It's getting to be that time again...when ragtime musicians and their supporters gear up for the World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest and Festival. And this year, the plot thickens.
The reason: After four decades of the event taking place in (as things turned out) four cities in Illinois (Monticello, Decatur, Peoria, and East Peoria), old-time piano's biggest competition (well, at least on American soil) begins a new chapter...on and around the campus of the University of Mississippi. This year's dates: 5-26/30-2016.
I won't get to go to Oxford, MS this time around. And the culprit is the cataract in my left eye. (It's going to have to be removed later this year or early in 2017, depending on when or if I'm able to receive a bonus from the plastics factory that currently employs me. And the eye-care clinic performing the surgery wants $1,500 up front- and the retina surgery I underwent on 12-14-2015 completely paid up- before an ophthalmologist can touch my left eyeball again.)
You bet I've got health insurance through my place of work.
It's just that, with its $1,500 deductible, the insurance is worthless when the staff at the eye clinic you trade with tells you: "We're going to have to shoot a laser into your eye."
Result: I've decided to retire from OTPP competition and focus on performing here in the Omaha/Council Bluffs/Bellevue area.
I came back to this area on 3-29-1997, and as a result, I couldn't make the trip to Decatur that Memorial Day weekend (hadn't racked enough vacation time at my then-new gig as a data storage technician for an infotech firm).
So...I made gearing up for OTPP '98 one of my goals.
The 1997 Decatur experience featured an eighteen-player field (fourteen in the Regular Division and four in the Junior Division) in which Brian Holland grabbed the Traveling Trophy for the first time...and Noah Harmon beat out Mindy Dunkle on technical points for the JD title.
The next year, Noah, Mindy, and their fellow 1997 JD competitors John Clark and Neil Blaze had to fight off seven new younger contestants: Kara Huber, Peter Segrist, Joe King, Katrina Kappes, Noah's younger brother Zack, and two names we'd hear from during the decade to come: An Illinoisan named Harrison Wade and a 12-year-old Marylander named Adam Yarian.
Meanwhile, the adult field saw a 50% increase in size over its 1997 counterpart. First of all, Patrick Kelly, Theresa Milhoan, Bruce Walker, a Tennessean named Michael Stalcup, and a Kentuckian by the name of Allen Dale (maybe you've seen Allen's YouTube offerings) entered the OTPP wars for the first time. And then Mimi Blais, Will Hahn, and I came back after a year's absence. (Gale Foehner, Arlene Stoller, and defending RD finalists Adam Downey and Steve Kummer were no-shows this time around.)
To top it all off, Floridian Dorothy Baldwin came back to C&F competition after a nine-year gulf...while Noah's and Zack's dad (and Linda's hubby) John ended an eleven-year sabbatical from going after the Big Loot.
Not since the Kaizers in the middle 1980s had a whole family tried to grab the top OTPP prizes. As it all shook out in '98 for the Harmons of Winneconne, WI, it was Mother and Oldest Son Know Best. (Noah lost his Junior Division crown...but he still outplayed Zack. What's more, Linda snared a place in the Reg Top Ten...leaving John behind.)
With Mimi back to perform her brand of sorcery on the contest piano ("Moby Dink," a Weber upright built in 1883), she and Brian made it a two-person RD race. And Theresa (a teacher from Illinois) initially looked like a Top Five pianist.
As Theresa flamed out in the Reg Division semifinals, Mimi broke a preliminary-round tie between herself and Brian to take a one-point semifinal lead...that evaporated when Brian aced his RD finals test, thanks to killer versions of "I've Found a New Baby" and "Handful of Keys." The Man from Indiana stood tallest again, while Mimi, Marty Mincer, John Skaggs, and Bill Edwards rounded out the division's money winners.
The biggest news in Decatur that May came in the JDs. Neil was hoping 1998 would be his year...but it actually was the year old-time piano fans found out about Adam Yarian's greatness.
A new force had emerged.
Instead of 32 pianists (the record-setting 1998 total; the old mark was 31 in 1984) duking it out, 25 showed up in the Holiday Inn Select's green room on 5-29-1999. Of the previous year's newcomers in the RDs, only Michael and Bruce came back for 1999 in their quest to prevent Brian from becoming the fourth pianist to get three straight Reg championships. In addition, only one newcomer enlisted in that division: Tom Cortese. And Marty Sammon (the JD champ in 1994 and 1995) made it into the ranks of the RDs this time around- his first contact with OTPP pressure in four years.
By contrast, the Danville Connection made its debut in the Junior Division bracket.
"The Danville What?" Well, a Danville, IL pianist and teacher named Bev Wolf started getting some of her students into OTPP; the first ones were 1999 combatants Ashley Leverenz, Erin Long, and Marcie Hunt.
Fellow Illinoisans Jerry Ailshie and Amanda Benoit joined Marcie, Ashley, and Erin as contest newcomers in the JDs for the last (or next-to-last, depending on your point of view) year of the 20th Century.
Jerry outpointed all the other newcomers (Tom included!), but it just wasn't enough to keep Adam Y. out of the driver's seat in the younger division.
Meanwhile, the 1999 Regular Division race was looking like the one from the year before...except that Mimi was clearly ahead of Brian during the first two rounds. (There'd be no stopping her this time, and she'd bring the $1,200 top prize back to Montreal, QC.)
"Oh, yeah?" said Brian.
With another nearly flawless final round (it included "Dallas Blues" and Scott Joplin's "New Era Rag"), Brian put his name next to those of Dorothy Herrold, Mark Haldorson, and Ron Trotta.
He closed out an era and became, at 27, the youngest three-time undefeated RD champ ever.
And so, the next question became: "With Brian Holland retiring unbeaten, who's gonna rule the Regular Division now?"
Stay with us and we'll find out.
Out of the 127 total artists on Billboard's Power 100 List for 2015, 15 of the acts were female. (Never mind that Lana Del Rey made the cover of the magazine the very week the list was published.)
PRS for Music found out that out of 95,000 composers and songwriters, just 13% were born female.
Less than 5% of established engineers and producers in the music industry are women.
When it comes to people in said profession making at least $30,000 per year, 22% of men in the field get to bring home that kind of bacon...but only 6% of women do.
And according to Creative & Cultural Skills, men have 68% of all the jobs in the music industry, women the remaining 32%.
All the jobs...and that, of course, includes Del Rey and other recording artists.
Seems as if, since the 20th Century came to an end, the percentage of women placing their tunes on Billboard's various US music charts has dwindled...even with Taylor Swift, Beyonce Knowles, Carrie Underwood, Iggy Azalea, and some other big names joining Del Rey at the top.
It's not just in rock or country or hip-hop/R&B [with hip-hop/R&B having a long history of being more paternalistic than the other aforementioned forms of music...which, in part, might be understandable when you consider the great lengths America's biggest social-and-cultural leaders (and leaders of other kinds) have gone to ever since the early 17th Century to treat African-American males as less than human beings, let alone as adults, in addition to denying any manhood in African-American males].
That's another can of worms in itself.
Anyway, I've noticed how the percentage of female performers competing in the World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest and Festival (this year's event takes place in Oxford, MS, next month) has been evaporating since the current century got under way. (In 1999, seven female contestants went at it, at a time when the Holiday Inn Select in Decatur, IL, was the contest site; the next year, six did.) Thus far this year, only one woman- first-time Regular Division contestant Anita Malhotra, from Gatineau, QC, Canada- has pledged to go after the Big Money.
Last year, the final Illinois (East Peoria) OTPP iteration saw five female pianists- four in the Junior Division- step up to the challenge. And the Reg Division would've been a fraternity for the second straight year if contest coordinator Faye Ballard hadn't signed up to join JDs Nina Freeman, Megan Jobe, Mia Yara, and Amberlyn Aimone.
Besides being in a ragtime club here in the Omaha/Council Bluffs/Bellevue area, I'm in the local chapter of the American Theatre Organ Society. When I joined the River City Theatre Organ Society in late 1984 (and subsequently got involved in ATOS, too), several women were concertizing all over at least the United States on Mighty Wurlitzers and on competing brands of theater pipe organs.
Since then, only Donna Parker and Patti Simon Zollman are still out there
...having outlasted equally-outstanding organists like Melissa Ambrose and Candi Carley-Roth. [In addition, death robbed the world of Edna Sellers (in 1989) and her daughter, Barbara Sellers Matranga (who passed away in 2014). And those deaths sandwiched that of Rosa Rio (in 2010).]
Been thinking about all of this for the last few days, and I've got just one question about all this:
"What in the world happened to put more women and girls on music's sidelines?"
Even with YouTube, Vimeo, and other video-oriented sites right here on the Web, the playing field (no pun intended) is still lopsided.
One of the factors skewing the whole situation came into prominence in the early 1980s.
That's right: Music videos.
Eventually, things got to the point where, if you wanted to sign a recording contract (especially if you were born with a vagina), you had to be some kind of attractive before given the chance to have something to say.
TV shows like American Idol haven't helped, either. On that now-deceased series, the judges found room for NFL-sized (and enormously-talented) Ruben Studdard, the show's 2003 champ.
Two years later, Missy, Mandy, and Erin Maynard tried out for the show...but Simon Cowell labeled the threesome as "too fat!"
Result: In today's music industry, there's no room for the Cass Elliots and Spanky McFarlands anymore. (Remember what happened to Carnie Wilson? Remember how she was treated, especially by video directors?)
Last year, Pitchfork senior editor Jessica Hopper put out a Twitter call that went like this:
The responses came by the hundreds.
I read every last one of them.
You talk about infuriating!
More often than not, this is what greets you if you're female and want to become a musician and/or vocalist. More often than not, some you-know-whats are going to tell you that you just don't belong...regardless of what you've got to say.
If you've ever been the parent of a daughter, what was your reaction when she told you that she wanted to play a musical instrument...especially one usually associated with boys?
If you're a music teacher at an elementary school (or at a middle school or a high school), if you've discouraged any female students from taking up the axes of their dreams (especially the instruments usually associated with male students), then you're part of the problem.
Admit it. Don't kid yourself.
If you've ever said or written "Girl bands suck" or "Chick bands suck," you're- let's face it- part of the problem.
It's long been time to encourage people who want to sing and/or play...regardless of gender. We need to hear as many voices as possible, and we need to take their efforts seriously.
Roughly half the people in this world are female...and music, among other activities, loses when women (and other marginalized people) aren't allowed to be heard.
After all, good is good.
You can find Hopper's Twitter call at https://storify.com/Laupina_/from-the-margins. And you're invited to visit coastalbeatsmedia.com/2016/03/29, where Gabby authored a fine post, "Editor's Essay: Women in the Music Industry," where I got some of the info found on the post you've been reading.
This year, I've been following more NCAA Division 1 women's basketball tournament games than NCAA Division 1 men's basketball tourney ones.
The big reason: I'm upset at CBS CEO Les Moonves for crowing that the sexist, racist, homophobic, religiophobic, etc., etc. rantings of Donald Trump and other 2016 Republican presidential candidates are "good for CBS." Moonves likes how all the excrement slung by the Elephants' office seekers means more advertising money for the folks at the Eye Network. (Never mind the continuing corrosive effect the propagation of hate has on the collective American conversation.)
So while I'm watching ESPN and ESPN2 whenever they show D-1 women's tourney contests, it's TBS and TNT for me when it comes to seeing D-1 men's tourney teams play. (To get truTV, I'd have to pay my local cable outlet for another tier of channels.)
Speaking of ESPN2...I was watching this afternoon's Tennessee-Syracuse game (the Orange won the Midwest Regional final, 89-67, to get into the D-1 Women's Final Four for the first time in program history) when I saw the scroll on the bottom of the screen: "Geno Auriemma won't apologize for his team's success."
Why should he?
Yesterday, his Connecticut Huskies mauled, crushed, demolished, and crucified Mississippi State, 98-38,
for the biggest victory margin in any regional or Final Four game since the NCAA started conducting a Division 1 women's hoops tourney in 1982. (The 60-point margin topped the 51-point difference between UConn and Texas in one of last season's East Regional semifinals.)
It was the 72nd straight time Breanna Stewart and Co. won a game; Stewart led the way with 22 points, 14 rebounds, and five blocks.
After the game (one in which the Huskies put in the game's first 13 points, enjoyed a 32-4 lead on the Bulldogs, then stretched it to 61-12 at the end of the first half), Auriemma fielded a reporter's question about whether Connecticut's total domination of D-1 women's b-ball- three straight championships and ten overall coming into this 2015-16 season- is killing the sport.
The head coach with the most Division 1 women's basketball titles ever wasn't pleased with the question.
"When Tiger (Woods) was winning every major, nobody said he was bad for golf," said the Man from Philadelphia. In fact, Woods' phenomenal success drew more fans to golf as the 20th Century was getting ready to make way for the 21st Century.
What's more, Tiger's presence on the links made the other PGA golfers step up their game.
Result: Since the current century began, golfers like Phil Mickelson, Padraig Harrington, Zack Johnson, and- more recently- Rory McIlroy, Bubba Watson, and Jordan Spieth have shown they can frequently come away with The Big Check, too.
Same thing happened in NCAA Division 1 men's basketball...which, from the 1963-64 campaign to the 1974-75 season, was in the grip of one team: John Wooden's UCLA Bruins.
The Bruins took ten of the twelve D-1 men's titles offered during that span of time. It would've been twelve straight if Texas Western hadn't stopped Kentucky, 72-65, to end the 1965-66 season- a season where Oregon State interrupted UCLA's reign in the old AAWU (now, of course, called the Pac-12); and if, in 1973-74, North Carolina State hadn't beaten Marquette, 76-64...after the Wolfpack dethroned the Bruins, 80-77, a couple of days earlier.
By the way...a year after their school won it all in men's hoops, Texas Western College of the University of Texas officials changed their institution's name to the University of Texas at El Paso.
Wooden showed that he could get UCLA to the top with any kind of team, be it a run-and-gun kind, a patient team, or one headlined by a certain 7-2 center who, while still in high school, had college recruiters all over the country knocking each other over to sign him.
Lots of other head men's hoops coaches breathed heavy, heavy sighs of relief when John decided to hang up his whistle after the 1974-75 season...a campaign that ended when UCLA thwarted Kentucky, 92-85.
That's how the 37th NCAA D-1 men's hoops tourney ended. Before the Blue and Gold seized control of men's D-1 roundball, 18 different squads had won the first 25 NCAA D-1 men's basketball tournaments, starting with Oregon (the 1938-39 kingpin). And Kentucky was the sport's gold standard, with four championships- 1947-48, 1948-49, 1950-51, and 1957-58.
By the time the 1974-75 season ended, 21 teams had won the 37 NCAA D-1 men's b-ball tourneys. Since then, 14 others had taken the pot of gold for the first time ever.
And men's college basketball has grown exponentially in popularity since then...to the point where the gender's D-1 Big Dance is the NCAA's most lucrative event. (An event where this country's president fills out a bracket every March, just like millions of other Americans.)
While the 78th NCAA D-1 men's hoops tournament is going on, the 35th NCAA D-1 women's basketball tourney is also happening.
And, as Geno will tell you, it's all taking place at a time similar to what was happening in men's Division 1 ball during the 1963-64/1974-75 era.
Connecticut's first D-1 women's title came at the end of the 1994-95 season. Before that, eight different clubs claimed the first 13 NCAA Division 1 women's basketball tournaments, with Tennessee leading the way (the Volunteers, then under Pat Summitt, were tops in 1986-87, 1988-89, and 1990-91).
Since UConn got that first notch, teams headed up by Auriemma and Summitt nailed down 14 of the next 20 titles in D-1 women's roundball...with Tennessee grabbing three championships in a row from 1995-96 to 1997-98,
then triumphing in 2006-07 (the act that angered Rutgers fan Don Imus) and 2007-08.
Five other teams accounted for the other six championships of the 1995-96/2014-15 period- Purdue (in 1998-99), Notre Dame (whose 2000-01 title prevented what ultimately could've been a UConn five-peat), Baylor (the only one able to go for seconds; the Bears followed up their 2004-05 championship by ruling in 2011-12), Maryland (the winner in 2005-06), and Texas A&M (which took it all in 2010-11).
So, that's it...coming into March Madness 2016, 14 different squads have won the first 34 NCAA D-1 women's b-ball tournaments.
At this very moment, the Huskies are working on a four-peat.
But first, they'll have to take the Longhorns out of the way tomorrow night to win the East Regional.
Two more victories after that, and Auriemma will get his eleventh title as a head coach...and he'll pass Wooden in the process.
The way I see it, Connecticut's success (that's putting it mildly) in D-1 women's basketball isn't killing the sport.
Media apathy toward the game is.
I mean, it hurts to turn on one of Disney's ESPN networks each March and find a good, good game being played in front of...rows and rows of empty seats.
It hurts, too, that these same media people- even those at Disney- don't lavish the same attention on women's ball as they do on men's ball. The scrolls themselves offer a clue: Rarely this season were you told how many points Stewart had in this or that game. (By contrast, Georges Niang's name was almost always seen in the scrolls here in 2015-16.)
Listen...Iowa State's Niang and Connecticut's Stewart were two of college basketball's leading players these last four seasons. Let's give 'em BOTH shout-outs!
And that speaks to something else.
How committed are many of the NCAA's Division 1 schools to their women's basketball teams?
Not just in money...but in spirit.
It's been 44 years now since Title 9 became law...and it hurts that, 44 years later, lots of resentment continues to exist over the law. The resentment not only shows up on TV and on sports radio, but in no telling how many athletic departments at no telling how many schools here in America.
How much support do the Breanna Stewarts really have, given- let's face it- America's anti-female heritage?
Breanna herself had one real answer to giving women's NCAA basketball a boost:
"Teams need to get better, players need to get better, and that starts from before we even get to college."
John Wooden had no problem with women's college basketball. He, in fact, called it a purer form of the sport than the men's kind.
I've always thought athletes were athletes, regardless of gender.
How about you?
Wendy Holcombe's effort to become an all-around entertainer hit a couple of huge bumps in 1981-82.
First of all, in the summer of 1981, the pilot the Alabaster, AL native did for NBC, the sitcom Wendy Hooper, US Army, didn't get picked up (America's TV viewers hitched their wagons to another Army-based comedy, CBS' Private Benjamin, which presented Lorna Patterson in the role made famous by Goldie Hawn in the previous year's big-screen hit of that name).
Had Wendy Hooper caught on, Holcombe (then 18 years old) would've been one of the youngest to ever get top billing on a prime-time sitcom on American television. (Jay North was just seven in 1959, the year he landed the show that gave him his fame: Dennis the Menace.)
Bill's and Helen's multiinstrumentalist-singer-comic daughter got a sitcom anyway when, on 10-29-1981, Lewis & Clark premiered on NBC.
The same viewers who kept WHUSA from joining the Peacock Network's 1981-82 schedule stayed with L&C's biggest Thursday-night competition, CBS' Magnum, P.I. (That crime drama- the one that made a household name out of Tom Selleck- survived its rookie campaign, the 1980-81 season.)
Not even a pair of time-slot changes could save Lewis & Clark, where Holcombe played a server (okay, waitress) in the Luckenback, TX nightclub run by Gabe Kaplan and Guich Koock.
Even if many people couldn't get into Wendy Holcombe the actor, they still fell head over heels in love with Wendy Holcombe the musician. And some extra proof of that came in 1983, when Wendy, her hubby Tom Blosser, and their band traveled to Israel to play alongside bluegrass legends Bill Monroe and Mac Wiseman.
Not long after that, Tom and Wendy turned their 1983 travels into a world tour, focusing on Australia, New Zealand, and several Asian countries.
The closing act on that international tour: None other than Perry Como.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, the banjo-playing wife and her bass-playing husband set up shop in Florida, only to move to North Carolina...to get closer to relatives.
And a year or so before WLH and TYB set out for their overseas tour, Wendy Lou started performing alongside fellow banjoist Buck Trent.
Their performances set that twosome up for a 1982 Music City News Bluegrass Act of the Year award nomination. Later on, the Country Music Association nominated them for Instrumentalists of the Year.
All this time, Wendy was performing despite a degenerative heart condition (first diagnosed at an early age).
By the middle 1980s, that heart condition (technically known as cardiomyopathy; in lay terms, enlargement of the heart) wasn't improving.
Several times, an ambulance would arrive at the Holcombe-Blosser house to pick Wendy up...but she'd beat the odds whenever they were stacked against her recovery.
Then came that ill-fated Saturday...the seventh Saturday of 1987.
Country music's much the poorer because of Wendy's 2-14-1987 death. The Alabaster Kid strove for perfection in everything she did...including in her musical endeavors. And that pursuit of perfection showed whenever she appeared in front of any kind of live audience or whenever Wendy appeared in front of a set of TV cameras.
Even if you and I can't go online and find Holcombe's acting performances (you'll strike out on www.youtube.com if you're looking for Lewis & Clark episodes), there's plenty of audio evidence (the posthumously-released CD "Memories of Wendy" is finally available...on www.cdbaby.com as well as www.amazon.com) and plenty of video evidence right here on the Internet that Cindy's and "Muley's" sister was a powerful musician.
And a powerful, energetic, enthusiastic influence.
Wendy, I'm glad you came along...and I'm glad you brought so many great things.
It was 1980, and Nashville on the Road's Wendy Holcombe was knockin' 'em dead...not only on that syndicated TV show, but also as a guest on other series (as well as that 1979 ABC special, "Merry Christmas from the Grand Ole Opry," cohosted by WKRP in Cincinnati's Loni Anderson and Vega$' Bob Urich).
And then there were the personal appearances the Alabaster Kid made, where audiences got a chance- up close and personal- to check out her infectious brand of banjo pickin', fiddlin', guitar playing, and vocalizing.
One thing was still missing: A recording contract with a major or not-so-major label.
All Wendy's NOTR partners were cutting sides. I mean, Jim Ed Brown was still recording for RCA (he was heading for 25 years with the label...going back to when Jim Ed and his sisters Maxine and Bonnie were a trio, the Browns). Helen Cornelius joined RCA in 1976 and immediately teamed up with Jim Ed; the next year (same one in which the label's biggest star passed away at age 42), Helen became a regular on Nashville on the Road.
Jerry Clower's comedy albums (on MCA) were selling pretty well, too.
But you still couldn't go to your favorite record store and pick up Holcombe's latest LP/8-track cartridge/cassette.
There was no such thing (unless you were into bootlegging).
But you could still watch WLH on TV...not only on NOTR,
but also on shows like Hee Haw.
About the time Wendy started doing guest shots on Roy Clark's and Buck Owens' biggest gig, she met a bass player named Thomas Yoshiro Blosser (he turned 29 in 1980). Not long after that initial Hee Haw taping, Tom started playing bass in Wendy's band.
Tom already had a pedigree in country music, backing up some of the music's biggest names (such as Louise Mandrell).
TYB (born Yoshiro Sudo) came into the world 11-3-1951 in Muroran, Japan; in 1957, a Mennonite missionary couple named Eugene and Louella Blosser adopted him...and changed the little boy's name.
In Muroran, Tom had a biological brother and a biological sister...and they were all raised by their grandmother once the children's parents passed out of the picture.
Toward the end of '57, Louella and Eugene (whose biological children were Philip and Rachel), living and parenting- to say nothing of doing missionary work- in Japan at the time, got the chance to add another child to their family (a prospect that lighted little Philip's fire).
Enter Yoshiro/Tom.
And he and Phil hit it off immediately.
By 1959, the Blossers of Sapporo started making regular trips to the United States...and on one of those, Thomas became a naturalized American citizen.
Back in Japan, Phil and Tom eventually attended middle school in Sapporo before going on to high school in Tokyo.
In Tokyo, they found out that Tom had chops- he could play a mean guitar. In fact, he and his older adopted brother finished off a talent show at the high school by singing "Mrs. Robinson."
The fundamentalists in the audience weren't looking for that.
Phil and Tom next went to college...here in the US. Tom chose a two-year institution, Hesston College (in Hesston, KS).
It didn't really work out.
TYB's heart was in music, and he spent most of the 1970s playing guitar and bass (mostly bass) in all sorts of bands- rock, R&B, and country.
It all stood him in good stead by the time he and Wendy got together.
And it wasn't long before Blosser's and Holcombe's musical relationship became a marital one, too.
But first...Wendy had a chance to fulfill her dream of becoming a complete entertainer.
In 1981, NBC offered Cindy's and "Muley's" sister her own TV series: Wendy Hooper, US Army. It was all about an outgoing, banjo-playing girl who thought that joining the Army would advance her country-music career.
The pilot episode aired on Friday, 8-14-1981. (I had a chance to watch it...and I didn't think Wendy Hooper was too bad.)
The show's other viewers and I were badly outnumbered. After all, the WHUSA pilot came on four months and eight days after CBS turned Goldie Hawn's 1980 romp, "Private Benjamin," into a full-fledged series.
With Lorna Patterson (you might remember her from another 1980 movie, "Airplane!") taking over from Hawn, most of America's TV viewers didn't feel like supporting two prime-time sitcoms about young women coming in from left field to join the branch that gave Dwight Eisenhower and Colin Powell their first tastes of fame.
And besides, "Airplane!" showed that Patterson could sing and play the guitar, too.
Peacock Network potentates weren't done trying to turn Wendy Lou Holcombe into an actor. Her next acting try, Lewis & Clark, made it into the 1981-82 NBC schedule.
Lewis & Clark (it debuted 10-29-1981) was Gabe Kaplan's followup to Welcome Back, Kotter and the series Guich Koock did after Carter Country. In addition, the show featured a pre-Mr. Belvedere Ilene Graff (as Kaplan's wife) and an Amy Linker who, as things turned out, was one season away from teaming up with Sarah Jessica Parker on the critically-acclaimed Square Pegs.
And David Hollander (he, too, from "Airplane!") was along to play Linker's brother.
Anyway, Kaplan played a native New Yorker who wanted to open up a country-music nightclub...but not in the Big Apple.
The club was going to be in Luckenback, TX...away from Fun City's hustle and bustle.
Well, the nitery was called the Nassau County Cafe. And Koock played its manager, while Holcombe was its sole server (okay, waitress).
Despite a shift from Thursday nights to Saturday nights (and then one to Friday nights), L&C never caught on...probably because viewers thought Gabe needed better "Sweathogs" than Wendy, Guich, Clifton James (the show's town drunk), and Michael McManus (the bartender).
To top it off, Julie Kotter (played by Marcia Strassman) never had kids!
So it was back to playing and singing country and bluegrass for Wendy Holcombe...with her new hubby, Thomas Blosser, by her side on bass.
When we come back, we'll look at how Wendy's last years turned out.
For the last week and a half, I'd been thinking about a young performer who was a regular on a syndicated TV series called Nashville on the Road. She was a regular on this country music show from its debut in 1975 to 1981 (NOTR limped along for another two years afterwards).
At first, the show's cohosts were singer Jim Ed Brown and comic Jerry Clower; every week, they'd introduce a guest or two (as well as the show's two regular acts).
That's right...I like almost all forms of music, and that includes country.
One late Saturday night in 1976, I was flipping channels...and ran into Nashville on the Road, which, at that time, was locally (the Des Moines/Ames area) on WOI-TV, the Des Moines/Ames area's ABC station.
I noticed this thirteen-year-old girl who was picking a mean, mean banjo and moving along to her own (and her bandmates') beat.
She hooked me...and things got to the point where, every Saturday night at 10:30 PM (Central time), I'd flip the station over to "ABC5" and check out Jim Ed, Jerry, the Cates Sisters (their successors, the Fairchilds, were replaced in 1977 by singer Helen Cornelius), and that young instrumentalist-singer-comic.
Instead of getting ready to blow out 53 candles this coming 4-19-2016, Wendy Lou Holcombe passed away on 2-14-1987.
At age 23.
Of a heart attack.
At the time Wendy died, I was into my first stint of living here in Omaha...and working two jobs (I was an inventory specialist and a pizza-delivery driver at this time in 1987). I was coming back from my job at Domino's (that's right, THAT Domino's) when I turned on my TV, started flipping through channels, and I stopped at The Nashville Network...the forerunner of today's Spike.
When the news came on about the death of the most famous performer to ever come out of Alabaster, AL, I was completely flabbergasted.
Wendy Holcombe- that total bundle of energy- dead? At 23? Of heart failure? How'd that happen?
Then I got to thinking about the fact that not one single sizable recording company offered her a contract.
What stopped the record industry's Billy Sherrills, Owen Bradleys, and Chet Atkinses from having Holcombe sign her John Hancock to a recording contract? If not age, what?
I still, to this very day, feel it all came down to dirty rotten, filthy sexism.
I mean, at a time when Dolly Parton, Barbara Mandrell, and Roni Stoneman (she of Hee Haw fame) were showing what they could do with five strings, the thinking in corporate boardrooms was (and, in too many cases, still is) that a banjo is a man's instrument. After all, Uncle Dave Macon, Grandpa Jones, and Earl Scruggs led the way. (Oops...I should've mentioned Earl first!)
A man's instrument.
That was the way it was supposed to work out in the house where Bill and Helen Holcombe were raising their three children when, sometime in 1974, Bill brought a used banjo home (it even came with an instruction booklet and an instruction record).
Bill struggled for two months to be the next Roy Clark or, well, Earl Scruggs...but, in the end, he couldn't even get one tune down. Wendy begged for the chance to see what she could do with that banjo, only to get turned down by her father: "This banjo is too expensive for you to fool around with."
Wendy found an ally in her mother.
Helen let the then eleven-year-old pick around with Bill's pride-and-joy while Bill was off at his nine-to-five. By the time that afternoon session came to end, Wendy mastered "Mountain Dew" and other numbers her dad tried to learn.
And when Bill came home from his job, he was so impressed with Wendy's version of "Dew" that he let her keep the same banjo he'd struggled with.
Helen's and Bill's little daughter practiced on that banjo day and night; she'd take it out to the Holcombes' barn and try her music out on her cows, goats, and horses.
It paid off, because Wendy went on to win $50 at a county fair talent show...and that led to her going to nearby Birmingham to appear on TV's The Country Boy Eddie Show.
WLH's big break was just up the road...Interstate 65, that is.
After seven months of pickin', Wendy wanted to go to Nashville's Grand Ole Opry to celebrate her twelfth birthday.
Bill and Wendy couldn't get tickets (you needed- and still need- to get those ducats in advance), so father and daughter decided to hang around Music City for a few hours. At the first music shop they ran into, WLH saw a snazzy-looking banjo and asked for permission to test it out.
Holcombe's version of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" attracted the bass player in Stoneman's band. He then took the young picker and her dad to a nightclub, where she played a few songs onstage...while "Billy Jack" met a promoter who said he could get the Two Holcombes backstage at Opryland.
That's where Wendy Holcombe met Roy Acuff.
Next thing she knew, she ended up backstage playing alongside his Smoky Mountain Boys, Jones, and several other Opry regulars. And that led to an appearance the next night at the "Midnight Jamboree" at Ernest Tubb's Record Shop.
And that spawned appearances on two other TV shows: The Porter Wagoner Show and Pop! Goes the Country.
And then...and then...in the fall of '75: NOTR, put out by the same production company that came up with Pop! Goes the Country.
Because of Nashville on the Road, Wendy Lou closed out 1975 by fulfilling her lifelong wish.
She performed at the Grand Ole Opry.
On the main stage this time.
And what's more, Wendy Lou worked alongside Jim Ed at the Opry that night.
With Nashville on the Road becoming a hit, things continued to look up for "Muley's" and Cindy's kid sister, who went on to master the fiddle, the guitar, the mandolin, and the dobro...and topped that off by playing trumpet in her school's band back in Alabaster.
All of that from a teenager who, at first, took piano lessons.
And as the 1970s started to morph into the 1980s, Wendy wanted to become a total entertainer. (She wanted to try acting...and in the process, follow Johnny Cash.)
Non-NOTR TV appearances began to mount up for the Alabaster Kid; they included turns on shows like Big Blue Marble, The Mike Douglas Show, and The New Mickey Mouse Club. And in 1979, she appeared on a Christmas special on ABC; the show was hosted by none other than Loni Anderson, of WKRP in Cincinnati fame; and Robert Urich, who was knocking 'em dead on that network's (ABC's) Vega$.
Well, a guest shot on Hee Haw took Wendy's life in another direction...and we're going to look at that direction when we come back.
SHOUT-OUT TIME: A lot of this information came from an excellent Website, www.wendyholcombe.com. (Check it out whenever you get a chance!)
