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Round-Up time in Boston means it's 4 P.M. and time for Terry Cowling. WCOP also presents Terry in a program of rare recordings on Sunday.
TALES by TERRY
Round-Up Ranch's head man has been with the Boston station for ten years;
With the words "Welcome to Round-Up Ranch," Terry Cowling invites one and all to a real hillbilly-Western-hoedown session each afternoon at 4 P.M. over WCOP and WCOP-FM. And Terry is quite proud of his unusual program because in the past four years Round-Up Ranch has grown from fifteen minutes to forty-five minutes with an increasing and loyal audience.
The music for Round-Up Ranch breaks down into three groups: hillbilly; Western; and hoedown and square dances. Although many of the square dances are native to New England and familiar to WCOP listeners, Round-Up Ranch is fast building followers for the other types of native American music. Terry often tells stories of the origin of the music along with many amazing tales of the tunes which are completely new to Boston and local listeners.
One of the things that Terry likes to point out is the fact that many of the hillbilly songs today were never actually written on paper but were handed down from one singer to another, and it is only recently that they have been recorded. Many of these songs are Elizabethan in character and by listening to them it is possible to trace the early days of our country. Terry's favorite recording artists of these tunes include Cousin Emmy, Burl Ives, Ernest Tubb and Grandpa Jones.
Interspersed with these numbers are songs indige
nous to the West and Terry Cowling is one announcer who firmly believes that if more folks would only give themselves a chance to listen to this music, they would become rabid fans.
Of course, most New Englanders are accustomed to the Saturday night square dances in Grange Halls, and the husking bees where all the neighbors help a farmer shuck his corn. Though many people regard folks from these parts as being on the conservative side, the farmer who finds a red ear of corn at the husking bee wins a kiss from the prettiest girl — a custom that antedates radio by a good many years.
These are just a few of the unusual program notes that Terry injects into Round-Up Ranch. To add flavor and authenticity, Terry usually includes the weather reports for North Dakota, South Dakota, Kentucky, Tennessee and Montana — so that the many local residents who have moved from these states will still know what the weather is like down where Aunt Susie lives.
Terry will celebrate his tenth anniversary with WCOP this month and, in addition to the fun he has doing research on Round-Up Ranch, he has a hobby of collecting and playing the cylinder records of years back on an old Edison gramophone. This hobby he also shares with his radio listeners each Sunday at 1:45 P.M. on his Wax Museum.