COUNTRY'S GENTLE GIANT DIES AFTER BOUT WITH ILLNESS

By Robert K. Oermann
Garrett News Service

Country Music Hall of Fame member Tennessee Ernie Ford is
dead at age 72.
He died Thursday morning at HCA Reston (Va) Hospital, where
he was admitted September 28.
Ford, who suffered from a liver disease, became ill at Washington's
Dulles International Airport as he was about to return to San Francisco
after attending a White House dinner.
Ford was known to generations of TV and music fans for his deep,
resonant voice; informal onscreen warmth; gentle sense of humor and
easy-going approach to show business.  He was a star of network
variety television for almost 10 years and scored major successes
in the country-, pop- and gospel-music fields.
He immortalized such songs as "Sixteen Tons", "The Ballad of Davy
Crockett", "Mule Train", and "I'll Never Be Free".  Few artist in
history have scored as consistently on both pop and country charts;
he had 17 top-10 country hits, 11 top-20 pop hits, four million-selling
pop albums and a gospel Grammy Award.  Ford recorded more than 80 albums,
among them the first gospel discs to win Gold Record awards.
Known as "Ol' Ern", "America's Favorite Hymn Singer", and "The Ol' Pea-Picker",
Ford never lost touch with his Tennessee roots throughout decades of
California stardom.
Born Ernest Jennings Ford in Bristol, Tennessee, February 13, 1919,
Country Music Hall of Famer initially had no intention of pursuing
a singing career.  In 1937, a high school teacher suggested that his
deep speaking voice would be ideal for radio announcing and arranged
for Bristol's WOPI to hire him after graduation.  His first paycheck
is framed today in the station's lobby.
He moved to Cincinnati to study voice in 1939, but he ran out of money
and returned to radio after only a few months.  He was at WROL in
Knoxville when he announced the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor
on December 7, 1941.  Ford enlisted in the Army Air Corps and was a
bombardier instructor during World War II.
In 1942, he married the late Betty Heminger, from California.
After the war, the couple settled on the West Coast.  Ford took radio
work at KFXM in San Bernardino, where he adopted the nickname "Tennessee Ernie"
and a hayseed dialect character.  During a stint at Pasadena's KXLA he was
heard by entrepreneur Cliffie Stone, a 1989 inductee into the Country
Music Hall of Fame.  Stone heard Ford singing along with country hits
and recognized his potential as a vocalist.
After serving an apprenticeship on "Stone's Dinner Bell Roundup"
and "Hometown Jamboree" radio shows, Ford was signed by Capitol Records
in early 1949.  Stone became his manager.
The very first recording session produced a big country hit,
"Tennessee Border" and for the next three years Ford was a regular in
the top ten.  Among his early 1950's hits are several in the uptempo
"country boogie" idiom.  Many regard these discs as forerunners of
the big rockabilly music movement of the mid-1950's.  Also notable during
this period were a series of hit duets with Oklahoman Kay Starr.
In 1951, Ford first played Las Vegas, and in 1953, he became the first
country star to headline at the London Palladium.
In 1954, he moved to network TV as the host of NBC's "College of Musical
Knowledge" game show as well as his own weekday show.  At the close of
each program, Ford invited his fellow "pea pickers" to sing a hymn
with him.  Both the expression and the religious music stayed with him
thereafter.
The TV show is also where he introduced the coal miner's lament "Sixteen Tons".
Audience response was so enthusiastic that he decided to record it in 1955.
It led to prime-time TV stardom on NBC's "The Ford Show" 1956-61.  His homespun
"Bless your little pea-pickin' hearts" became a national catch phase and he
continued to conclude his programs with hymns.  His second series was in
daytime for ABC in 1962-65.  He remained a fixture of variety television
throughout the early 1960's.  On "I Love Lucy" he portrayed "Cousin Ernie"
In 1974, he starred in the PBS special "Tennessee Ernie Ford's Nashville to
Moscow Express", the result of country music's groundbreaking goodwill
tour of the Soviet Union.
He maintained his gospel career throughout the 1970s and 1980s.  In 1989,
after the death of Betty, he married his second wife, Beverly.
In 1990, Ford was saluted with a Nashville Network TV special,
given the Minnie Pearl Award at the TNN-Music City News Awards during
Fan Fair and inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
"At one point in my life, my idea of success was to go to Chicago to
the Toddle House and eat all the chocolate pie I wanted." Ford once told
the Tennessean newspaper in Nashville.  "I never dreamed that something like
this would happen to me in my whole life."
"I remember when country music was Dallas, east and south. Now we can
take country music all over the world and fill auditoriums all over America...
I was lucky enough to get in on the ground floor of a medium that I love,
which is television.  It goes into the American home.  And I feel very
comfortable in the American home."
"I am proud, I am so happy.  I am most richly blessed.  And bless yore
li'l ol' pea-pickin' hearts."

Lafayette Journal and Courier
October 18, 1991
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