Slim Bryant – The professional
In 1939, Slim, who occasionally ran interference with promoters miffed by McMichen’s quick temper, watched his friend make another business misstep. The fiddler formed a twelve-piece pop-jazz dance orchestra to broadcast over WHAS and to play Louisville area ballrooms. Slim also played guitar in the new band, but knowing the region had more established local dance bands, he began considering his options. “I liked the music and everything, but I also liked to make money and I didn’t see any money to be made,” he explained.
The split was amiable. Slim left with the name Georgia Wildcats and with Loppy, Wallace and Newton, who became the core of his organization for the next 21 years. At WRVA in Richmond, Virginia, they worked with two other bands, one led by Sunshine Sue Workman, long credited with founding the Old Dominion Barn Dance in September 1946. Slim, a man not given to grabbing undue credit, insists that the Barn Dance began in 1939, on his watch.
“I named the show!” he asserts. “We had [it] in a theater, broadcast for an hour every Saturday night over the Mutual Radio Network. That show was the idea of myself and Nubby Brower, one of the blackface comedians. The two of us got it together, got permission and [made a] co-emcee of a guy who was superintendent of schools in order to get [to perform] in school auditoriums. The thing got so big we couldn’t handle it, so we moved it to a larger theater.”
When WRVA became embroiled in an extended mid-1940 dispute with Richmond’s musicians’ union, Slim, a member of the Chicago local, called a hiatus. Six years later, Sunshine Sue revived Old Dominion. For the moment, Slim and Mary Jane visited his family in Atlanta. Loppy, wed to a Pittsburgh-area native, headed there and stopped by KDKA.
“George Heid was the program director. He said, ‘Where are you guys playin’?’ Loppy said, ‘Well, right now, we’re on vacation.’ He said, ‘I wish you’d come in here!’ And August 10th, 1940, we came in and we stayed — me, Loppy, Kenny and Jerry Wallace.
“I liked Pittsburgh,” Slim says with a smile. “I liked [KDKA’s] 50,000 watts.” They also played local venues around western Pennsylvania.
“The KDKA Farm Hour will include two news broadcasts and current speakers. It will be heard Mondays through Fridays from 6 to 7 a.m.”
— Pittsburgh Press, June 8, 1941
Farm reports were a longtime staple at KDKA. The Farm Hour added a new twist. Eleven songs from Slim Bryant and the Georgia Wildcats framed a five-minute newscast and Homer Martz’s farm reports. “It was really a highly produced show,” Slim explains. Without fail, they played the daily hymn at 6:23 a.m. The show was so successful that it soon teemed with sponsors.
Early on, management suggested that they avoid talking, but jump into a song after the news and farm reports. Slim, with a decade of radio experience, balked. “We just said we don’t want to do that, because our forte is to get with the people. The people have got to think that we’re right there in the room. We can’t do that unless we talk to ’em. So they left me alone and…we went on for nineteen years like that.”
When World War II gas rationing limited their travel to live shows, KDKA gave Slim a fifteen-minute evening show in 1944. During the war, he received fan letters from a sailor who picked up KDKA’s signal on a ship in the Pacific and a local soldier who heard the show while encamped in India.
Wallace’s departure for the Marines left a hole, and after the draft snared a replacement sideman, KDKA’s music director suggested hiring accordionist Al Azzaro. “Polkas were big around here,” Slim explains. Azzaro scored so well with the region’s eastern European and Italian communities that he remained when Wallace returned. The banjoist, who’d met a jazz guitarist in the service, now focused on electric lead guitar that added a more modern edge.
KDKA’s NBC affiliation led to weekly performances from Pittsburgh on the full network. The New York producers saw no sense in a group performing from the smoky epicenter of American steel production calling themselves the Georgia Wildcats. From then on, they were simply the Wildcats.
“KDKA’S Slim Bryant and his Wildcats spent Saturday and Sunday in New York making records for Majestic. The New York laboratories asked local representatives about Slim’s radio work and a few minutes after phone conversation Slim and his gang were on their way.”
— Pittsburgh Press, October 21, 1946
It wasn’t quite that simple. Among the audition discs they recorded at KDKA was a new Slim original based on his childhood. “In Georgia, when I was about seven or eight, there were two, three girls, two or three of us boys. We’d play hide and go seek. This one girl had a saying: ‘Eeny meeny, Dixie Deeny, hit ’em a lick and Johnny Queeny/Time, time American time/Eighteen hundred and ninety-nine’…That was time, and you better be hid.”
With the war’s recent horrors still fresh and the Cold War raising new fears, the lyrics of “Eeny” — posing the question, “Wouldn’t you like to be a kid again?” — hearkened to more innocent, less apocalyptic times. In the fall of 1946, Slim took the discs to New York and met with Steve Sholes, RCA’s country A&R man. Sholes was impressed with “Eeny”, but begged off since he’d just signed a similar act: Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys.