup Gang: Glen and Jean Hughes, "Fiddling Red" Herron, and "Little Joe" Isbell. In Atlanta they became a featured act on WSB's Crossroad Follies program, performing with such locally popular groups and individuals as Pop Eckler and His Young'uns; Hank Penny; a father-son duo, Red and Raymond Anderson; Butch Cannon and the Hidden Valley Ramblers; Marvin and Doug Spivey, the Pine Ridge Boys; Uncle Ned [Strickland] and his Texas Wranglers; Cousin Emmy; Chick Stripling; and now successful Nashville music publisher and songwriter, Boudleaux Bryant.
According to Harpo, when the Roundup Gang went to Atlanta, they had to alter their music to better suit the local audience. He notes that al that time instruments and songs that were popular in the Midwest didn't always go over as well in the South. He says, for example, that north of Cincinnati, the accordion was very popular, but this was not the case in the Atlanta area. Also, he says, trios were popular in the Midwest, but in the South, he found that solos and duets were in greater demand.
Except for two brief interludes, Harpo remained with WSB in Atlanta continuously for twelve-and-a-half years. He left the station once to operate a grocery store in nearby Marietta, Georgia, but when things didn't work out as he had planned, he was back on the air within a year.
On another occasion he left WSB to take a job at WAPI in Birmingham, Alabama. It was in Birmingham that he worked with the Delmore Brothers whose singing talents he is quick to praise . "You didn't appreciate their harmony," he says, "until you sat down and listened to them in person. We used to go over to their house when I was in Birmingham, and we'd sit around and drink coffee, and they'd sing one song right after the other. Their harmony was so close it would sound almost like one person singing."
After only a couple of months in Birmingham, Harpo returned to Atlanta and WSB.
In December 1939, WSB and its parent company, Atlanta's evening newspaper, The Atlanta Journal, were bought by the Cox enterprises of Ohio, and J. Leonard Reinsch became the station's new manager. One of Mr. Reinsch's first projects at WSB was to revamp the station's country music programming. To help with the job, he called on John Lair whom he had known while working earlier at WLS in Chicago. Lair, who was just getting his Renfro Valley Barn Dance established, was responsible for bringing several country music acts to W5B, including James Roberts who was known in Atlanta as James Carson; Roberts' future wife, Martha Ambergey; and two of Martha's sisters. At WSB Martha and her sisters were known as Minnie, Mattie, and Martha , the Hoot Owl Hollow Girls. Lair made trips to Atlanta on weekends to help supervise the station's country music shows. A man named Chick Kimball was hired by the station to serve as booking agent and to perform other duties connected with the country music activities at the station.
As part of the reorganization at WSB, the Crossroad Follies was abolished and replaced by the Saturday night WSB Barn Dance, the daily noon·time Georgia Jubilee, and several other daily programs, including Hank Penny's Cracker Barrel program and the Barnyard Jamboree which Harpo managed.
Although a few of the performers from the disbanded programs were retained, the new programs featured mostly fresh talent. Among the artists with whom Harpo worked on these new programs were Pete Cassell, James and Martha Carson, Cotton Carrier, Boots Woodall, and the Swanee River Boys.
![]() |
![]() |
The WSB Bam Dance, which brought all of the station's country talent together on Saturday nights, soon moved from the Biltmore studios to the Atlanta Woman's Club Auditorium from the stage of which a thirty minute segment of the show continued to be broadcast over WSB. The show later moved to the Erlanger Theater which, like the Woman's Club Auditorium, was located on Atlanta's famous Peachtree Street. On occasions, especially in the summers, the Bam Dance was staged in large auditoriums in Georgia's other larger cities such as Macon and Albany.
Another change inaugurated by the new management at WSB had to do with the remuneration of the country music performers. Formerly, the musicians' only source of income was from personal appearances, but after 1940 the station started paying its talent a salary. In exchange for the booking services handled by Chick Kimball. the station received a percentage of the door receipts at personal appearances of the entire Barn Dance group and of the smaller performing units, the Cracker Barrell Gang and the Barnyard Jamboree, that played the school auditoriums and small town theaters in the surrounding area.
Harpo says that "the WSB Barn Dance, at its best, was probably the best show I ever worked on."
A newspaper radio log from the early 1940's lists the following program (or one of the broadcast portions of the Bam Dance: "FreeLittle Bird" -Hoot Owl Hollow Girls "Steel Guitar Rag"- Bootsl Woodall "Freight Train Blues" -Pete Cassll "Bully of the Town"-Harpo Kidwell "Rock of Ages" -Swanee River Boys "Leather Britehes"-Chiek Stripling "r'm Walking the Floor Over You"_ Hank Penny " Kansas Citv Railroad Blues"-Cotton Carrier "Precious Jewel" -James and Martha Carson "Under the Double Eagle"-Jane Logan (Accordionist) "Bill Bailey. Won't You Pleases-Corne Ho,rne"-Chick Stripling
By the late 1940's the WSB Barn Dance was. as Harpo puts it, "beginning to not do too good." During its waning days, the show first moved to an auditorium in one of Atlanta's suburbs and finally was broadcast remote from any stage for which a booking could be obtained.
After the Barn Dance finally folded, Harpo stayed with WSB for about a year. "trying to make a go of it" on a
Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company sponsored program. Harpo had with him at this time a duet, Richard and Helen;
Bill Dover; and a steel guitarist named Charlie Stevens. "I was on the air at a bad time in the morning," Harpo
recalls, "and I wasn't on a station salary, then, like I was prior to that, and the bookings weren't paying off like they should.
Bobby Gregory told readers in late 1951 in his Cowboy Songs column that Roger and Helen McDaniel had joined Harpo Kidwell and his Smoky Mountaineers on radio station WSB in Atlanta.
"Then," he continues, "I got this call from WLW in Cincinnati wanting me to come and play on the Midwestern Hayride. an NBC simultaneously broadcast radio and television program that was heard on several hundred stations." As Harpo recalls, this was around 1952. In addition to the Midwestern Hayride, Harpo worked on some of WLW's other programs, including Morning Matinee, the High Neighbor program, and the Ohio River Jamboree.
At WLW Harpo was on the station's payroll with union pay. He also performed with the station's road shows that played state fairs and other dates throughout Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and along the Michigan and Illinois state lines.
Harpo likes to tell about the time he taught WLW's sixteen-piece pop orchestra how to play "Careless Love." One day, when Harpo reported to the station for work, his regular back-up musicians were not there. As the time for him to go on the air rapidly approached, the program manager, in desperation, asked the orchestra if they would provide back-up for Harpo. They had never heard "Careless Love," but agreed to try to follow if Harpo would lead the way. Harpo says that about halfway through the first chorus the orchestra had caught on and was doing "a fine job." When Harpo signaled to the violin section to take a break, the three fiddlers stood up and "did a real good job."
Harpo's wife. a native Georgian, did not like Cincinnati; and since Harpo himself was getting homesick for Atlanta, he returned South after about a year-and-a-half to begin what he thought was a permanent retirement from show business.
During his career Harpo worked at other radio stations in the South and Midwest, including a brief stint at WCKY, then located in Covington. Kentucky, where he was a member of the Boone County Jamboree cast. While at WCKY, he was also appearing on WHBD in Mount Orab, Ohio, where he was known as Cowboy Kidwell. For a while Harpo also performed on the Renfro Valley Barn Dance, where Red Foley and Merle Travis were among his co-workers. Once, Harpo recalls, he and Riley Puckett made a guest appearance together on the Grand Ole Opry.
When he said goodbye to the entertainment world in the 1950's, Harpo says he never dreamed that by 1976 he again would be playing the type of music he has always played. At that time he had never heard of a bluegrass festival.
In Harpo's words, "Bluegrass music is nothing in the world but the old-time country music-not amplified."
"It {his return to show business and bluegrass music] has been a great thing for me," Harpo emphasizes. "Bluegrass music is great music, and there are some very good bluegrass musicians."
Harpo, who estimates that he has made over 10,000 personal appearances to audiences ranging in size from two or three people to 100,000, notes that there is one major difference between the way he used to present a show and the way a bluegrass festival is programmed. "In the old-time way of putting on a show," he explains, "the audience didn't see the performers before the show started." He sees as a radical departure from the old-time way the manner in which bluegrass musicians of today mix with the audience both before and after performances.
Harpo, who plays bass, ukulele, and guitar in addition to the harmonica, has written more than sixty songs, two of which have been recorded. His "Boo-Hoo Blues" was recorded by the Lunsford Brothers, Paul and Leithford, Eddie Smith played harmonica on the record. Another of Harpo's compositions, "The Moss Covered Mill" published in 1949 by Peer International, was recorded by Pete Cassell. (Hillbilly-music.com Note: The Lunsford Brothers recorded "Boo Hoo Blues" in 1942 and the record label shows Kidwell as the song writer. Cowboy Songs published the lyrics to "Boo Hoo Blues" in its January and March 1951 issues, but credited Carolina Cotton as the songwriter with a copyright date of 1950.)
Harpo's harmonica playing was recorded only once. Around 1952, he remembers, he recorded with the Delmore Brothers at their last recording session in Cincinnati. He has never seen the record and doesn't know for sure the name of the tune.
Now a grandfather, Harpo is married to the former Josephine Clestelle Jones who was born and reared near Atlanta. Harpo and his wife met when she came to the WSB studios to watch one of his programs. The Kidwells have three grown children.
Hillbilly-Music.com Update:
Horace Opal (Harpo) Kidwell passed away on December 29, 2003 from complications of Parkinson's Disease.
His obituary written by Patricia Newman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution perhaps summed up how close he may have come to playing like his father. "Harpo could make sounds with his harmonica that didn't seem possible."
Author Wayne Daniel was quoted, "I called him the dean of the 'Barn Dance' harmonica players." Daniel also stated, "Other musicians would say he could get more notes out of a harmonica than anybody they had ever heard. He had a lot of volume and could make a real full sound."
Harpo could also play the bass, ukulele and guitar.
Another song credited to Harpo was his harmonica tune, "Harpo's Waltz". John Carson, then co-president of the Atlanta Country Music Hall of Fame noted, "When you heard it, you thought about love. It was a beautiful song."
Harpo's wife, Clestelle, passed away on June 12, 2004.
Credits & Sources cited by Wayne W. Daniel
Credits & Sources — Hillbilly-Music.com
Printer Friendly Version |
Hillbilly-Music.com
Yes, Hillbilly Music. You may perhaps wonder why. You may even snicker. But trust us, soon your feet will start tappin' and before you know it, you'll be comin' back for more...Hillbilly Music.
Hillbilly-music.com ...
It's about the people, the music, the history.
Copyright © 2000—2022 Hillbilly-Music.com
|