Cal Calhoun

Partial Transcript: Oh. Well, for some reason I’m from Erwin, Tennessee. And they came over here in 1927. And (00:37 indecipherable) … a newspaper. And down there where the theater is today was back then a funeral home (Note: also sounds like “back end of a funeral home”). And I didn’t know much about funeral homes and I wasn’t anxious to find out. But it was rough going back during the ending of World War I and I was just right for number II. I went to get my mail one day and I was a … I had this nice little letter from the draft board. And they had taken the 4-F’s that were talented enough to do it and asked us if we’d accept an assignment in any of the outlying possessions of the United States. I said, “Yes, I will. Any but two of them.” And that’s Hawaii – and he’d been nibbling on that – and the other one is the Panama Canal and they damn near can’t get to that. Don’t you believe it but they didn’t get to anything if you let them. You gotta get to them first, and that’s what we dared to do. Which you would be surprised how many people in this world has got – that has never seen the Panama Canal and how it works and why is was necessary and why they built it. The third locks I heard there was two or not but they could use them. But it’s something to be a part of what you know the government is doing but you don’t talk about it. You see it’s there and you’re part of it and you do your job and keep your mouth shut and if you come out there with a rating of at least a captain – and that’s what happened.

Partial Transcript: (03:54 indecipherable) yourself about the Panama Canal. It’ll all be the same. They’re not gonna let you see it. Oh, you could see the ships go through but if you wanna go from the Atlantic Ocean over to the Pacific – 51 miles and they built a railroad track and they got that other train. Rover Robins has got one – I don’t know yet how he got it over here but he’s sitting up there at Blowing Rock. And I told him one day, “Rover, if you can figure a way out, to get that train wrapped around that little mountain up there,” I said, “I’d like to buy some stock.” Well, he did and I don’t think I ever bought a stock. I didn’t have time.

Partial Transcript: Oh, yeah, when I first went. But they moved me up in six weeks to managing the damn commissary. And they had a lot of people in there and I had the pleasure of checkings and those that send in passing. I wanted to know who gave me my pay. We didn’t have any such thing. We had a little ticket thing. If they had that in their hand, they didn’t ask them questions – they’ve done been through it. I stayed down there for about two and a half years and I am still a captain. Some people don’t believe that but they can look on my birth certificate – born January 5, 1910. Went in to the service when I was 16 – 17.

Partial Transcript: Well, it was so much that needed to be done that I just went to work and I ended up, uh, for eleven years managing the Carolina Theatre down there and business was bad. I’ll tell you they had 500 seats in there they had never been full. I told the man that – Mr. Hendra (Note: unsure of name) from Erwin – he was (08:48 indecipherable). I said, “Mr. Hendra, give me that damn theatre there, just for three weeks. And on the third week, if I don’t show … the red spots turn to black, I’ll leave on my own.” And by the end of the third week, we had the black column back and that’s when things was getting worse.

Partial Transcript: I think the main reason of all this is not just because I’m smart but because I lived it. I came back to Panama. I had no work. I took a job working at the Carolina Theatre and they were fixing to close it. And that company had about forty other theatres and I said, “I don’t care what you wanna do with them.” I said, “You just forget this one here for a month.” At the end of three weeks, we started turning it around and that’s when I got my friend Myron Houston. He could play a harmonica and pick a guitar at the same time. And I said, “Damn if I could do that, I’d just get going.” We started a little thing, uh, talent show. We’d get some of those banjo pickers and if any of them were around here then, then there is now. And there was no such thing as country music, as we’ve been told. But, um, I knew some people that got into the business. They just had a big brown hat and a cowboy pistol on the side. They made one – I got a job managing that theatre in (12:00 indecipherable). I’d never managed a theatre before. Bought a ticket and at the end of the third week, the theatre down there was making money left over after all the expenses were paid. And I decided if that’s what the people like, uh – Myron Houston was a good band on the guitar and he knew he had the talent. I got with him and we’d just put on a little skit after every show, maybe 10 or 15 minutes. And Myron said, “He’s easy to …” He’s a good guitar picker. He said, “Why don’t you just run one picture instead of a double feature on Friday and Saturday?” I said, “Well, that’s saving money.” So we tried that. We didn’t have full houses and there were a few empty seats but Myron took care of that. He says, “If you’ve got something that they’ll come to see, me and my buddy over there – make a lot of other people out there would like to come but they don’t want to be seen in that theatre. Got a bad reputation.” I said, “Well, I can’t help that reputation right now. We’ve gotta straighten out everything else.” They let me have the theatre and the third week I has that theatre, 500 seats, in the black, making money. And I found out that the credit actually, I guess, should go to Myron Houston some because he directed the barn dance. I don’t know what the word is but anyhow, before anybody got to play on that barn dance, I had to go before Myron. And we started out with a guitar, a mouth harmonica, a ukulele. I thought of that and the people came to see it.

Partial Transcript: Yeah, there were no such thing. And that’s why we’ve had so much luck with the music on this – You’ve never heard anything but of, uh, Gibson banjo or guitar, but you go around these cities now and you’re gonna find mountain music. And the day they take the mountain out of the music, I don’t wanna be here. So …

Partial Transcript: Some big names came from it. Some of them thought they could play. That little Jimmy Dickens – I’d spank him good. That boy – He just couldn’t cut it. He almost got to have somebody else but that wasn’t it. He’s smart aleck. (19:05 indecipherable) They wanted to be out front and the leading position on the camera. It’s him and Beatty but he made it because that girl singer – I can’t remember her name – sang the songs and Jimmy’d come in every now and then, pop his little head in there. And then he wanted to quit it for all the publicity that that show was beginning to get. And then, um, I don’t have any – maybe six months or a year. That little country music shop down there in North Carolina says they’re fixing to take that show and put in on Liberty Network. That’s 211 stations coast to coast and they’re gonna broadcast it live from Spruce Pine to Dallas, Texas. And then they will record it at the same time that we play it and they’ll hear it in California before we get it played. But that’s the time zone way of doing things and it sorta began to grow. And I told Myron, I said, “If we’re gonna do this, say, let’s get some more friends in here and put them on a shindig.” He says, “What’s a shindig?” I said, “I can’t tell you but I’ll fix it so you can tell … “

Partial Transcript: Well, they were within 30 days of closing the Carolina Barn Dance and that building, back when things was really cheap, was $70,000 dollars. And that’s money that you don’t pick up on the street. They had 500 beautiful seats in there on the nastiest interior hard floors you ever saw. I took that job, $50 dollars a week.

Partial Transcript: And every time that – Every Friday night we were beginning to pick up customers and soon had the house about half-full on Friday night and I wanted to see if there’s any city folks around here that would like country music. Well, man, what I found out was that they loved it. And we went to the – Every Friday night was about 30 minutes of Myron and that other guy – I can’t think of his name – um, coming out there and he’d play about a half hour. And Myron said, “If you don’t do this, then why don’t you do it right?” Well, I said, “As far as I know, I am doing it right. But what else goes along with that?” He said, “Look at the theatre. You’ve got it cleaned up down the stairs there. It’s nice, beautiful. But what about the rest of it? The roof leaks. A lot of damn things are wrong with it. Why don’t you fix it?” And I said, “What can I do Myron?” He says, “Oh, I know. This is what I’ve learned living down here in Poplar.” Yeah, but he says, “You got a lot of learning that you can’t talk about that when you got into the 4F, you went up the stairs and they’d come in and want for the job. They got – Don’t matter where it is, you’re gonna go.” I ended up in Panama.

Partial Transcript: Well, it’s simple. I thought it was a joke. We’d begin to see that the people was coming from (25:44 incecipherable) to hear that country music because they got up and left when that music was over and the show started. So Myron says, “Why don’t you just cut out the double features on Fridays, Saturdays. Why don’t you just cut that one feature out and put in a half hour of country music every Friday night. Get the regular boys and let’s see what happens. Well I didn’t know nothing about country music except I like it and if you ever listened to the words of one of those country music songs, you’d learn why people like it. I went that route and the people came back. And I got to checking and I thought, “Better see what we’re doing here.” I saw people that I knew from (26:52 indecipherable). I knew they had better theatres than we had. I said, “What brings you over here? What are we doing wrong?” He says, “That’s not the way to put it.” He says, “It’s what you’re doing right that is wrong with them, right with them and wrong with everybody that drives a Cadillac.” So I got the message and we put in that country music for about a half hour every Friday night.

Partial Transcript: Yes, he did. He was vice president of the Liberty Broadcasting System in Dallas, Texas. Well, he had that taken care of. He says, “I’ll give you an hour. If you’ll keep this quality music up and improve as you see it needs it, then I’ll give you an hour on Friday night.” Well, some of them took Saturday night but it’s all the same. So he made arrangements with the telephone company to run a special line from Dallas, Texas – well, it’s nothing but just a phone line – but it was tuned in to this theatre and 3:00 every Friday. And that’d give us time to go over what they wanted to hear down there and get them shaped up a little better. And Myron Houston is the one that deserves the credit and he’s gone forever. Well, we hope to see him later. But he said, “If they come out here on a Friday night and then you don’t seem them again until next Friday night, you think they’re interested in the picture? Just drop one of those pictures and give us another half hour on the stage Friday night at 9:00.” And at 9:00 – or maybe it was eight; I’m not sure sometimes – it didn’t matter what was on the screen. It came off. I cut it off right in the middle of anything and I let those boys walk on the stage and do 30 minutes to an hour of country music. We found out what the white folks wanted was to know a little bit more about the country. And the country was already (31:10 indecipherable). We changed to the booking system and from that day on I stayed there 11 years. Every week – well, every day – ticket things were sent in to (31:30 indecipherable). And Cherokee amusements has several theatres but they never came back to call us the Carolina. I stayed there 11 years. And I changed – I really didn’t want to put the word “dance” in there because the church people would try to (32:01 indecipherable) at times and the people that wanted to hear it would get up and leave when the other picture came on. So I took Myron’s advice and reversed the booking and, to my knowledge, I stayed there a little over 11 years.

Partial Transcript: Well, that’s a good question. It’s one that I really wish I had a clearer, better answer but now knowing what it’s like out in the west, I don’t know if they tuned the radio station in or not and I told them so. And he was so honest that he says, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. I’m a fast operator.” I said, ”Well, I’m not that fast, but I get there. What’s your idea? You put us on an hour for the Liberty Network every Friday night.” And he says, “We will run a direct line – the telephone will put it in there – and you’ll never know that it’s on that line unless you go somewhere to hear it. But they’ll be hearing you in California the same time we’re hearing it here in North Carolina.” I said, “Sounds good to me.” We started it and I said, “I don’t know how to determine who like country music and why the others stay away when we’ve got it.” Myron Houston says, “I can tell you. They haven’t had a chance to listen to lyrics of some of the country songs and once they do that, they’ll tune your stations in.” Or my stations, he said. And says, “You’ll be on 111 to start with and we’re fixing to either change the name Liberty to RCA –“ Or Columbia, I forget. But it’s still the same. We went out of Spruce Pine on 111 stations every Friday night. And I think I was – Well, and that works stuff. We played the shows just like everybody else but the telephone company rigged up some stuff that they sent to Dallas, Texas at the same time we played it here on Friday night. And they – When we had an ad or something, a minute, they took their minute out between our commercial and he sold out of time and they wanted more. I said, “We’ll (36:25 indecipherable). How much more?” Says, “Well, you name it, we’ll try to live with it.” I said, “We’ll try nothing.” I said, “We’ll put the show on. You give me 30 days and if we don’t turn this theatre around and fill these empty seats, then you take the theatre and the whole works and go home. That’s fine with me.” So it’s just a simple case –“

Partial Transcript: It was a – We had to show them. And that’s when Liberty Network – instead of just piping it down to Dallas, Texas every Friday night, we’d stop the picture show double feature. I don’t care if it was in the middle of an ad. When it came to 7:30, the screen went dark and the country music came on. And it grew, it grew, it just kept going. And that’s when I found out that maybe they know what it is out on the west coast. We got mail, telephone calls. And that fellow – I can’t remember his name – Hensley, I guess, from the Liberty Broadcasting System was listening to the program over at WJHL in (38:23 indecipherable) City. And he just turned his car around and, uh, headed on over to Spruce Pine and told me who he was and I said, “Well, what can I help you with? You’re a long way from Spruce Pine.” Yeah, but he says, “That microphone is just as close to Dallas, Texas as you are right now. If we turn it on,” he said, “we’ll give you a full hour every Friday night from 8:00 to 9:00 if you’ll feed us that program free of charge.” Well, I says, “I’m not getting anything for it now so let’s go with it.” Well, I didn’t really know what they liked in the west. And we just opened the microphone and that man says, “Just listen.” And we had a call from Dallas and one from Wyoming and the 10 or 15 minutes, he had stations – forty stations, think it was, yeah.

Partial Transcript: Well, they wanted in and I was too damn stubborn. I thought, “Well, you wanted to wait and see what they’s gonna do.” And I said, “We’ve got all the stations we need right now. Why don’t you contact us about a year from now?” And that was the end of that. So the Liberty had been to Washington. He started fooling with the airwaves and sent space of time that you never had in the first place. It’s a mixed up world. But the network man says, “Let’s show you how simple it can be.” And he just turned around and the telephone company hooked him up to the direct line and we finished broadcasting the show.

Partial Transcript: Well, in the country music field, there were none. At that time, Gibson has made a guitar and a banjo and a ukulele and a harmonica. That’s what we had to start with. So I told this man from Texas – we were standing there – he says, “It’s not any trouble for them to listen to you in California right when you do it here.” Says, “We take an hour to record it and put it into commercials that we sell and we give you a minute every 15 minutes. We’ll give you anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute and you can talk about Spruce Pine, you can talk about North Carolina, whatever you wanna talk about (43:14 indecipherable)”. So the first Friday night that we had a few – most empty seats but we had it cleaned up. So by the next Friday night, we had pretty close to a full house at 50 cents apiece. And then Myron Houston says, “If it’s worth 50 cents for a half hour,” says, “why don’t you drop one of those double features and give us an hour for country music?” Well, I didn’t know any better. So we did that and I notice people coming in late to see the country music and listen to it. And then they’d get up and leave.

Partial Transcript: Somebody wanted to know if I knew Bill Monroe. I said, “Yes, I know Bill.” I says, “You want to hear him every Friday night?” They said, “We listen to the way that man operates every night if we could get him.” I just picked up the phone and called Bill. I knew him. We were old friends. He’s starving to death too. So bill stepped in and he was really a big asset because I could remember his name when he started in music. He had a brother with him and his brother didn’t like country music. He told his brother, said, “You go ahead and stay where you are. I’ll just take it by myself.” And that’s what Bill Monroe did. And I helped him when we went on the network. Bill Monroe was on that barn dance for doing an hour show with the other musicians every Friday night. The seats began to fill. And by the third week – Thursday the third week, we quit selling tickets. The seats were full.

Partial Transcript: Well, Chet Atkins – my man. I took him when he was just a little boy and his mother died and his father didn’t want him to pick a guitar. And he lived over near Marstown, Tennessee. And Chet was having a pretty hard time. That’s gotta be Chet. And then we got Bill Monroe and just from there with the Liberty Network. I don’t know how many stations …

Partial Transcript: A.P. Carter and the Carter family. I says, “I know that old guy. He played here with the revival up here in a tent show one time and they couldn’t come one night and the tent was about empty. I remember those things. I know where he lived. And, um, I got my wife and we got in the car and we went over to see Mr. Carter. And he was sitting there on the porch just like the world had quit now, I’m getting old. And there was a man I never he thought he could sing anyway but there was something there that made that Liberty Network man stop his car and come to Spruce Pine to work a deal with me. Well (49:18 indecipherable) all worked out. And I didn’t have any more empty seats in the theatre. So we went to a hour show and that hour went out – I don’t know how many stations – 400? I guess it was. But anyway –

Partial Transcript: Well, I think that it’s an honor that they’d even remember me. Back from the service and I was a little hungry so I went to take that job managing the theatre because they were gonna close it. I told the manager that had charge of these things in North Carolina, I said, “You give me one month, just one month, and if I don’t start filling in them seats, you can have the whole works. I’ll find something else.” Well, I did not know that the people in California love country music but they didn’t hit it. And that’s when the Liberty Network walked in and says, “We’ll put you on 411 stations.” Or 211 – I don’t remember. But anyhow, we went nationwide and the publicity we got was what one man can do for his country. And listen to this. And they told the Calhoun story and it was all true but I didn’t know it. I didn’t make a penny out of that barn dance. That’s just extra work for me but I did bring back a theatre full of people. And when I asked what they came back on Friday for, says, “We don’t care nothing about a double feature. We could listen all night to that country music.” And then this guy walks in two days later from Dallas, Texas with that offer. “We’ll give you an hour on Friday night.” Well, they’d put it on Friday night but some of the stations used it on Saturday night but I never knew.

Partial Transcript: I think what they’re proving is that country music will be accepted every time it’s played somewhere for somebody. And this fellow from Liberty was going from Washington back to Texas and he listened to it over WJHL. He just turned his car and came on over. That’s how we got hooked up to the Liberty Network. And we stayed on that, I guess, pretty close to 2 years. And liberty – I think I’m right; I don’t know; it don’t now matter – bought out RCA. Or maybe – ABC, yeah. Anyhow, I wanted a job. I didn’t get no money out of it. I never had a penny out of that barn dance in 4 years and something. And the network saw an opening there to kinda get the south and the sest acquainted with each other. And they started feeding it out and I can’t remember how many stations we were on. Maybe it was 200 or –

Partial Transcript: Well, I’ve never said anything unkind about my talent. I didn’t know I had any. But I bought that theatre that they were there to close it and when I came down the street and I hadn’t been back from Panama but just a few days, I said, “Don’t do that to this theatre. You’ve got a $70,000 dollar investment. Let me manage this theatre. I need a job.” They gave me a job. I ran that theatre for 11 years, never lost a penny. And if that man heard it over WJHL, he got 211 more stations and all he’s got to do is press a button and we’ll have a network show. That’s the way it came about. But as far as the people here, I never worried about them. Well, Bill Monroe, I guess, he says, “Why don’t you try them out?” he says, “Take that double feature and send it back. Just give one movie and an hour-long country music show. And you’re gonna see what they like in the west as well as the south.” You wouldn’t believe the change it made.

Partial Transcript: I’ll bring that down, let you see it sometime. Beautiful plaque and they presented that to me, I think, about 3 months after I took the theatre over. I had it cleaned up with a few empty seats yet. But they gave me the award – Scared the hell out of me. I didn’t know what would happen. I knew that Liberty –