Slim Bryant – The professional
Majestic was a new label headed by Frank Walker, who’d produced the 1931 Georgia Wildcats recordings. He signed the Wildcats, who recorded in New York in October. In 1947, “Eeny” became the breakout single, only to be quickly undermined by Majestic’s wretched distribution and a hastily recorded (and better distributed) RCA cover version sung by Zeke Manners and produced by Sholes.
Some call Slim’s version a million-seller. It wasn’t. Neither his nor Manners’ version appeared on the Billboard charts. Still, he sighs, “Zeke outsold us two to one on account of that. I’ll be in a store and somebody’ll come up to me singin’ it. Older people that remember us…” Majestic folded in 1947. The Wildcats’ opportunity for a national hit had passed.
In many ways, it didn’t matter; Slim and the Wildcats were Pittsburgh’s premier country show band. “We owned the area,” he declares. They sold 70,000 songbooks of a seven-volume series. After the war, nearly every eastern and midwestern region had a similar band that hosted radio (and TV) broadcasts, made records, sold songbooks, and played area theaters and parks. Chicago had Captain Stubby & the Buccaneers; Denver Darling led various bands in Manhattan; Pee Wee King dominated Louisville; the Down Homers were based in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Chester, Pennsylvania, boasted Bill Haley & the Saddlemen (in their pre-Comet days). Jimmie Rodgers’ cousin Jesse and his band held sway in nearby Philadelphia.
“We had the town people listenin’ too. Not just the farmer,” Slim says proudly as he describes their genre-bending versatility. Newton sang Eddy Arnold-style ballads; Loppy tackled the bluesier, Jimmie Rodgers-style fare. Slim handled novelties, and Azzaro did polkas. He, Loppy and Newton harmonized on other numbers. On occasion, he and Newton trotted out Lang and Venuti’s “Wild Cat” or other swing instrumentals. “It was not just like some guy in Nashville and four backup guys,” he explains. “There were five guys on there and every one of them had to stand up to be good enough to be a soloist or we wouldn’t be on there.”
On January 11, 1949, WDTV Channel 3, Pittsburgh’s first commercial television station, made its premiere broadcast. Slim and the Wildcats were part of it. The next day, Pittsburgh ad agency exec Vic Maitland, who handled locally-brewed Duquesne Beer, asked Slim to host a weekday fifteen-minute broadcast over WDTV, which lacked a studio. “All they had was a little cubbyhole about like my kitchen there to do the news,” he complained. Troubled by that, and fearing overexposure (they still did the Farm Hour), Slim declined.
When the studio situation improved, Maitland organized “Duquesne Showtime” on WDTV, a weekly show to be hosted by a rotating cadre of local stars. When Slim agreed to be a monthly host, Maitland scheduled the Wildcats to kick off the premiere with nationally renowned folk singer Burl Ives as the guest. Maitland didn’t attend the first production meeting, but Slim did. An underling announced that Slim and the band would open the show and then defer to Ives, who would handle the rest of the broadcast.
Slim went ballistic. “I said, ‘That ain’t the way it’s gonna be!’ He said, ‘Well, that’s the way we want it!’ I closed up my briefcase and said, ‘You can getcha another boy!’ I walked out the door, left them sittin’ there.”
He was painting his dining room in Dormont when Maitland invited Slim out to his home. When he arrived, he told the ad man, “You know damn well that I ain’t gonna do that! This is gonna be our show or else we ain’t gonna be on it!'” Maitland fired the underling. The group emceed their monthly “Showtime” appearances. Slim felt he’d upheld a principle: “If you don’t stand up for yourself, you’re dead! You feel like you’re beaten down.”
“Slim Bryant has been a KDKA [radio] fixture for 10 years. He and his Wildcats have been heard over all major networks….He has contracted with NBC to provide folk-western type music for their Thesaurus Library, heard on 415 stations in the USA, Canada and South America.”
— Pittsburgh Press, July 23, 1950
They’d actually started recording for Thesaurus around 1947. Subscribing stations received 16-inch discs with music as well as pre-recorded spoken intros. Programmers could combine songs however they chose, sell ads and present them as fifteen-minute shows. “We made 287 numbers. I have about 40 of my own songs in there…used on stations all over the world. We’d open with a fast movin’ song and then one out of Kenny, from Loppy and an instrumental by Jerry, Al or myself. We did an awful lot of western tunes.”
On “Duquesne Showtime” there was no guest the Wildcats couldn’t accompany. “When they brought Rosemary Clooney in, they didn’t have to have another band,” Slim declares proudly. Nashville pop crooner Snooky Lanson, a star on TV’s “Your Hit Parade”, appeared several times (and once forgot his lyrics on the air). They soon graduated to “Slim Bryant and His Wildcats”, a fifteen-minute Saturday night show.
When Duquesne withdrew sponsorship, their competitor, Iron City Beer, gave them Friday nights 9:30 to 10, which continued after WDTV became KDKA in January 1955. Having worked with several female singers, they added perky blonde vocalist Nancy Fingal. There were no other guests.
Fingal was, Slim says, “A very talented girl, singin’ Sinatra tunes, that kind of stuff. We didn’t play that much pop except [pop] tunes that fit the country tunes. ‘Sugartime’ was really a country song. Those kind of things, we grabbed ahold of as soon as they came out. We kept up with what they wanted to hear.”