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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Country hall adds three

Clark, Mandrell, McCoy join greats

Charlie McCoy, left, Barbara Mandrell and Roy Clark,  have been voted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.  (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
Peter Cooper The Tennessean

Three country musicians – linked by recording sessions, television appearances and friendships – have achieved country music’s highest honor.

Barbara Mandrell, Roy Clark and Charlie McCoy have been announced as the next three inductees into the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tenn. Chosen by the Country Music Association’s anonymous, roughly 300-member panel of electors, the three honored musicians will increase the hall’s membership to 108 when they are officially inducted at a Medallion Ceremony this spring.

“This is the pinnacle,” said Mandrell, who helped usher in a new era of country music showmanship in the 1970s and who brought country to 40 million viewers per week in the early 1980s through the NBC-TV series “Barbara Mandrell & the Mandrell Sisters.”

Mandrell hits such as “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool” featured McCoy on harmonica, and she appeared with Clark on many stages over the years. Clark was a co-host of “Hee Haw,” the syndicated television program on which McCoy served as musical director for 18 years.

The three are connected as musicians who were not defined by television but who used the burgeoning medium to full advantage.

“The camera was very kind to me, and I consider myself to be a television baby,” said Clark, who first appeared on Washington, D.C.-area television in 1947. “At first, it wasn’t that I was so talented, but they had to fill time and they had to put somebody on. So they’d say, ’Well, let’s get the kid.’ Later, I got to where when I looked at a camera, I didn’t see a mechanical device. I saw a person.”

McCoy thrived in studio

Except for his time on “Hee Haw,” many of McCoy’s major achievements came out of the limelight. He thrived in the recording studio, where he was a member of Nashville’s A-Team of musicians, and he is the most recorded harmonica player in history.

His harp is heard on smashes including George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and Tom T. Hall’s “Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine,” and he also contributed to sessions on guitar, bass, vocals, keyboards, horns and other instruments. A founding member of the band Area Code 615, McCoy was voted into the hall in the “Recording and/or Touring Musician Active Prior to 1980” category.

“I didn’t approach a session on bass any differently than one on harmonica,” said McCoy, whose bass is heard on the entirety of Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding album and who also played guitar on Dylan’s “Desolation Row” and trumpet on Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.”

“Learning to play a lot of instruments kept me here in Nashville all these years,” he said.

Mel Tillis heard McCoy playing in a Florida club in 1959 and stutteringly persuaded the young musician to head to Nashville. Tillis told McCoy that he would be able to get a record deal, which McCoy said was “like showing a steak to a wolf.”

In Nashville, McCoy first recorded as a singer and guitarist, but soon wound up playing harmonica on hits by Ann-Margret and Roy Orbison. McCoy’s instantly identifiable harmonica playing reinvented the instrument’s possibilities and brought the harp back to popularity in Nashville sessions.

McCoy also adapted Neil Matthews’ numbered vocal transcription method, taught the system to other musicians and turned the “Nashville Number System” into studio players’ standard written language.

McCoy recently surveyed the 105 plaques in the Hall’s rotunda, did some counting and determined he had recorded with 51 of the enshrined Hall of Famers, including Jones, Hall, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Vince Gill and Merle Haggard.

Clark known for guitar

A deft guitarist whose instrumental instruction books were teaching tools for many younger players, Clark scored hits including “Tips of My Fingers,” “Yesterday When I Was Young” and “Thank God and Greyhound.”

He was the first country artist to open a theater in Branson, Mo., in 1983, and his television credits include “The Tonight Show,” “The Muppet Show,” “Hollywood Squares” and, of course, “Hee Haw.” His onstage ease was honed from his early days in Nashville, when he and banjo player David “Stringbean” Akeman worked stages small and odd.

“We would play drive-in theaters, standing on the top of the projection booth,” Clark said. “If the people liked it, they’d honk their horns.”

Clark was inducted in the “Career Achieved National Prominence Between World War II and 1975” category.

Country music is ’lifeblood’

Mandrell was elected as someone who achieved prominence between 1975 and the present.

“My lifeblood is country music,” said Mandrell, who was playing saxophone and steel guitar at age 10 and was playing paid gigs a year later. She joined the Mandrell Family Band in the eighth grade, performing with father Irby and mother Mary Ellen.

Her father became her manager and aided her in moving to Nashville in 1968, where club performances quickly led to a record deal with Columbia. She had some hits on Columbia and ABC/Dot, but her career peaked as an MCA artist. While on MCA, she was named the CMA’s female vocalist of the year in 1979 and 1981, and the entertainer of the year in 1980 and 1981.

“I was taught that people don’t come to your concert to hear an album, they come to see a show,” she said. “You have to give them something visually.”