[piano intro] [radio waves crackling] - [Narrator] In the early days of the 20th century as the crackle of radio waves filled the air, North Carolina emerged as a pioneer in the golden age of broadcast media.

From the mountains to the coast, the Tar Heel State became home to some of the South's most influential radio stations, voices echoing through living rooms, farmhouses and city streets.

By the 1940s and '50s, radio was more than just entertainment, it was a lifeline.

Local stations brought breaking news, gospel choirs and the sounds of bluegrass and country to the people.

Then came television flickering into homes and transforming how North Carolinians connected with the world.

WBTV in Charlotte led the way, giving rise to homegrown talent, live music broadcasts and a new era of storytelling.

It was in this fertile ground of radio waves and television signals that something special happened, an explosion of local music that brought laughter and lighthearted fun to the airwaves.

- Arthur Smith!

[alarm ringing] Hey, hey, hey!

- [Narrator] And in Eastern North Carolina in a hardworking farming culture where tobacco was king, an up-and-coming band recorded their first record.

That might be remarkable enough, except for the fact that Jackie Butler and His Playmates came by their name quite literally.

They were a band of children.

Today over 70 years later, Wade Hargrove, a retired attorney in Raleigh, and C.D.

Carter, a successful business owner in Charlotte, give a glimpse into a slice of rural North Carolina music and broadcast history that was almost lost.

- Good grief.

- Mike, I declare you- - [C.D.]

Man, you went all out.

- Well, I think I'm gonna to hang mine right here on the TV.

- Good grief.

- [Wade] My mother made that shirt.

- [C.D.]

I didn't know that.

- And look at C.D.

's nice outfit.

And we ordered these cowboy hats from a store in Denver, Colorado.

And see, Jack's got even fancier shirt and he's got cowboy pants.

And that's Jack's sister, Ciana.

- She really didn't travel with us that often.

She might've gone with us on a couple of TV things down in Wilmington before.

- Yeah.

- I remember that.

♪ Just lookin' ♪ ♪ Just lookin' ♪ ♪ Just lookin's all I ever hear them say ♪ ♪ Just lookin' ♪ ♪ Just lookin', just lookin' ♪ ♪ Lookin' something for nothing every day ♪ ♪ Now I've had some good ones and I've had some bad ♪ ♪ But of all the jobs I've ever had ♪ ♪ I believe the one that pains me more ♪ ♪ Is working in a dry goods store ♪ ♪ I'll take you up hat from off the shelf ♪ ♪ But I can't sell one to save myself ♪ ♪ They'll try on this and they'll try on that ♪ ♪ And then pick up their same old hat ♪ ♪ And say no thank you, just lookin' ♪ ♪ Just lookin', just lookin' ♪ ♪ Just a lookin's all I ever hear them say ♪ ♪ Just lookin', just lookin' ♪ ♪ Lookin for something for nothing every day ♪ - It so happened that C.D.

Carter and Jack Butler and I were in the same class in the fifth grade and I played the harmonica and Jack played the guitar.

- I knew Jackie because he and I were cousins.

I always enjoyed being around Jackie because he could play guitar.

His daddy had him playing when he was a little tyke.

Jackie decided I could play the washboard and he taught me how to keep time on it and just scrape it with a thimble up and down.

- In those days, the school had an event, it was a fundraising event called Stunt Night.

And each class in school was asked to put together a stunt.

We formed a little group and Jack and C.D.

we sang "Hillbilly Fever", which was a country song at that time, "Hillbilly Fever's Going Round".

Lo and behold, we won the stunt night.

We thought that, that was a great deal of fun.

And so we started getting together.

Jack was the singer.

C.D.

soon graduated to an electric bass and he learned to play that quickly.

Jack's house was located on a busy street in Clinton, North Carolina.

- [C.D.]

We built a stage in his garage, which fronted the side of a little drive-in restaurant - And called it The Good Old Opry.

And we would wear cowboy hats and cowboy clothes.

We looked as garish and tacky as Porter Wagner does on his TV show.

- We'd do it on every Saturday night and go out there and we would play probably, I don't know, 30 minutes or so, might have been more than that, of some popular country western songs at the time and maybe one or two that Jack's daddy wrote.

- They would see these kids performing on a stage and people would come over.

Well, it got crowded.

- After a while It got to be where on a Saturday night, I think people actually looked forward to it happening and it was a thing to come and do.

And I really think that's where we really got started doing the professional thing.

Jack's dad decided he could take us and make us into something different than what we were being at that time.

He saw some potential in it that we had no idea probably was there.

["Paw Aint Got a Cent"] ♪ Paw was a right good feller ♪ ♪ But he aint' got no sense ♪ ♪ Maw said she'd always known he was a little bent ♪ - We got a radio program on Saturdays at the local radio station.

We would play on the TV station in Wilmington.

On Saturday night, they had a country music program, - [C.D.]

UHF station over in Fayetteville and we did a couple of things on that on a special program.

And I remember us going to WTVD in Durham.

- And we played on the Jim Thornton program that came on, on Saturday nights.

We played in Wilson.

It was called the Pack House Jamboree.

We played one year at the state fair.

We would go over to Thalian Hall and they had a mini Grand Ole Opry and they had local bands and it was broadcast on a radio station.

One other time we had been booked at Fort Bragg over in Fayetteville to play at an officer's club on Sunday night.

Well, I grew up in a very strict Baptist home.

My mother did not think that we should be performing on Sunday.

So I promised my mother that the money that we got paid, which was peanuts, that I would give to the Clinton First Baptist Church.

I wouldn't keep any.

So I said, "Mom, you can think of this in terms of I'll be doing the Lord's work."

She was okay with it.

Of course, it was painful for me to give that $2 or $5 that we got paid each to the church, but I did it so the Lord wouldn't send me to the devil when I died.

[laughs] - We did a chapel program in high school one day and played rock and roll stuff and the principal didn't know what we were gonna be doing and he got upset about it pretty good.

But I mean, we had the kids just rolling in the aisles and up hollering and carrying on.

We were probably doing some things we shouldn't have done when we were doing it song wise.

Seemed like we played a lot.

And particularly, when we got to be probably more like 13 or 14 years old.

- [Wade] I remember Jack and C.D.

and I would sit in the back seat and we would practice our autograph signing.

[chuckles] - We thought we were pretty big time.

You know when you're 13 or 14 years old you can get to thinking pretty good.

- It was the novelty, I think, of these kids masquerading as professional entertainers.

♪ And Maw's so made she don't know what to do ♪ - I heard the early 78s.

Oh, I could kind of tell, boy, these guys sound like you're from Eastern North Carolina.

[laughs] You know it felt like home to me.

I kind of study country music, local acts, especially North Carolina artists, and especially when it's from Eastern Carolina.

Who were they?

What were they?

I'm a record collector.

Somehow I ran across Jackie Butler and The Playmates and I was fascinated with that.

♪ One day I couldn't find my broom ♪ ♪ So I looked in the ladies sitting room ♪ - I like local artists.

I like homemade projects rather than something slick and produced.

And this sounded, had that kind of back-woodsy, do-it-yourself type sound and that attracted me.

Reminded me a bit of stuff, material like Jimmy Dickens might've done or something.

- I used to buy "Country Song Roundup" on the news stand.

I saw an article on Jackie Butler and the Playmates, and I noticed that Jackie and the steel player were about my age and that that caught my interest.

We were all reading from the same book about that time.

It was back in the good old days when it was called hillbilly music before they tried to go uptown with it and dress it up.

It was really basic, three-chord country, I always call it.

- The 78s were done in the real early '50s.

So it's like who was popular then?

Lefty Frizzell, Webb Pierce, Carl Smith they're the guys that were played on the radio.

The guys that were putting out the records and having hits.

- We had good radio in those days for our kind of music.

That played the kind of music that we wanted to play.

This was actually before television.

If you were on the radio, people listened to the radio.

We would listen to the Opry and then we'd listen to WWVA.

And the Osborne Brothers and Hylo Brown and Doc Williams & the Border Riders were big on WWVA.

- Myself growing up in Goldsboro, we had WGBR was the station we listened to every day.

And you had programming at that time.

During the day, had kind of mellow music for the housewives.

Had one called the "Road Show", more lively stuff for people going to work.

Carl Kasell was a famous announcer on public radio and "Wait, Wait, don't tell me!".

But he came from Goldsboro.

He had his own show there.

Then at the evening you had a teenage dance show.

When that went off the air, they had "Magic Melodies".

That was music to go to sleep by.

That was easy listening stuff.

- I was so into it, when I'd go to bed at night, I had a little table radio and I would pull it under the covers with me so my parents wouldn't hear it, they didn't come in and get on me to go to sleep, 'cause I had to work the next day.

- Radio was important and these guys had a radio show in Clinton.

♪ Now one day I couldn't find my broom ♪ ♪ So I looked in the ladies sitting room ♪ - One of the biggest things to ever happen in Clinton was when, in the late '40s, the town got its first radio station.

- [C.D.]

The Clinton radio station, WRRZ.

And they played a mixture of country music and a lot of stuff.

- We were always nervous performing those radio programs live because if you make a mistake, you can't correct it.

[laughs] It's there.

- Radio didn't make me nervous or anything, but live TV did.

And I have no idea why we would be nervous because there would be nobody in there but a cameraman and whatever the guy was doing and us.

But it was still something that just made me nervous to be on TV.

- [Wade] Our radio program was exciting, but we knew that the station signal could be heard only 20, 30 miles from town.

- Just upped the ante a bit.

If you played on television, you reached even more people and your draw at the local venues were better.

If you watch somebody on TV all the time, you feel like they're part of the family because you're coming into their living rooms.

And when you go out and play, they know you by name and come up and talk to you.

- [Mike] You saw a country act on TV and they were like your friends, part of the family.

I grew up on Arthur Smith, who was out of Charlotte.

Station out of Durham is Saturday Night Country style with Jim Thornton, Barefoot Boy from Broadslab, Little Washington, Ted Smiley O'Brien.

Bill Pollard played a a TV show in New Bern.

- North Carolina back then was pretty much a rural state and that's the way people entertained themselves.

People's get away from the hard daily life.

[upbeat country music] - My mother played the piano and she could play the piano by ear.

- My dad could play the banjo pretty good.

He could play the piano all by ear.

My mother played the piano by ear.

So I came from a musical-based family, but I was a farm boy.

[birds chirping] [dog barking] - The economy in those days depended on growing tobacco.

People that owned those tobacco warehouses wanted to encourage farmers to bring their tobacco and sell in those warehouses and they would try to provide entertainment for the farmers and make the whole experience pleasant.

- And we were hired by the Clinton Tobacco Association and they hired us to go around and go to the different farms and people and if we'd see anybody barning tobacco or working in that tobacco, we would stop and we would perform a song and I might do a joke.

I remember part of the jingle that Jack's dad wrote for it.

And it was like, ♪ Bring your 'baccer into Clinton ♪ ♪ Where the greenbacks are ♪ ♪ Bring it to Clinton ♪ ♪ Prices are high ♪ But we would sing that to the people to get them to bring their tobacco to Clinton.

And we did that for, I don't know, seemed to me like it was a pretty good job.

'cause I remember the pay was better than I was making working in tobacco.

[laughs] And seemed like we got paid like five or six bucks to do that apiece.

- Our band was invited to play for the opening of a tobacco warehouse near Fayetteville.

We were at this point about 14 years old.

Jack and C.D.

and I went upstairs in the warehouse to a dusty old room with dried-out tobacco leaves everywhere to change clothes and get out of our street clothes into our cowboy outfits, 'cause we were gonna go back downstairs.

And on the floor of the warehouse where all the people were, we were gonna pick and sing.

Well, we were up there changing clothes.

The next thing I know, Jack and C.D.

are lighting up cigarettes.

And I said, "Guys, for gosh sakes, you can't smoke in here.

This whole warehouse will go up in flames.

You can't do this.

Put those cigarettes out.

I mean we're all gonna get burned up in this thing."

And about that time, Mr.

Butler opened the door to that room to tell us they want us downstairs now.

Well I never will forget, Mr.

Butler opened that door and cigarette smoke just went [imitates explosion].

And of course, he realized what had been happening and he was furious.

Fortunately, the cigarettes were extinguished and there was no fire.

But that was the scariest event ever.

A lot of the stuff that we performed were songs that Jack's father had written.

Melbourne Butler was a very gifted musician and he poured his heart and soul into writing music.

And was, I always thought, a musical genius.

- North Carolina has always been a hotbed of good players.

We've sent a lot of players to the big time: Earl Scruggs, Randy Travis, Don Gibson, on and on from North Carolina.

- We're not the deep, deep South.

You know there's more influences from other places coming to North Carolina, but we're Southern.

So I think it was the mix of that.

A bit of sophistication mixed with rural roots.

[lively country music] - Rock and roll music came along about the same time.

[upbeat rock music] Even girls out in the country were more interested in rock and roll music than country music.

We sort of, as we got into high school, gave up.

Our band didn't play that much.

We realized that for teenagers, country music was not cool.

I went off to college, got an academic scholarship to go to UNC at Chapel Hill.

I went to law school.

And when I finished law school, I went to Washington, D.C.

to learn to be a media lawyer.

- I decided I wasn't going to college to start with, so my dad got me a job in retail in Goldsboro and that was my first venture out.

I found out after about two months I was not gonna do that.

And I came back home and told my dad, I thought I'd go to college.

Went to Wilmington College for a while.

I wound up having an offer for a job in Charlotte in 1960 and I moved to Charlotte for that job and I've been there ever since.

- Jack stayed in Clinton and got a job full-time at the radio station.

- Yeah, he wasn't a kid anymore.

His voice had changed.

He was Jack Butler and he did a rockabilly song in the late '50s called the "Old Wolf Whistle".

The label is Decoy Records, Clinton, North Carolina, which was their own label.

The song was written by Mel Butler, his dad.

["An Old Wolf Whistle"] ♪ I'll track you down fun ♪ ♪ And the chase has begun ♪ ♪ My lonely heart is filled with pain ♪ ♪ I looked around the city ♪ - Jack called me and said, "Wade, I am going to move to Nashville and try to make it as an artist."

He got a job as a disc jockey at WLAC.

It's a big 50,000 watt radio station in Nashville.

He made some records.

He toured with some country music artists.

And Jack was a very gifted guitar player.

♪ And it's my night to prowl ♪ ♪ Bop, bop, boppa-bop-bop ♪ - I don't think any of them went very far.

I mean it's hard to have your own label and get it out there.

- He gave up on Nashville and moved back to Clinton.

And sadly, he passed away at a relatively young age, mid to late 40s.

Way too young.

I always had the feeling that his life trajectory didn't end up like it should have, 'cause he was very talented.

- I tell people that are trying to make it in music, don't obsess over the end, the goal.

Enjoy it today, 'cause these will be the good old days.

Here we go.

One, two.

["Remember Me"] ♪ The sweetest song belong to lovers in the gloaming ♪ ♪ The sweetest days were days that used to be ♪ ♪ The saddest words I ever heard were words of parting ♪ ♪ When you said sweetheart remember me ♪ ♪ Remember me ♪ - [C.D.]

What do people do that don't play music?

You can escape from your problems.

It still excites me today.

♪ Close of a long long day ♪ - I get up every day that I wanna learn something new about music.

♪ All alone I'm dreaming ♪ ♪ Just to know you still remember me ♪ [lively country music] - One weekend I was on a weekend golfing trip with some people at a club I'm a member of.

He said, "Well, we have a jam session every two weeks at my house.

Why don't you come and join us?"

And as it turned out, about four of us started a band after that and that's been 20 some years ago.

[lively country music] - The name of our band is Bloomsbury, that I'm in now and have been since law school.

[lively country music fades] ["Paw Ain't Got A Cent"] ♪ Paw was a right good feller ♪ ♪ But he ain't got no sense ♪ - Oh, I look back on it with great fondness, great happiness, some of the happiest moments of my life and feel very fortunate and blessed to have had that.

♪ His money in wine, beer and liquor ♪ - I enjoyed it as a kid.

I enjoyed doing it.

I enjoyed the notoriety that we got from it.

And it was a positive experience for me.

I had a lot of fun and a lot of good experience and met a lot of interesting people.

- We were legends in our own minds.

I mean we were big time in our own little provincial world.

[laughs] ["Paw Ain't Got A Cent"] ♪ Maw gets mighty evil ♪ ♪ And a showdown's drawing near ♪ ♪ When the coffee can is empty ♪ ♪ And the pantry's full of beer ♪ ♪ But Paw don't stay to listen ♪ ♪ To what she has to say ♪ ♪ He packed his lunchbox full of brew ♪ ♪ And he's on his way ♪ ♪ Paw invest his money in wine, beer and liquor ♪ ♪ I don't know what we're all coming to ♪ ♪ He ain't got a cent to throw away on groceries ♪ ♪ And Maw's so mad she don't know what to do ♪