We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Grand Ole Opry is one big family. Red Foley (upper left) became one of the family when following Roy Acuff's exit he joined the t.cupe
PROGRAMS do not have to suffer "Hooperdroop" doss of audiences) when stars take a walk. Lux Theater held its audience when Cecil B. DeMille was forced to exit. The Sealtest Program didn't nosedive when Joan Davis, inspired by a nice new $17,500 contract, left Jack Haley for her own CES show on Mondays. Even when fictional characters shift, as in the case of Sherlock Holmes being replaced on the Fetri Wine MBS airing by Gregory Hood, ratings can be sustained.
When Roy Acuff. star for seven years on the Grand Gle Opry. decided that he wanted mere than folk-music men ere usually paid (peanuts) and turned in his notice to the R. J. Reynolds Company, the tcbaccc organization had more than usual star aches. Acuff was almost a religion in the mountain music territory. He h^d sold thousands of song books, controlled a flour company featured on the Opry as the Acuff Flour Mills and had his own hillbilly orchestra which travelled with him wherever he
— but program rating doesn't sag. Reynolds Tobacco had aches when Acuff left (hand Ole Opry but it's building with Red Foley
played. A juke box just didn't snag its share of nickels unless it had plenty of Acuff difes, and they still say he could have become governor of Tennessee, if he hadn't decided not to run.
So when William Esty and Company, the advertising agency handling the Reynolds account, was told the sad news, it had trouble, real tall corn trouble. A leasonable facsimile of Acuff, even one better than the original, wouldn't work. The circuit-rider hold that the exiting star had on "his people" wouldn't disappear just because he was playing one-night stands throughout the country to collect upon his national reputation. Something new had to be added to the Prince Albert section of the Opry that had hit 13.1 in December. 1945. just as it had in December of the previous year.
So Esty's Tom Luckenbill went to work,
with modern tools, to solve a back-country problem. With plenty cf help from his sponsor's organizaticn. he had a section of the Grand Cle ( pry audience checked, surveyed, p; t under the microscope and taken apart, to see what made it tick. radioly sre; king.
At first, figures came up to haunt the program truth seekers. The dir-lei = wanted Opry just as it was. sans change.
The first gl« m of light came on the horizon when figures began to show that 126 per cent of the Opry fans wanted more music. That indie ited one thing. The new star would have to be bzs cally a singer.
Further light on tie situation came when
the kind of music desired was tabbed as
being no more than 30 per cent of any type
— ballad, comic, or psalm. This meant that
(Please turn to page 47)
NOVEMBER, 1946
19