Cannon Ball Yodel / I'm a Fool For Foolin' Around / Rescue from Mooseriver Goldmine / Texas Plains / Can the Circle Be Unbroken / Little Mother of the Hills / I Want to be a Friend of Yours / Mockingbird Hill /S.A.V.E.D / I'm Gonna Tear Down the Mailbox / The Round-up in the Fall / I Was Born About Four Thousand Years Ago / There's a Bluebird on Your Windowsill / Read the Bible if You Want To Meet the Lord / In the Little Shirt that Mother Made for Me / Let's Live a Little/Long Road Ahead / The Calgary Round-Up / Roll Along Moonlight Yodel / Oklahoma Hills/Beyond the Sunset.

    Here's a valuable addition to a relatively undocumented segment of country music history: the local "cowboy' radio performer who remained local and made no commercial recordings. The nationalization of radio programming by the formation of networks didn't go very far towards meeting the real communications needs of the listeners. The network shows were soap operas, sitcoms, real operas (the Metropolitan Opera, broadcast live every Saturday afternoon), and national news. Those of us who lived on farms didn't relate to any of them, but truly loved the local newscaster with the noontime news, including a segment on the local stock market broadcast directly from the stockyards. The radio stations were aware that enterprising farmers with enough money to buy two radios put one in the barn, and swore that the cows gave more milk when the radio was on. Not tuned to opera or Lionel Barrymore, though-yodeling was what brought down the milk in torrents.

    Ken MacKenzie (1918-1993) was born in Concord, N.H., and played and sang country songs and yodels on radio station WGAN, Portland, Maine, from 1938 until 1957, and on WGAN-TV from 1954 until 1971. Obviously, he had a big following in the northeast, even though almost none of the rest of the country ever heard of him. Like other country radio performers, he organized a troupe that dressed up in fancy cowboy garb and traveled around the area giving shows at grange halls, school auditoriums, and county fairs. The show would consist of 8 to 10 performers, including tap dancers and acrobats. They were so popular they once appeared at 94 different locations in 95 nights, always returning to Portland for the 7:00 AM radio performance (gotta keep those cows milking, you know).

     This cassette was made from radio transcription discs made in 1951 and 1952 that somehow escaped destruction. They were badly mildewed, however, and even after cleaning there are occasional scratches and dropouts. These are not bothersome, however-the fidelity is normal AM broadcast quality, which always includes a little static if there's a thunderstorm in the vicinity.

     The cassette starts out with an introductory one-verse yodeling radio theme song: "I'm Following the Stars." The next song, "Cannon Ball Yodel," establishes Ken's expertise at the difficult art of yodeling (after all, if anybody could do it, those dairy farmers wouldn't have needed the radio). It gets more spectacular. On "Texas Plains" he holds a single falsetto note for 45 seconds without breathing while on "I'm Gonna Tear Down the Mail Box' he demonstrates "four or five" distinctive types of yodeling.

     Throughout his radio career, he was assisted by his faithful wife, "Simone The Mrs." (Simone LaBrie MacKenzie, evidently of French Canadian heritage), who sang an excellent country harmony.

    The local cowboy radio performers never pretended to be amateurs: they covered all the country songs that were popular, so authorship credits on the songs include Elton Britt, Stuart Hamblen, A. P. Carter, Bradley Kincaid, and lots and lots of Wilf Carter. I like to think that the cow's minds started to wander during the weaker sections of the broadcasts, like the sickly sentimental "Beyond The Sunset," complete with recitative. (I promise to return as a ghost and personally drag into hell anyone who dares to sing that song at my funeral.) Not enough to ruin the milk production, you understand-there were enough songs like "Oklahoma Hills" or "Can the Circle Be Unbroken" or even the composed ballad "Rescue from Mooseriver Goldmine" (which was in Nova Scotia) to cause an American milk over-production problem that still hasn't been resolved.

    Ken and Simone's two sons and a granddaughter are responsible for publishing this cassette. I thank them for the opportunity to listen to it!! LYLE LOFGREN

To order: Richard MacKenzie PO Box 5849 Darlington, MD 21034-5949; 410-836-3897

 

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