Tennessee Ernie Ford’s time in Knoxville as a radio announcer didn’t last very long, but his chance involvement in a historic event would leave a lasting impression on Ford and his listeners.

Ernest Jennings Ford began his radio career at WOPI in his home town of Bristol, and for a brief time his voice could be heard over Atlanta airwaves. A month shy of his 21st birthday, in January 1941, he took a job in Knoxville as a news announcer and DJ at WROL, then located in the Holston Building. During an on-air news reading the afternoon of Dec. 7, 1941, both the AP and UPI teletypes in the studio began chattering. At the time, if a news event was particularly urgent, bells connected to the teletypes would chime. Ford’s son, Jeffrey Buckner “Buck” Ford, an actor who divides his time between Nashville and Los Angeles, remembers his father recounting how he had to silence the bells before he could continue speaking. He then took a deep drink of coffee and announced that Pearl Harbor Naval Station in Honolulu had been attacked. For East Tennesseans, it was Ford’s voice that informed them of the life-changing event.

Within days, Ford joined the Army. When new recruits were gathered at the induction station, which Buck thinks might have been in Lawson McGhee Library, they were asked if any of them wanted to fly. Having been interested in aviation since he was a child, Ford immediately volunteered to join the Army Air Corp, where he rose to the rank of first lieutenant. He did not, Buck says, pass his pilot’s test, and was stationed as an instructor at the Army’s secret aerial bombing training site in Victorville, Calif. Ford met his wife, Betty Heminger, there; as the only woman on the base, she assisted in the scoring of the cadets’ tests.

After the war, Ford returned to WOPI in Bristol, but after only a few months took a job as an announcer at KFXM in San Bernardino, his wife’s home town. A short stint at KOH in Reno followed, and eventually he made the jump to the larger market of KXLA in Pasadena. It was here that the Tennessee Ernie Ford persona caught on. Reading news as the dignified and sonorous E. Jennings Ford, he would then slip into the down-homey Tennessee Ernie character for the “Bar Nothin’ Ranch Time” show. Most listeners, including country musician Cliffie Stone, had no idea the two announcers were one and the same. Stone turned up at the KXLA studios one day and asked Ford to introduce him to Tennessee Ernie, whom Stone had heard singing impressive harmony over his records on air. It was the beginning of a decade-long musical partnership, with Stone acting as Ford’s manager and arranging appearances on radio and television. Buck says his father initially had designs on a career in opera, having trained as a classical singer at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, but Tennessee Ernie was just too popular and lucrative, especially after his 1950 recording “Shotgun Boogie” became a hit. The Bear Family label out of Germany recently released a five-CD box set containing all of Ford’s non-religious recordings from 1949 to 1960, if you’re interested in hearing him in his prime.

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Ford remained close to the armed services the rest of his life, and his son says he always considered himself a soldier, often performing for various branches of the Armed Forces. A week before I spoke with Buck Ford, I came across a series of Armed Forces transcription discs at an antique store. These records, live studio recordings of country-music acts meant to be played on radio as recruitment tools, were not released commercially. The majority I found were from the Air Force’s Country Music Time program from the 1960s, featuring artists such as the Osborne Brothers, Jean Sheppard, Hank Snow, the Wilburn Brothers, and Martha Carson, who frequently performed on WNOX in the late 1940s and early 1950s before breaking big and appearing on televisions shows such as Tennessee Ernie Ford’s. Tom Paul (a misspelling of Tompall) and the Glaser Brothers recorded a program, back when they owed more to Marty Robbins and folk-music trios than outlaw country. They even throw in a jazz interlude of “Stompin’ at the Savoy.”

One particularly interesting disc was the Navy’s program Hootenavy. Host Ernest Tubb informs us that “Hootenavy is a hootenanny that went to sea.” There’s a small irony in this, as the term hootenanny was introduced to describe group folk singing by Communist-affiliated congressman Hugh De Lacy. It was later popularized by the anti-war Popular Front group the Almanac Singers, whose members included Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. By the time of the Hootenavy recordings, in the mid 1960s, the word was popular enough to be the title of a national ABC television show devoted to largely apolitical folk music and seemed to be detached from any political affiliation.

I haven’t found evidence of any Tennessee Ernie Ford transcription discs, but as he performed for Armed Forces Radio, it’s entirely possible that such recordings exist.

Inside the Vault features discoveries from the Knox County Public Library’s Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, a collection of film, video, music, and other media from around East Tennessee.

Eric Dawson

Eric Dawson is Audio-Visual Archivist with the Knox County Public Library's Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, and with Inside the Vault combs the archive for nuggets of lost Knoxville music and film history to share with us. He's also a longtime local music journalist, former A&E editor of the Knoxville Voice and a board member of the nonprofit performance venue Pilot Light.