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PAT AND HENRY
Pat Buttram, left, uses his real name and his real voice. Henry Hornsbuckle, right, is really Merle Housh, and this is what he really looks like when he is a dignified announcer. Lately they have been having a lot of trouble getting started with their newspaper.




WINNIE, LOU AND SALLY
Changed since last year by the marriage of Marge Dempsey, this sweet singing group now consists of (left to right) Lucille Overstake, Helen Jensen and Eileen Jensen. Heard many times during the week and on Saturday night. Helen also plays organ.




DEPENDABILITY

   
Around the studio the "production men" are those who have to see the program through and make it click. Al Boyd (left) was photographed while bringing a soft-voiced youngster closer to the microphone. Tom Hargis (center), who also sings and plays minstrel parts, was feeling happy. Chuck Ostler (right) handles sound effects.



Chief Engineer Tom Rowe (above) is the calm, unhurried genius responsible for all the mechanical and electrical control. Directs a large group of engineers and operators. In radio technical circles, one of the top men of the profession.

Pat Buttram: Part of the Barn Dance

            Maxwell Emmett "Pat" Buttram, born June 19, 1915, in Addison, to Wilson McDaniel Buttram and Mary Emmett Maxwell. His brother was Augustus "Gus" McDaniel, born on June 21, 1913.
            Pat's father entered the Methodist Ministry, being licensed from Maxwell Chapel Methodist Church in 1912. His first assignment was Addison Circuit, located in the eastern part of Winston County.
            In 1916 the family moved to Nauvoo where his father pastored the Nauvoo Methodist Church. Pat attended school in several areas of North Alabama. After finishing high school at Moritimer Jordan, Jefferson County, he went to Birmingham Southern College to study for the ministry. He performed on a local radio station after he was spotted in a college play. His big break came when he went to the Chicago World's Fair in 1933, and was interviewed in the audience at the old "WLS National Barn Dance." This began his non-stop adventure into show business at the National Barn Dance. He did a regular comedy spot on the show for 13 years billed as the "Winston County Flash." Pat met Gene Autry here. Both were a part of the Barn Dance Radio Program which included Red Foley and the Hoosier Hotshots, Georgie Goble, and many others who went on to Hollywood fame.
            When Pat left the WLS Barn Dance he went to Hollywood to be a sidekick to Roy Rogers. Since Rogers already had two sidekicks, Pat was dropped. It was then that his old friend Gene Autry picked him up as his sidekick with Pat using his own name, "Pat Buttram" in over 40 movies and a hundred or more episodes of the "Gene Autry Show" which aired from 1950 to 1956; he replaced Smiley Burnette. This was long before Pat's famous role on the television show "Green Acres" where he played the role of Mr. Eustace Charleston Haney, opposite Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor.
            For country music, the middle 1930's was an era of tremendous change. Recordings and later, radio, had basically served the function of preserving the folk tradition as it was found in the 1920's, or capitalizing on it, as in the case of Vernon Dahlhart. However, by the mid-1930's, changes were being wrought by the musicians themselves, who, discovering that a reasonably good living could be made in the midst of a nationwide Depression, began to focus their creative energies on both stylizing a distinctly personal "sound" and pleasing a growing public interest as well.
            In the far west, a young singer from the WLS Barn Dance, named Gene Autry, was revolutionizing both a film and a musical genre with the portrayal of the singing cowboy; in Oklahoma and Texas, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were fashioning a unique and dynamic country equivalent of the big dance band; and in the southeast, the Monroe Brothers were dramatically changing the art of the vocal and the instrumental duet, turning what had been basically a vehicle for parlor songs and sentimental ballads into an energy-charged, visceral musical experience. The impact of this change is not only still being felt today, but it is actually continuing to grow, a full 60 years later.
            Yet, because of the enormous influence of the career of Bill Monroe after he and Charlie dissolved their partnership in 1938, the importance of the Monroe Brothers has been thought of primarily as a precursor to the musical greatness which followed. -Gus Buttram

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