Wallace Smith
The Old Radio Shows
(By Wallace Smith )
I got interested while listening to their radio show on KFWB (the Warner Brothers station in Hollywood) as a schoolboy in high school (Alhambra) and college (Pasadena). I had bought a Gibson guitar for 50 bucks when I was 18 and learned ALL of their broadcast songs, taking down the words over the air & remembering the tunes.
I won a contest sponsored by KFWB (a Nolan songbook) which they were kind enough to autograph. In the a.m. on KFWB they were the Gold Star Rangers, in the afternoons they were the Sons of the Pioneers & in the evenings they were the Pioneer Trio. Just 4 of them at first (trio & Hugh).
I can still recall the highlights of the 1935 radio broadcast my parents and I enjoyed at the Hollywood theater. The Pioneers were on stage accompanied by announcer Harry Hall of KFWB, grouped in western attire around a single mike (Hall had his own mike). They were a far remove from the Pioneers I saw on stage in Oxnard in 1977, dressed in powder blue suits with white trim, standing in line each with his own mike - probably the way they're dressed in their own theater in Branson, Missouri.
The 1935 Pioneers included, of course, Leonard Slye (Roy Rogers) and his yodeling, both solo and in harmony, something Len invented, I think.
Also on stage was Peter Potter who hosted the HOLLYWOOD BARN DANCE every Saturday night. My folks wouldn’t let me go out late on school nights. Jo Stafford and her 2 sisters, Pauline and Christine Stafford were on stage also. When they debuted with Potter, they sang in a heavy nasal twang, hillbilly style! But this didn't go over so well and by the time we saw them, they'd adopted the mellow style of the later solo Jo Stafford, a style she maintained until she retired except for a couple of "cut up" recordings she and Red Ingle released. On these she sang first as "Cinderella Stump" and then as "Buttermilk Tussie"! I have one or both of them in my Stafford files. They were inspired by an off-key singer who made quite a hit (short-lived) on her discs. Can't recall her name.
Peter Potter faded away after a few years and I don't remember what happened to him. Pauline and Christine, of course, retired in favor of Jo as one of American's favorite singers. The only time I ever heard the trio on a record as THE STAFFORD SISTERS was in 1938 when they recorded OPEN SPACES with the Pioneers, a failed pilot. Jo does a great job on Nolan's Tumbling Tumbleweeds on a disc I own.
Nolan was always my favorite in the group. I love his songs and I could identify with his openly sentimental approach to the Old West. On many occasions he wept on those KFWB broadcasts as he remembered some poignant episode of his days of riding the rods in Canada and the Southwest. Those early shows, of course, were quite spontaneous and unrehearsed – no scripts – and the give and take among the singers was as pleasing to me as the songs themselves.
Among their steadfast fans was Carrie Jacobs Bond (who often wrote to them from her home in the Hollywood Hills) and her beautiful melodies were often featured on the air – and later on their Decca recordings. She wrote, on one occasion as I recall, that the group probably was unaware of the quality of its harmonies. Unexpected praise, perhaps, of a bunch of self-trained singers from a lady of her superb training and talent.
