habitualscrewup

The Old Country

By Joe Heim

NASHVILLE

Country music has its share of wild characters, but old-fashioned,
clean-cut, suit-and-tie-wearing Eddie Stubbs isn't one of them. He
abstains from bad habits ("dadgummit!" is as close as he comes to swearing),
goes to church every Sunday and has a work ethic that would put
Puritans to shame. Above all, he is an evangelist, a spreader of the word,
eager to initiate the uninitiated and bring those who have strayed back
into the fold. It is not belief in God, though, that he is trying to
sell. Eddie Stubbs is on a mission to save the soul of country music.

He'll come right out and tell you as much if you ask him. Country has
forgotten its roots, he'll say. It has neglected its pioneers and
forsaken its heroes. What he won't say out loud, but what you think he
secretly believes, is that most new country music isn't country music at
all.

For a radio disc jockey faced with media conglomeration, target
audiences and shrunken playlists, filling commercial and even public
airwaves with classic country -- music from its golden era of the 1940s, '50s
and '60s -- is a tall order. But as any listener to his Sunday
afternoon show on Washington's WAMU-FM or his weeknight and Saturday morning
shows on Nashville's WSM-AM knows, Stubbs is diligently stoking the
embers of old-time country, bluegrass and honky-tonk. "Yes sir, friends,
that was Johnny Paycheck singing 'The Real Mr. Heartache.' I'll tell you
what, he makes you believe he's been there. Wow, it doesn't get any
better than that. Great stuff." Stubbs is standing in front of the
microphone in his fishbowl of a studio in the lobby of the Gaylord Opryland
Resort hotel. Tall and fence-post thin, he has a slightly haunted face
that's all bone and little flesh.

Unless he's flashing his grimace of a smile, he looks straight out of
a Depression-era photo. Listeners, he says, are often surprised by his
appearance. "They usually think I'm 65 to 70, bald, portly, smoking a
pipe and do the show every week with a dog at my feet," he says. "Well,
I don't like dogs, I don't smoke, I'm far from portly and I'm 41."

Stubbs is unfailingly polite, modest and solicitous. But he's also
serious and reserved; hidden beneath those gaunt features is a sense of
melancholy that's more difficult to define. "The sadder songs are," he
says, "the better I like them."

Like the blues, country weepers provide their own sort of solace.

In the studio, Stubbs finds another sort of solace. In many ways, this
is his home away from home. This is where he brings his treasured LPs
and scratchy 78s, what he calls his "deep catalogue" material, to make
the case for "the era of great country music that we'll never see
again." This is where he gets lost in the sounds of simple chords, steel
guitars and a high lonesome fiddle.

It's not surprising that many listeners assume Stubbs is a generation
older than he is. Whether he's talking about music or cabinetmaking or
even a simple handshake, he bemoans that "things aren't the way they
used to be." He readily admits he would rather have arrived in Nashville
in 1945 than 1995, and he occasionally uses phrases that make you think
he did. His favorite Italian restaurant is a "fine place to get fed and
watered." And LeAnn Rimes "can sure sing the fire out of country
music."

Stubbs wonders aloud: What became of the dress code for entertainers?
"Is professionalism a bellybutton ring and a bare midriff?" he asks.
"Would you go into IBM dressed that way?"

He's not given to that sort of scolding on the air, though. With help
from the 50,000 watts of WSM, "the Air Castle of the South," he
transmits his fervent belief in the classic sound to listeners all over the
South and Midwest. On the clearest of nights, the station's signal (650
on the dial) can reach 38 states, and with his show now available at
www.wsmonline.com, he hears from fans as far away as London, Johannesburg
and Tokyo.

"When music gets inside of you and gets a part of your heart and a
part of your being and a part of your soul, for those who experience it
at that depth, there's nothing quite like it," says Stubbs, as he cues
up Kitty Wells's "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels."

As the music plays, he takes calls off the air from listeners like
the 37-year-old trucker speeding along I-70 in Missouri who thanks him
"for playing all that old music 'cause no one else does." And the elderly
woman in Chillicothe, Ohio, who praises him for digging up a favorite
Hawkshaw Hawkins song she requested. "How'd you find that so fast,
Eddie?"

There is wide agreement in the country music world that no one is as
knowledgeable about the music as Eddie Stubbs. "Everybody understands
that he knows more about it than anybody else, and they just defer to
him," says country star and historian Marty Stuart. "He's a beacon. He's
a reminder of greatness. Any time you need to know where the standard
lies, tune in."

Bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs concurs. "Eddie is one of the best
things that ever happened to Nashville," he says. "All of the extra facts
and information he provides about the music, well, no one else can do
what he does."

From 8 p.m. until midnight Monday through Thursday and 6 until 10
Saturday mornings, Stubbs stands alone at the WSM mike, working without
notes and dipping into his memory for the back story about songs and
performers. "Little tidbits to try and help sell the artist, sell the
record," he calls them.

Even when a request comes for a less-than-classic-country song, John
Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads," Stubbs is ready with the
dossier. He mentions that the tune is by Washington-area songwriters Bill and
Taffy Danoff. And then he recalls being told that it wasn't the rolling
hills of West Virginia that inspired it, but "the beautiful rolling
hills of northwest Montgomery County . . . along Maryland's Route 117,"
the route the pair took on a trip to West Virginia.

Listening to Stubbs's shows is tantamount to a distance-learning
class at the University of Country Music. Unlike most DJs, he is given
plenty of latitude as to what songs he can play. At WSM, there are a few
he's required to include each night, but the majority are his own
selections. His WAMU show, on the other hand -- which he now records in
Nashville -- is entirely up to him.

His authoritative knowledge and easygoing, radio-rich voice were
instrumental in helping Stubbs land a premier gig, one of the three regular
announcers at the Grand Ole Opry, which hosts the longest continuously
running radio broadcast in history. Every Friday and Saturday night he
shares duties with his fellow announcers, welcoming the audience at the
show's 4,400-seat venue and introducing Opry legends like Little Jimmy
Dickens and Porter Wagoner.

It is a dream come true for the kid from Gaithersburg, whose dad
taught him to play the fiddle at age 4. For Stubbs, who had visited the Opry
as a youngster with his parents, the program is sacred territory.

"Don't ever forget what you're seeing here tonight," he whispers
urgently to a visitor backstage at the Opry earlier this year. "History is
passing us by, and this is a very special place."

Increasingly the industry, which wants mostly to tout its new stars,
has recognized Stubbs's contributions as both disc jockey and
invaluable resource.

Last year the Country Music Association named him the large-market
Broadcast Personality of the Year, the first time in 20 years that a DJ
for an AM station had received the award. In 2001, the International
Bluegrass Music Association chose him as Broadcaster of the Year. And he's
already been nominated for the Country Broadcasters Hall of Fame, even
though he hasn't met the 25-year minimum working requirement.

Along the way, Stubbs has become something of an unlikely favorite of
Nashville hipsters. According to WSM's Web site, Arbitron ratings for
his show consistently beat FM country stations in Nashville and boast
surprisingly young demographics. The alternative weekly Nashville Scene
named him Best Country Deejay, and a few years back he made the list of
Nashville Life magazine's 100 Coolest People.

Eight years ago, Eddie Stubbs might have had difficulty imagining
anything like this sort of success.

Before he moved here from Gaithersburg in 1995, his life was running
out of promise. He was 33 years old, recently divorced and unsure of
what to do next. From his senior year at Gaithersburg High School he had
been a fiddle player and vocalist in a much-heralded traditional
bluegrass band, the Johnson Mountain Boys. But the band split up a decade
later and was playing only sporadically.

His radio career also seemed iffy. Stubbs' first job was in 1983, a
weekly bluegrass show for tiny WYII-FM in Williamsport, Md. He was paid
$20 per program. In 1984 Stubbs landed a job at WAMU, working with Gary
Henderson, one of the station's longtime country DJs. His own weekly
show had its debut in 1990but as Stubbs points out, "No one gets rich in
radio." To keep himself in groceries he was painting houses and doing
occasional carpentry work. Things were not looking up.

"There have been times in my life when my records have been my best
friends," he says. "Something that you can grab on and hold to that will
always be the same."

Over the years he had developed a friendship and working relationship
with country singer Kitty Wells and her husband, Johnnie Wright, often
playing fiddle for their band when they visited the D.C. area. In 1995,
Wright and Wells persuaded Stubbs to move to Nashville and play with
them regularly. For a fifth-generation Montgomery County man, whose
parents and two younger brothers still live in Maryland, the move felt much
bigger than the 750 miles between Gaithersburg and Nashville.

What happened when he arrived, Stubbs says, was a miracle. Within 17
days, he had been hired by WSM and selected as an announcer for the
Opry. "Five people up for the job, and the new kid in town gets the gig?
If that's not God, I don't know what is," he says.

Stubbs feels indebted to Wright and Wells. He is still a regular
visitor at their home and is fiercely protective of her position in country
royalty. He's incredulous to hear that a crossover star is being called
the queen of country music. "Can you imagine that?" he asks, his voice
rising. "Kitty Wells is the queen of country music. End of story."

There is no room for gray in Eddie Stubbs's vision of country. He
knows, of course, that all music has to evolve. WSM bills itself as
"country's past, present and future," and Stubbs says, "That's the way it
should be." But that doesn't make finding modern music that speaks to him
any easier.

"I really get a kick out of listening to him when he has to announce
a contemporary country artist," Stuart says. "It's like pulling gravel
out of his mouth. It just doesn't come out the same as when he's
talking about some obscure dead hillbilly."

It burns Stubbs that most country stations can't find room for
legends and that most DJs have no authority to choose songs to play. It burns
him that they won't play country music that "speaks to people, people
who have lived these songs."

The incredible success of the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack
shows him that real country and bluegrass has a huge potential
audience.

"People are starved for substance. And they get frustrated because
they can't hear the music they want to hear on the radio," he says.
"We've got people like [Merle] Haggard and [George] Jones still making
records, and they've just shut these people out."

Of course, more people clamor to hear Shania Twain than Ernest Tubb,
and Stubbs isn't arguing otherwise. "You can't ignore someone who's got
a number-one record. That's not responsible," he says. "I'm not saying
you have to be a student of the music, but you have to appreciate where
it came from."

That's a good summation of Stubbs's credo, and his dedication extends
beyond playing the music on his shows. Though he never went to college,
he is a self-taught scholar who is endlessly researching, and has


exhaustive liner notes to a number of the ambitious box-set compilations
of seminal country artists that are issued by the Bear Family label. To
commemorate the 50th anniversary of Hank Williams's death this past New
Year's Day, Stubbs put together a six-hour radio documentary for WSM.

Stubbs has sought out many aging country performers not only for the
history they can provide, but simply to befriend them. Marty Stuart
recalls that last year when Bashful Brother Oswald, the legendary dobro
player for Roy Acuff's Smoky Mountain Boys, fell ill, Stubbs was among a
group of bluegrass musicians who visited and played for him on Sunday
afternoons. "He really does more than talk about these old-timers, he
cares for them and he backs it up by his actions," says Stuart. "He's
really community-minded that way."

These days in Nashville, when a country performer dies, Stubbs is
often asked to speak at the memorial services or to write a remembrance.
He has also created tribute shows to honor greats who pass away,
including Oswald, who died in October, Tammy Wynette and Bill Monroe. "I go to

a lot of funerals," Stubbs says wearily. "In the past few months, 15
bluegrass and traditional country artists have died. And I knew 13 of
them personally.

"That really gets to you after a while."

Sitting at a bustling Cracker Barrel restaurant not far from the
Opry, Stubbs slides his tie inside his white shirt before tucking into a
pair of pork chops. Then he notices the 79-year-old Earl Scruggs and his
wife, Louise, seated at a table across the room. He excuses himself and
walks over to say hello, kneeling on the floor to talk to them.

"It's a very gratifying thing to meet your heroes, get to know them
and then become their friend," he says when he returns to the table.
"It's just another amazing blessing."

Marty Stuart and other colleagues worry that Stubbs's all-consuming
commitment to a bygone era of music takes too much out of him. And he's
aware of their concern, but he waves off the notion. "I know people
say, 'Eddie, you don't have a life.' But I have a wonderful life," he
says. "I know that I miss out on things by doing things the way I have, but
who hasn't? We all wish we had more time. It's a precious commodity."

Each person is put on Earth for a purpose, he says, and he feels
lucky to have found his. Old-time bluegrass and classic country may be
fading into the past, but Eddie Stubbs is fighting a mighty battle to help
it stay a little longer.

Eddie Stubbs can be heard from 3 to 5 p.m. Sundays on WAMU-FM (88.5),
and on the Internet at www.wamu.organd www.wsmonline.com.

balecox

three separate places in the dictionary. Beside the words "Dignity",
"Integrity" and "Respect" and maybe a fourth "Reverence".<<

Good thought, JC. He is a gem.

P

busgal58jb

Stubbs wonders aloud: What became of the dress code for entertainers?
"Is professionalism a bellybutton ring and a bare midriff?" he asks.
"Would you go into IBM dressed that way?">>>>>

I've been saying that about the folks on the opry for quite a while.

BUS Janice
2 Western Fiddle albums
Howard Kalish What the Hay http://www.howardkalishmusic.com/
Bobby Flores Just For the Record http://www.bobbyflores.com/