Oral History Interview with Randy Atcher

Yes, I was born in Tip Top, Ky., which is now part of the Fort Knox reservation. No, I really don’t know how it got its name. There was nothing there except a depot on the IC Railroad that went by. And it just had its name Tip Top and it could be because it is at the very top of Muldraugh Hill. I imagine that’s it. You know, up Muldraugh’s Hill and then it flattens out to get to Tip Top.

Well, my father was raised at Rogersville, Ky., which is just a little past Fort Knox on the old 31W highway. And my mother was raised at Stithon, Ky., which has now been completely taken over by the Army–by Fort Knox–but then was a little town on US 31W and she was raised there. Dad was raised at Rogersville. And they married and I suppose–well, Dad was of course a farmer. And he rented after they were married–of course I was the fifth child of eight–so there were four children already. And he rented a farm there [at Tip Top] which they called the Brooks place–the original owners were people named Brooks–and worked that farm. And that’s where I was born. And that was on Dec. 7, 1918.

We didn’t stay there any length of time at all after I was born. I have no memories of this farm at all because I left there at the age of 8 months. My grandfather and grandmother had gone to North Dakota and they got in touch with my father and mother and said there was wonderful, rich farmland up there and they should come. So they decided they would do that and the moved, as I said, I was eight months old, so that was in 1919. We went by train–Dad took all his stuff he could–and he had one favorite team of mules that he just loved so he took those up with him to North Dakota. The mules were transported by rail car–some kind of livestock car–or whatever they had at that time.

We moved to a little place called Auburn, N.D., which is 30 miles from the Canadian border in the Red River Valley of THAT area, you know. My father had never been there before. So he moved there sight unseen–on the word of my mother’s parents. And my grandparents had only been there two or three years–don’t know exactly how long–but they liked it. And the land was rich and there was a lot of it–flat land. You couldn’t homestead land at that time. But Dad and my grandfather worked 3,000 acres of land, raising wheat and Irish potatoes. Of course, I was pretty small when we got up there and there’s one story I need to tell you: My oldest brother Raymond apparently saved the life of almost every one of the children in the family. And in my case, my father used to smoke Bull Durham Tobacco and roll his own. And it came in little sacks. And I’d get those sacks and play with them, and the railroad went about 100 yards from the house that went up through there. And one day I was out sittin’ in the middle of the railroad track fillin’ those little sacks with rocks from the railroad [bed], and my brother happened to see me when a train was comin’ and he grabbed me and got me off the track just before the train got there [laughs]. One of my other brothers fell in a rain barrel head first and he was about two years older than I was and my brother happened to see that and got him out of there [laughs]. That was Francis.

Anyway, they went to North Dakota. And the many things I’ve been told about North Dakota–of course, I can kind of remember the house–it was a big ol’ two-story white frame house. That was our house, not my grandparents’. It was about a mile away from the grandparents’ house, which in North Dakota is pretty close. And in Auburn, N.D., the little town, the only thing there was about three houses, one store and a granary. And that was about all there was to the town. But I can remember the house and remember the barn–in lots of those northern places they have a covered area going out to the barn but we didn’t. Of course, Dad had two teams of big Percherons and then his team of mules. Percherons are real big horses–very good at what they do, pulling heavy loads and so on. When you’re plowin’ a field, those big feet tend to get on what’s growing, so Dad loved his team of mules ‘cause they’ve got little, small feet and he used them most all the time.

One of the things I can remember about North Dakota–my brother Bob and Raymond and my father were out bringing in hay–they’d cut the field of hay. Bob was sitting on the front of the wagon–had a rack goin’ up there–he was drivin’ the team and he was about eight, and my brother Raymond was on the wagon placing the hay, and my father was on the ground tossin’ the hay up. And the team started to run away. And my father ran up and grabbed the nearest horse by the bridle and the horse stepped on his heel and pulled him down under the wagon and the wagon ran over him and broke three or four ribs and a few things. One of the things I can remember is all the people coming to the yard in their old Model T Fords–I can remember those cars with the black tops, you know–when Dad had his ribs broken. I think the doctor came to the house and he was laid up there. And in those days on those farms, when wheat threshing time came, everybody would come to your place and do your threshing and then you would go with the rest of them to the next place–it was a cooperative thing.

I really don’t remember who the neighbors were. They might have been immigrant families–some. I don’t really remember names except I remember some McGowans. I can find out more about that because I....My older brother I was just talkin’ about is still going at the age of about 88 and I’ll be able to find out from him some of those names ‘cause he was old enough to remember. I’ll talk to him about that.

We went to church. There was a church nearby. It’s a Catholic family and Mother particularly was strong, staunch Catholic. My father was a convert. And my grandfather who was up there went we first went up was as closely to a saintly person as I have ever known on earth. His name was Robert E. Ray–we called him Papa. My mother was Mary Agnes Ray before she married. Which reminds me about a year after we got up there, they came back to Kentucky and left us up there. I can remember one other thing and that’s seeing snow up to the second-story windows–just really snowed. And that’s the primary reason, I think, that my father decided to come back to Kentucky because the winters were just something awful.

One of the things I remember that always really surprised me was the sun would come out in the day time and melt the top of the snow–would start meltin’ the snow–the snow would freeze at night and you could take a team and sled and go over the snow banks. They didn’t break through–I never could figure that out. You wouldn’t think it would melt enough to be that solid.

We had sleighs with runners. And of course, the only kind of fun things you did in the winter time was go for a sleigh ride and have some kind of a sleigh ride party, sort of. Yes, the one thing Dad always had everybody in the family doing was keeping the way clear to the barn. But many times you couldn’t get away from home. But of course they always raised everything in the way of food that we could possibly need–we had cows for milk and every winter, usually in November, if the snow hadn’t come too soon, well we’d kill hogs and have. We raised hogs up there. And Mother always had a garden going. There was no cellar in the house. But there was sort of an outside cellar; it was a place where you could put things for storage and like that. Yes, we ate lots of potatoes, had lots of potatoes to store. Of course, Dad smoked meat so there was a kind of a smokehouse attached there too. He did that much later when we came back to Kentucky.

Anyway, I was about 4 ½ when Dad decided to come back to Kentucky. And I think he’d sort of had enough of farming for a while [laughs]. So we came back to Kentucky and Kosmosdale–my grandfather and grandmother who were up there had come back to Kentucky and were at Kosmosdale which is where the Kosmos Cement factory is. And my grandfather had a garage right near the entrance to the Kosmos Cement plant. Anyway, when they came back, my dad went to work for the Kosmos Cement plant. He was just a laborer, I guess you’d call it. But my father was one of the hardest working persons I think I’ve ever seen. He was almost kind of disliked by the other employees because he would do two men’s work instead of one. It was just the way he was made up. He worked hard; he was not well-educated; he had only a fourth grade education. But knew more about things–I’ve seen him look at a house and be able to say how many board feet it would take to build it, you know. Oh, yes, he had good horse sense.

Anyway, Kosmosdale was where the first stop was and we had a little ol’ rented concrete house there for just a few months. Well, yes, that was sort of out in the country. Everything out that way was country. Kosmosdale was just a little place–very tiny place. And the cement plant was the only thing there and all the housing was cement property, owned by the cement factory. Yes, we rented one of the company’s houses. I remember it fairly well because they had some bee hives that Dad was raising bees–about four or five bee hives. And my brother Francis and I were out there playin’ around and he knocked over one of the bee hives and I got stung from the top of my head, down my back, it was just really something. I’m glad I wasn’t allergic to bee stings. I was laid up for a while but I got OK, you know.

Back then, if you lived in the country or a small town, you raised a lot of your food. But not everybody had a bee hive–it was something unusual. But when we moved from there–I’ll go into this a little bit differently–Dad decided he wanted to build a house and he liked West Point, Ky., which is just about three miles south of Kosmosdale on old 31W. Now there’s a place called Tioga Springs which is on top of Fort Hill--we always called it--[which is] Muldraugh Hill. And they had--in their time it was kind of a resort and they had people–houses that people could rent rooms in and so on–most of ‘em 2 ½ or 3 storey frame buildings. So Dad bought one of those. The rooms had 12-foot ceilings, so he bought one of those and took it down in sections. The first pre-fab house I guess I ever heard of. Anyway, he would cut a foot off the walls–cut a foot off the top, cut a foot off the bottom–still had 10-foot ceilings. Anyway, he brought that down to West Point on wagons–sunk a telephone pole in the ground and a block and tackle, and that’s the way he would put those sections in place. He was about a 2 ½ storey house when he bought it and when he rebuilt it at West Point, it was two-storey with dormers–front and back dormers. So there were four bedrooms upstairs. ‘Course, by that time, there were six children–two more came later on. Anyway, he built the house there and it was really sturdily built and everything. It’s still standing but it had to be put back. In the 1937 flood, a big ol’ tree came floating down the river and hit, I guess–anyway, knocked it loose from the foundation. And there’s sort of a slough just below the house and you could see where the house had touched and turned and turned–ended up about half a mile down the road in the schoolyard.

At this point–of course this was quite a bit later in my life–I had graduated from high school–there’s a lot to come in between–but I was going to Western Kentucky State Teachers College–it was then–at Bowlin’ Green–and knew about the flood–came home–and Dad and I took a rowboat and went out to where the house was and you could see of this two-storey place was just the comb of the roof stickin’ up out of the water. And so I quit school and came back and helped Dad along with the others to build it back. That was the 1937 flood.

Anyway, well before that, after we had come to West Point, Dad always had–right there at where we were–he had about five acres which was enough for us to grow a garden–just about everything we had. But then he would lease land and grow a heavy stand of corn and potatoes and things like that–had by this time gotten into a tractor. The old tractors. I think it was one of those old Ford tractors–iron wheels and the iron, you know. Yes, he was still working at Kosmosdale. So he had his day job and a lot of other jobs. And of course, we all had our chores to do, you know, weeding the corn and the potatoes and the things in the garden was one of the ones that took most of your time and I hated to hoe when I was a kid like that [laughs]. Yes, it was back-breaking work. But we always had plenty of vegetables and food like that at any time.

I can’t ever remember food being scarce during my youth because we always had–even during the Depression years–we always had plenty to eat ‘cause we had the gardens and everything we needed. We looked ahead; we grew our own food and preserved it. And anything that should be seeded Dan knew how to cure the seeds and get them ready for the next planting. But oh, I can remember when I was about eight or 10 we’d cut the corn for the season and we boys would get out there in the cornfield and pull up the–you know, you always leave about a foot or so of cornstalk and the root–pull ‘em up and throwin’ ‘em at each other [laughs]. Had a little fight. We did quite a bit of that.

But my mother did a whole lot of work with the garden. She knew what to do to get these things to grow, I guess, but she was often–almost always–in the garden. One sister was born in North Dakota; she’s just younger than I am. Her name’s Leonora. Then when we got back to Kentucky, brother Charles was born and my youngest sister whose name is Mary George–named after mother and father–Mother was Mary and he was George. Charles–when he was 14 years old, he used to love to roam around all the hillsides out there, up on Fort Hill, and he’d go out there and collect led shrapnel or something from the Fort Knox guns and bring it down and then he’d sell it. And he did that, oh, quite a long time. Anyway, he came back from up there one day and was not feeling well and they didn’t know what was the matter, took him to the doctor. The doctor said he had a ruptured appendix and his fever was too high for them to be able to operate. And they kept him for a couple of days to bring his fever down and then he died and they discovered it was a poisoned kidney that killed him. Course nowadays there would probably be a big suit over that but then it was just part of life. He was treated at St. Mary’s [and Elizabeth’s Hospital], I believe. I can’t remember the doctor’s name–I think Dr. Shacklett. He was the only one of my siblings to die when I was growing up. That wasn’t so uncommon to have a brother or a sister to die from a large family in those days.

He was the only one and we’ve only lost one since then–they’re six of us still left. The oldest is Josephine Roberta Atcher and her married name now is Leary. She lives in Massachusetts–a little place called Middleton and she’ll be 90 in July. Then next is Raymond–he’s J. Raymond–Joseph Raymond–everybody called him Raymond–and he’s still living–lives at West Point–the only member of the family who still lives there–he and his wife live in West Point. The house that has the historical marker–that’s the old house–the one that we moved–and of course, had to redo that after the flood; you know, Dad had to take it down AGAIN and put it back in place [laughs]. He reduced the dimensions a little bit the last time–it’s got eight-foot ceilings now–modern–so it went from 12 to 10 to 8 [laughs]. And next would be Bob–that’s Robert Owen–called him Bob Atcher; Bob died in 1996, I believe it was–yeah. And next is Francis A.–that’s Aloysius–I won’t make you spell that–[laughs]. Then me–Randall Ignatius Atcher. Yell, Aloysius and Ignatius are two good Catholic names. [laughs] Then Leonora–maybe Leonora Elizabeth–but I’m not absolutely sure about that–Atcher; and she’s married to a man named Wigginton. And then the one who died–Charles–and I don’t remember whether he had a middle name or not. Yes, I remember he very well; he was 14 when he died so I was already well up in ....But then the youngest is Mary George Atcher; she’s a Thompson now.

So I have three sisters. Yes, I stay in touch with the family. We’re a close family. Well, it’s a strange thing about this family. The family is close in some ways and not in others. Communication between siblings is almost non-existent except one brother Francis who I talk to often. Quite periodically I call my older sister in Massachusetts but it’s not a thing like every week or every other day–anything like that.

There’s one thing in all this talk I’ve been doin’ I’ve neglected to talk about and that is the fact that music was such a part of this family from its very beginning. My father was a fiddle player.

We don’t have family reunions anymore–since my mother died. Up until my mother died, once a year we all got together. Down here at her home. All the grandchildren and so on didn’t come many times but lots of times most all of them did. So we’d have a [big gathering]. It wasn’t a set day but it was usually in the fall of the year. Well, not really fall, either, because they did it when school was not in session; I’d have to check with one of the sisters to see what the dates were but it was a moveable feast. But my mother was a wonderful woman–very strong willed–and our reunions were sort of like: I’m letting you know and you’d better be here, you know. She was not goin’ to tolerate not having the whole family around her. Let’s see, she was born in 1891 and died in 1991 because in six weeks she would have been 100.

Yes, I think I have the right genes as far as longevity goes. All the family does because my older sister Josephine will be 90; Raymond will be 88; of course, Bob would have been 86; Francis will be 84; I’ll be 82; and so on. So we do have. My family were hard workers and lived under a lot of stress. And I guess I was in one of the most stressful professions you could have–certainly Bob was. Still, we managed to survive. Yes, in many way, when we were kids at home, it was one of the nicest family situations I think you could imagine. We didn’t have any fallings out between brothers and sisters; oh, we had our battles but I mean really fallings out.

Mother kept a very tight rein on everybody. She was the disciplinarian for small things but boy, when you did something wrong, my father was the one who took care of that! Yes, he whipped me many times. One of things he used to say was you get a lickin’ at school, you’ll get another one when you get home. And most of the time it would be for neglect of the thing you were supposed to be doing at home. And I ‘member one time in particular--I thought I’d be smart–he sent me out to get the switch. And most all country boys carry a pocket knife; I had one in my pocket. So I notched that switch about every eight or 10 inches. And the first time he swung and hit me-oh, he never seriously hurt you but he hit you across the rear end and it stung–that thing fell all to pieces. Well, that was a mistake [laughs]–I should not have done that. I got a worse one. But...I can’t remember what kind of a switch it was. We had some fruit trees out there.

My father died in 1963 at the age of 75. He died of lung cancer. He smoked and he also worked at the cement factory for 30 some years, breathing that cement dust. And I always felt that had a lot to do with it. At the time, nobody much questioned it.

I guess my mother died really from her heart giving out. She had had some heart problems and she had a light stroke almost ten years before when she was 90 but it didn’t incapacitate her much. At about the age of 95, she got to the point where she wasn’t able to get around by herself. Up to that time, she lived at the old home BY herself and took care of everything. So the place in West Point that’s still standing was my primary boyhood home. That’s where I really grew up–from the time I was in first grade through high school. That was the house my mother was living in when she died.

I don’t know who the people are who own the house now. It was when Mother was in a nursing home the last three years or so of her life, the family decided they needed to sell it, partly for money for her in the nursing home. So it sold–I could get the name of the person who bought it–from Raymond–but one interesting thing–it’s right there on the Ohio River where the Salt River comes in and it’s right on that point of Salt River and Ohio River. So every time there’s a flood of any size, there are problems. Even now there are problems. In 1937 it washed down the river; in 1964 they had a flood that got into the basement–of course, he was gone by then. But before that, he took 2 X 12's and sealed up the door to the basement when they thought the water was coming. And a drop of water could not get through it–it had to come clear up over the foundation before it could get in the basement. It was a good carpenter; he really knew how to do things like that.

When it rained a lot when I was a boy, we watched the river. We kept our eye on the river. There was a row of homes right on the river bank–almost all of ‘em–sort of a summer home–they were summer homes for Louisville people–so they were there in the summer time but seldom there in the winter time. And this slough I mentioned earlier went from our backyard–it was a slant down into the slough and then up to the bank of the Ohio–was right there. And whenver it started to rain heavily, we were always watching to see what gonna happen. I don’t remember having to evacuate; we never did have to get out of the house. See, it was after I left home when I was 17–in the entertainment business–that the first flood after 1937 came along. And they did have to evacuate a couple of times and of course, move all the furniture that they could on the first floor. I know in ‘64 it got about five feet into the first floor of the house. There were other periods when it wouldn’t get quite that high but would get in the basement and so forth. But from time to time they’d have to move the furniture off the first floor.

Of course, in 1937 even, everything was stacked up as high as it could get. When had an upright piano and it was put up on saw horses, you know, so that the top of it reached the ceiling but of course the house washed down the river [laughs] so everything was gone. Almost all of the furniture was destroyed in that flood. I have a guitar that was called a tenor guitar that my oldest brother had played previously and it was upstairs in one of the bedrooms–actually, in a closet off the bedroom–and a few years ago I all the pieces and put it back together. That was my brother Raymond’s guitar.

Music has always been such a heavy part of our family. My father played the fiddle. Mother played piano. And as the family came along, the first one to really show strong interest in playing music like my dad played was Bob. And he learned to play the guitar. ‘Course, all through my father’s young life, he played square dances all over Hardin County. Of course, in those days, a square dance would be at someone’s home–you’d roll back the rug and have the square dance. And of course, from the time I was old enough to know anything–six years old or seven years old–there was music at our house. We had a little mission church in West Point called St. Patrick’s. The whole church was probably 20 X 35 feet or somethin’ like that–a real small place. And the priest had to come from either Vine Grove or Louisville to say Mass; most of the time they came from Vine Grove and we would always have them over to the house after Mass and have to have some music, you know. That was during the day. We’d either have Mass at 5 o’clock in the morning or at 11 o’clock ‘cause he had these other churches in between. But then we’d always have music then. The kind of music would be strictly what you would call square dance music–fiddle tunes–it wasn’t religious music. No, we did very little of that [religious music]. You see, being a Catholic family, we didn’t have all of the Baptist hymnals and the Methodist hymnals and so on. As a matter of fact, my mother was one of the Catholics of her time and we were not allowed to set foot in a different church. Or to sing the hymns, even. At that time, we sang practically no hymns in the Catholic Church; if they was a choir, they would sing the hymns.

[Interviewer Wade Hall says: This is what makes Randy Atcher’s interest and his reputation in country music different from that of a lot of people because most of these people grew up in communities and churches where you had this tradition–country religious music, you might say. So many of the composers–the folk, country composers–like Hank Williams–wrote religious songs–the kinds of songs he had heard in church. His mother was a piano player, too. And she played in the little church they attended in Georgiana, Alabama. So it was just natural for him when he started writing, not only to write those honky-tonk songs but “I Saw the Light.”]

“I Saw the Light,” that’s one of Hank William’s most famous ones which I’ve sung many times.

Well, Bob was the first one. He learned to play the guitar. He went to West Point School there and they had a teacher come out from Louisville named [can’t undertand–sounds like Wells-Dee??] who taught mandolin and guitar and so on. And Bob took a few lessons on the mandolin. And he had a terrific ear, so he learned to play the mandolin--and somewhere I’ve got a picture of him and I’ll have to show you–in the mandolin band.

Anyway, I liked music. So did my brother Raymond–not as much–as took clarinet lessons at school but he played the bass fiddle with us. And then Francis who was between Bob and me–he took up guitar. And I learned guitar, too, and mandolin. And at the age of 10–or 11–we would all play for the square dancing that went on, and just for our own enjoyment.

And the way it all got started–I guess it’s time we got to this [subject]–Bob graduated from high school in 1932 and decided he was going to the University of Kentucky. So he went up to UK and they had at that time WHAS extension studio there and it was a large studio and it went through WHAS here in Louisville. And he started singing on that extension studio. The songs of that time were the popular country songs of the day–now they’re folk songs. And he went one semester there and was singing on the radio and came back after that semester and decided that that was what he wanted to do. And he didn’t really need to get a college degree for that. So he came home. Of course, we had all played together and he said to me one time–he said to me, Do you know how to yodel? Well, I didn’t really know how to yodel but I had heard–we had a call if somebody was a couple of blocks away in West Point and you wanted to get their attention, you know, you’d go awhoo, awhoo, awhoo–real loud–and that would carry farther than just a loud shout. And I thought maybe that’s what he was talkin’ about and I mentioned that and he said, No. And he got a hold of a Jimmie Rodger’s record–Jimmie Rodgers was the Yodeling Brakeman–yeah, the Blue Yodeler. And I discovered what it was and I started yodeling. So that’s when we went into the country music business as something that we wanted to do–just the two of us--to start.

It was funny how the family did–we carried the papers in West Point. At that time, there was the Herald-Post and the Courier and Times. And they’re really only–they’re three streets–but Main Street and–we called ‘em Front Street, Middle Street and Back Street–Back Street was Elm Street, Middle Street was Mulberry and Main Street was Front Street. So my brother Bob and I carried the Back Street area papers, and my brothers Raymond and Francis did the others. That was morning and evening. And we pretty much went that way with our lives. My brother Raymond, after he grew up, went to work in trucking. For a while he just used his own truck and he would haul tires from Akron, Ohio to Alabama or Georgia and pick up lumber or something and bring it back this way. And he and Francis eventually got into the distribution of gasoline–that’s what they did all their adult life–first it was DX and then Sunoco and so forth and so on. They had a route starting–down at Dumesnil Street was where the tanks were–where they filled up–they hauled gasoline, oil and fuel oil all over southern Jefferson County, even out toward LaGrange, [US] 42, and down into as far as West Point. And they did that gasoline distributing with gasoline trucks until they both retired. And they were doing Sunoco at the end.

There was a little station just opened in Louisville called WLAP. It was at 333 Guthrie Street. And that’s where Bob and I first sang together and worked together. We both played the guitar and mandolin. You know, we would switch off–I might be playing mandolin on one and he would be on the next one. Just the two of us. And it was a popular little radio station. We were sponsored by the Independent Grocers Association, and they had the fellow we called Salesman Sam, and most every weekend on a Saturday we would appear at some local IGA store–independent grocer–and Salesman Sam would come–and they’d auction off baskets of groceries. Of course, this is in Depression time, you know. This was in 1933. And this

SIDE B

...Garland, and uh, they claimed that there were about 8,000 people there. Every street in every direction was full. And that’s the first place were I ever went through the Presley syndrome where they tore my shirt off, they tore off my necktie, I mean...I was that kind of celebrity at that time. Like a rock star. And there wasn’t much of that goin’ on [back then]. I was 14–14 in 1933. Like people see a picture of me then and they say, You were cute then [laughs].

Anyway, we were at WLAP for a while and then found out that WHAS was looking for country music entertainers. Went over there and auditioned. We were at WLAP just about a year or less. We went to WHAS before the end of ‘33. That was about the time that Pee Wee King came down; Pee Wee King came in 1934. And Pee Wee has often said to people that I was the first person he met when he came to Louisville–we were at the station [then]. Bob and I sang every morning on WHAS and of course, at that time, they didn’t pay you to be on the station. The only way you made money was you were allowed to advertise where you would be appearing that night or whenever. [Wade Hall says that’s the way it was on the Grand Ole Opry.] Uh-huh.

So Bob and I, strangely, were on from 8 o’clock to 8:15 every morning, followed by Foster Brooks, the Loveable Lush, who at that time was not doing comedy but was singing and he has a wonderful singing voice. And a fellow named Joe Pearson played piano.

So I was still in high school and we were making appearances in places like London, Ky., Harlan, Ravenna–all these places down in the eastern part of the state. And we’d have to leave at noon or somethin’ like that to get to those places in time on those old two-lane roads with a ridge in the middle [laughs], you know. So we went to the principal of the school and talked to him about me being able to get off to go to these things. And he said, Well, as long as I kept my grades up it would be OK. So from my sophomore year through my senior year high school, I was in school very seldom. We would come in and do the program at 8:15, go back to West Point and I would go to school–get there sometimes between 9 and 9:30–maybe by 1 o’clock I’d have to leave and would study in the car on the way to and from these shows we were doin’. And there was an act on WHAS at that time called Monk and Sam and they did novelty songs primarily. Well, we advertised things of really double show–Bob and me, and Monk and Sam–you know.

And we had been at WHAS I guess for not quite a year when we decided we would try to have the family on. We talked my dad into playing with us on a few shows up to that time, but this time we talked to him about us taking a two-week tour. We were tryin’ in a way to get him away from the cement factory. So my brother Raymond played bass, Francis played guitar, of course I played primarily mandolin then, and my dad played fiddle. And Bob played guitar or mandolin or whatever was required for a certain song. So we talked him into this two-week tour down in eastern Kentucky. We were at London and Harland and Hazard and Pineville and Whitesburg and several places down there. And of course, people down there knew us ‘cause they could hear us on WHAS, especially at night. And we had full houses just everywhere we went because they knew of the family. This was in 1934 and I mentioned Pee Wee while ago. Pee Wee King came to WHAS at the same time Gene Autry came to town. And Gene was on WHAS for about five or six weeks before he went directly to Hollywood for his career in Hollywood. And he was doing the same thing we were–making personal appearances. And accustomed to huge crowds and I can remember driving by some place with a lot of cars and my father would say, Well, I guess Gene’s appearin’ there tonight [laughs]–you know. Or,He’s got the crowd tonight.

But we did–we had wonderful crowds in those little ol’ theaters or whatever was the biggest building in town–these were movie theaters. And we’d be between movies sometimes–that’s what we did most of the time. But sometimes the biggest building in town was the courthouse, you know, or a church or a school auditorium. And I know we were in Harlan and we had a show to do there. We had a vacant Friday for some reason or another. My brother Bob and I said, Let’s see if we can find a place where we can play. Well, there was a little place called Wallins Creek; it was just a wide spot in the road. So we went over there and they had a little theater, and talked to the theater owner and manager. And he said, Well, boys, I’ll tell yah, says, We’ll have a crowd anyway but these people probably like to hear y’all ‘cause they hear you on the radio. So let’s set it up and we’ll do it. So this was Thursday, so the next night we were gonna be there. The word got around. We had to do two shows–filled the theater twice. It was just a wonderful little thing to happen in between, you know. I was 15.

I don’t think I was spoiled by all that attention. I’ve never been sort of the spoiling type. If I had gotten a big head, my parents would have shaped me up–without a doubt. My brothers also–they would have been quick to do that. No, I don’t think I ever got that feeling of being important or anything like that. We were–I can remember going to talk to my grandfather at the garage there in Kosmosdale. We weren’t making much money, and I was talking to him about this entertainment business and whether I would keep on with it or not. And I remember he said to me, He said, Well, if you’re doin’ somethin’ you like, and I think you like what you’re doin’, and if what you like doing is doing something for other people, I don’t see any reason why you want to change it. And probably, that’s what caused me to more or less continue with it as a life’s work.

You would be paid depending on how many people came to the shows. And usually it was set up on a 60 percent we’d get and 40 percent would go to the sponsoring organization. Lots of times it would be the schools that sponsored us, and those theaters–it would be the theater owners who would do it. And there were places where we could go 70/30–we’d get 70 percent. Admission would be 15 cents for kids and 30 cents or 35 cents for adults. So, if we made $5, we were flyin’ high, you know. And we had our car expenses. Except on that two-week tour with the family, I don’t think we spent the night on the road. We’d come back to Louisville every day because we had to do the program the next morning.

This was our base and we’d go out to the towns–all of ‘em in close–LaGrange, Shelbyville, all of those. But we’d also go to like London, Ky.–do a show that night and drive back. And I can remember foggy nights leanin’ out one door of the car and my brother drivin’ and leanin’ out the other door, tryin’ to see where the side of the road and the white line was. But many times we’d come home and have to sleep in the car until time to get up and do the program–we didn’t have time to go home. We’d pull into the lot or street around WHAS and sleep for a while. We’d do shows every day–sometimes it would be every day but you know, whenever we’d get bookings. Many of them were like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Most of the theater things we did would be during the week because on Saturdays they’d have crowds anyway. We’d perform on Saturdays but we maybe wouldn’t go that far to do it, and it would be at some school or something like that.

Oh, yes, southern Indiana was a good place for us. Well, we appeared at Palmyra, Paoli, Corydon, and then on down to where St. Meinrad’s is, Jasper, Huntington [spelling??], all those places. Mostly schools. Bedford, Indiana was one of our better places; we’d go back there pretty regularly because people always wanted us to come back. We’d do this during all seasons of the year. In the wintertime, you had to be a little cautious about because of the weather and being able to get to some place. Yes, we had some accidents. Actually, when Bob and I were workin’ together, we never had any kind of an accident that amounted to anything. But we were comin’ back from one of those appearances with Monk and Sam--Monk was drivin’ the car–and a slick road and he put on the brake and car spun about five or six times and hit fairly hard against the side of the road but no one was hurt or anything. I have been so fortunate–I’ve never been hurt in an accident making personal appearances.

But later on, after–gosh, I kind of get this all mixed up–but in 1936, when I graduated from high school, which, by the way, I was tellin’ you I studied in the car and had to get passing grades and so on. I was salutatorian of the senior class. Bob had decided he was going to go to Chicago. So I decided I was going to get out of the music business; that’s when I went to Western Kentucky State Teachers College. And just an interesting sidelight, they had an orientation day–Hardin Cherry was the president and had been the president of Western since its inception–had a very pretty blonde daughter and we got acquainted at the orientation and dated for a while, you know. She didn’t know who I was as an entertainer. My reputation might have gone as far as Bowling Green but I don’t think they [she and her family] were listening to country music. I remember I had an English professor named Wilson; I can’t remember his first name but he had been there for a long time. And he was doing a special program with the Glee Club and the little orchestra that they had there. And he called me and he said, Do you know Barbara Allen? I said, Oh, sure, I’ve sung it a lot. He said, Sing a little bit of it for me. So I sang about three or four lines. He said, That’s the one I remember–I want you to come and sing that on this program. So I was on WHAS too [correct word–too-couldn’t understand]. So I did that just by myself down there. Barbara Allen is one of those old folk songs–I’ve seen as many as 22 verses–usually you sing about 10 or 11. And sometimes there would be local references.

So anyway, when the ‘37 flood came along, and I was goin’ to school there in the fall of ‘36, and the ‘37 flood came along and washed the house down the river, then I quite school and came back, helped Dad build the house back. And then just went right back into the county music at WHAS. They had a program called–and I was gettin’ around to this to get to the accident–named Early Risers Roundup.

The show we did at WLAP didn’t have a name–it was just called Bob and Randy Atcher. Bob Atcher right at first because he’d been singin’ a little while before I went in. They called him Smilin’ Bob Atcher. With me, they used to come in and try to get me tickled with somethin’ and I’d get in the middle of a song and be gigglin’ away about somethin’ these engineers or announcers were doing, so I got the title of Gigglin’ Randall [laughs]. And then of course when I did start yodeling, I did that with almost every song I sang with some kind of a yodel sound. Oh gosh, they billed me as the Yodeling Wonder [laughs]. Oh, boy...Bob tried yodeling. Later on–much later–we did some of the Sons of the Pioneers’ songs that had a yodel that went with it, and he would do that. But usually a harmony part–he never did any solo yodeling.

So they had this program called Early Risers Roundup. The band was Happy Morris and a girl named Millie Baynem, and Curly Bradshaw, and Casey Jones and Casey Jones was the fiddle player, and me. And we were makin’ those same kind of personal appearances. This was 1937. And we were on our way to a show down in the state and I can’t quite remember what the town was we were goin’ to. But Happy Morris did most of the driving. And there were six of us in the car. I was in the back seat. It was an old Chevrolet–I guess about a ‘35 Chevrolet sedan, you know. And we couldn’t put the bass fiddle in the car, so in those days you had a canvas case for the bass fiddle and you’d put it on top of the car and tie it with ropes to each corner of the bumpers, and it rode up there. So we’re on our way back from this show and Happy was drivin’ and he, I guess fell asleep for a short period, and there was a big drop-off on the side of the road. Ran off that drop-off and the car turned over and the top hit a telephone pole–that bass fiddle was in a thousand pieces, you know [laughs]. Came to a stop and I was on the top–in the back seat there were three of us there and I was the one up on the top, and the only person who got hurt was I stepped on the guy’s face on the bottom when I got up to get that door open, you know. And so we got out of that car and it was just as though it were a–I don’t know–anything as light as you could see–the four of us just picked it up and put it back on its wheels–just like it was nothin’ to it. You know, everybody’s adrenalin was so high. And that was actually the only accident I was ever in, in making all those places I’d been–traveled. We were on our way back from our date when the accident happened; that way we didn’t disappoint any fans. But we had to buy a new bass fiddle; it was Happy Morris’ bass fiddle [laughs]; he was the bass fiddle player.

And the other instruments were in the trunk and they didn’t get hurt.

We had a few flat tires, I’m sure, in those days but it was so routine we didn’t think about it. Didn’t really pay any attention to them.

The first show I had after I came back from college–the Early Risers Roundup–and that was on WHAS. And the Drug Trade–they sold things like Crazy Water Crystals and Feruna (sp??) and all these sort of patent medicines of the time–yes, I think Pee Wee King had a Crazy Water Crystals show, too–well, they came to WHAS and we started a program and included with the Early Risers group was Uncle Henry and the Kentucky Mountaineers. And this was a kind of a family thing with Henry Warren and his wife Sally and Henry’s brother–they called him Coon Hunter–Grady was his name–they were Warrens. The Warrens were from down below Columbia, Ky.–a little place called Summer–can’t think of that name–Summer Shade, yeah, they were from that area. So we hadn’t been goin’ very long and they asked me to come with their band. So I left the Early Risers group and joined Uncle Henry’s Kentucky Mountaineers. He dressed as an oldtimer kind of with a beard–white beard–and a kind of a top-hat-like hat. Yes, it was his beard. And he really didn’t do anything but be the front man. He didn’t play, sing or anything. He was the MC.

When brother Bob and I were playin’ together we wore overalls and blue shirts all the time. But by this time we had graduated to a Western–semi-Western wear. Blue-denim shirt under the overalls with galluses over that. Yes, I wore overalls at home; it was just normal for us.

But I’ll never forget on that two-week tour I mentioned to you earlier, we were in Whitesburg, Ky., and went down to a general merchandise store they had there and they had some Red Top boots sittin’ up on a shelf. So we bought enough of those for each of the boys–my father wouldn’t wear ‘em but [laughs]. We got Red Top boots and this was apparently a thing which was sort of dress-uppy, I guess, in its time. So we’d wear those. And sometimes you’d put the overalls inside and sometimes you wouldn’t–it depends upon...that’s when the family was on that tour.

But anyway, I joined Uncle Henry’s Kentucky Mountaineers and at this point, they decided they needed somebody to do comedy. Well, Bob had done a little of that when he was here before he went to Chicago and I kind of knew the things he did. And so I did the rube comedy routine–all myself. Lemuel Q. Splutterfuss and I wore the baggy pants, and as far as I know, we were the first to do the cracked-voice sound like what’s his name did in the movies for so long–I can’t think of his name–‘Well, I know what you mean’ [says in cracked voice]–Pat Butram–Gene Autry’s sidekick. If I can find it–and I think it’s around here somewhere–I’ve got a picture of me with this funny-lookin’ wig and baggy pants and shirt. And I did that thing for quite a while because after I’d been with Uncle Henry’s Kentucky Mountaineers for a while, a group came in called Sunshine Sue and the Rock Creek Rangers.

I was with Uncle Henry’s Kentucky Mountaineers in late ‘37 and early ‘38. Less than a year. And we were performing on WHAS. But we had what they called Drug Trade–they advertised these–and that’s the first time we started gettin’ paid for bein’ on radio–$35 a week. I got $35 a week. The leader might have gotten a little more. I thought it was good money. I bought me a car [laughs]. My first car was an old Chevrolet–a ‘29 Chevrolet with wire wheels–a sedan–‘cause it only cost somethin’ like $150. Now Bob had already left–in late ‘36–he went to Chicago. When I went to Western, well, it was actually mid-‘36, he’d already gone up there.

As far as I know, he had no connection in Chicago when he went up there. He went up there and auditioned and at that time, the Atlas Brothers had stations there. Ralph Atlas owned WJJD in Chicago and WIND in Gary, Indiana. And Wes Atlas owned WBBM in Chicago. And he had known someone who knew them and he went up to audition for that. He was married then. He got married before he left to go up there–married a little girl who lived about three miles from us–well, Kosmosdale. Her name was Loeeta (sp??) and she became Bonnie Blue Eyes; they sang together duets. And that’s what they were doing at WJJD in Chicago.

And as I mentioned, I had joined Sunshine Sue and her group. They were a group from Iowa–three brothers–John, George and Sam Workman and John’s wife Sue. And they did the pretty Western music. Not much at all of the country style but the Western music and pretty songs. They came to Louisville to do the program on WHAS. So I worked with them and I did the comedy routine with them too. And also sang with them in trios with Sam and George, and sometimes with Sue. And that’s where I first got my REAL liking for Western music as opposed to other country music. And learned all those songs like “Cool Water” and “Tumbleweeds” and all those things. And I was already dressing slightly Western with the Mountaineers and then went more so with Sunshine Sue and the group. Her group was dressing Western. A lot of times she wore a checkered, gingham dress, you know, but had that flair–the wide, brig [can’t understand word–big??] skirt and so on, you know. And she didn’t dress like a cowgirl any of the time–the boys did–but she didn’t. She wore that Mother-at-Home [laughs] gingham dress kind of thing.

Of course, this was radio and people couldn’t see us anyway. I can’t recall ever selling photos on the air but they had photos made and we would autograph them when we would go out to make personal appearances. Our sponsors would make those for us. And of course, they would have an advertisement somewhere on the picture in almost all cases. But I really enjoyed that time with Sunshine Sue and her group.

There was a fellow named Randy Blake who was well-known as an emcee in country music in those day–had come here from Chicago and he was the emcee for the program, and we were on for the Drug Trade people and then the contract ran out–wasn’t renewed. And Sunshine Sue and the brothers–they were all from Iowa–a little town called Mt. Zion, Iowa, which is down in the southeast corner of Iowa, not very far from Missouri–St. Louis. So we decided to leave WHAS and go to KMOX in St. Louis. This was in January 1939. So we left Louisville and this was in January–I went out and spent a month with the Workman family there, waiting for us to go on to St. Louis. And I’ll never forget it because I guess it was as close as I ever came to a real disaster for myself. We would hunt rabbits–and there was snow on the ground all the time–and do all those kinds of things. And we were out hunting rabbits one day and I had a single-barrel shotgun, and George Workman and Sam were in the woods, too. And this rabbit ran across and I swung the gun and pulled the trigger, and I couldn’t have missed George by more than two feet. It was just one of those lucky things that I didn’t hit him. Didn’t see him until I had already pulled the trigger.

Anyway, I stayed there for–I’ll never forget that because I was going there–I didn’t know for sure where I was going–so there was a place in Iowa and the train went there and then I had to catch another train to go to as near as Mt. Zion as I could get. And the place was A-tum’wah [check sp??] but I didn’t know that so when I went in and asked for a ticket, I wanted a ticket for A’tum-wah [laughs]. And I had a hard time getting that straightened out. Anyway, I caught that train and then when I got off the train at A-tum’wah, and got on this other one–it was what we used to call a hog and human [laughs]–you know, the people sat in one end of the car and animals in the other [laughs]. And it took me to Mt. Zion–we got there and I had almost a footlocker-like trunk and my guitar and mandolin and all this. And they just put me off at that depot at early evening–there wadn’t anybody around anywhere except one guy in the depot. And I went in and told him what I was there for and how could I get in touch with them, and he said, Well, you’ll have to call them–there’s a phone just around the corner. So I went around there–well, it’s about a block away in the snow to get to a place where there was a telephone. This is January. So I picked up the phone–it was in a little store–and one of those with a receiver that hangs on a hook, you know–and picked that up and rung. And I put it up there, and this voice says, Well, can’t I talk a minute? [he imitates a disgruntled, country voice]. Well, it was a party line, so I said, I’m sorry and hung it back up. Well, anyway, I finally did get in touch with John Workman and they came down to get me, which they would have had to do because I would have never gotten there carryin’ all that stuff. They lived out from Mt. Zion. Mt. Zion was just–a little depot was about all there was, you know–a little grocery store.

But then we went to KMOX and were only there two weeks, I guess, when my brother Bob called me from Chicago, and he and Bonnie Blue Eyes by this time were well-known. They had made records for Columbia. Of course, at that time, the country label was Vocalion. And Bob called me and wanted me to come up there with them. So I left [St. Louis]. He was not on the Barn Dance then–that came much later. He was at WJJD, and he called me and wanted me to come up there. Ralph Atlas who owned WJJD also owned WIND in Gary, Indiana. So I got up there, and they wanted me to form a band and do programs on WIND in Gary; then they would carry some of ‘em through WJJD. So I formed a little band–I called them The Frontiersmen–it was called Randy Atcher and the Frontiersmen. And it was accordion, bass fiddle, fiddle and guitar. And we did programs on WIND. Bob was living in Chicago and doing programs on WJJD in Chicago, some of which were carried by WIND, so we worked together but apart, you might say.

And then I would go in sometimes and be with him on some program on WJJD. And he and Bonnie Blue Eyes would come and do programs with us out around the Gary area. And Bob and Bonnie Blue Eyes sang–well, we made the first hit record of “You Are My Sunshine.” Bob and Bonnie sang and I played mandolin on it–was all I did. But we were recording very regularly then. That was in ‘39. Jimmy Davis wrote the song; I don’t think he recorded it early–but he did later–I’m not sure when he did. But ours was the first HIT record of the song. Yeah, it became a national hit. It was on Vocalion, I believe. Bob Atcher and Bonnie Blue Eyes was the way we did it.

And Bob and Bonnie had not done much Western music, so I introduced them to a lot of the songs I had been singing with Sunshine Sue’s group. And we ended up recording the first commercial record of “Cool Water.” The Sons of the Pioneers had it out on those big ol’ things–transcriptions, you know. This was in 1939 when we did that. But I’ll never forget it because–I was just 19, I guess–no, I was 20–had just turned 20–anyway, we were doin’ the recording and we got to the: “oh, they’ll face the barren wastes without the taste of”–my voice broke on me–“wa-aa-aa-aa-ter.” [he does a quivering sound] [laughs]. So we went ahead and sang it all the way through, then came back and I didn’t like that, I said, Well, let’s redo it. So we did it again without the crack, and the one they put out was the one with the cracked voice, you know. [laughs] It was intentional on their part–not on mine. We recorded these at the studios at WBBM in Chicago, in the Wrigley Building. A fellow named Art Satherly was the A & R man–Artist and Repertoire man. So we did recordings with the Frontiersmen band–we did several; and Bob and I sang some duets together, as well as Bob and Bonnie Blue Eyes. But we did a few of those trios and “Cool Water” did really well in the Western part of the country but not much in the Eastern part. Bob Noland (sp??) of the Sons of the Pioneers wrote that song.

And I’ll never forget–speaking of the Sons of the Pioneers–this was in I guess early 1940–it could have been in late 1939–they used to have the Camel Caravan that went around the states, sponsored by Camel Cigarettes, and they’d do these shows. Well, the Sons of the Pioneers were in Chicago and they invited Bob and me to come to their hotel with them–they were gonna have a little get-together and party and so on. So we went. And they had two rooms side by side and out in the hall outside the rooms, they had a card table full of liquors of all kinds. And being a Kentuckian, we never had liquor at home. My father kept a half-pint of bourbon up in the shelf of the kitchen for medicinal purposes only. Well, I didn’t want to let these people know that I was from Kentucky and didn’t know anything about whisky, you know. So I looked around and I saw Old Granddad and I thought, I know that–that’s a thing that they make down in Kentucky. So I poured a shot of old Granddad and started lookin’ around for somethin’ to mix it with and saw this bottle that said Canadian Club and so, oh, boy, that’s Ginger Ale, so I filled it the rest of the way full [laughs] with Canadian Club, took one drink and coughed [laughs], you know. I was 20 years old then.

No, we didn’t drink beer or anything alcoholic at home. I’ll never forget–Bob and I were appearing in Campton, Ky.–this is back in ‘35–and we got there a little early–we were gonna appear in the courthouse–it was the only place of any size at all–and this doctor saw us comin’ in and came over and invited us over to his place before the show started. He’d heard the programs and sort of felt like he knew us. So he offered us a drink of moonshine. Well, I’d heard of moonshine all of my life. And Bob, I guess, had had a drink of it or something. Anyway, he took one and this doctor poured a glass about, I guess, a glass about a third full of moonshine. Clear–used to be, you know. I had never tasted it and didn’t know what to expect and I took a drink and it just went down so easy and nice, you know, so I finished that third to half a glass of moonshine. And that night on the show–Bob told me later–I’s laughin’ about everything–carryin’ on somethin’ fierce–it didn’t affect the performance except I was in such high spirits [laughs]. I was in a good mood.

But anyway, I hadn’t gotten into drinking. None of my [family] had.

When I first went up there, I lived in Gary–at a little apartment, you know. And then later–well, after I had been at WIND for quite a while and we were on WJJD–the other brother who owned WBBM hired us to go with the Ben Bernie Orchestra, which was a well-known orchestra of that day–he was one of the big-name bands of that time. And they were gonna do a program on CBS for Wrigley Spearmint Gum, and hired the three of us–Bob and Bonnie and me–as a trio to do this program. By this time, we had sort of , I would guess, outlived the things we were doin’ at WIND and WJJD–pretty much straight country-Western stuff. So I moved into Chicago in an apartment in a little area–it was called Rosemont–and we started doing this program. Les Paul was the guitar player with Ben Bernie’s Orchestra–couldn’t read a note–and when it was time for him to play, Ben would point at him and he’d play the next eight bars–his ear was so good he could do anything like that.

Well, Bob and I learned to read music but only to the extent of learning a song. We never did use it–in other words, read from charts. We could have taken the music of a song and played from that but very slowly. Because all we used it for was to learn what the music was to the song–never did get into a thorough understanding of [reading music]. I never played the piano but my mother did. My sister Josephine played the piano. My brother Raymond played clarinet and bass fiddle, and the rest of us were all the strings. You know, when we were up there, I played guitar. Bob played guitar. Once in a while, we would use mandolin, but mostly the two guitars. With our trio....

Yes, I played the fiddle some too. Dad, I think, was disappointed that nobody really took up the fiddle. But I played the fiddle and so did Bob some but we weren’t expert at it–we were passable on some things. I could play “Boil the Cabbage Down” but I couldn’t do very well with “Orange Blossom Special” [laughs]–you really have to be accomplished on the fiddle to do that one.

Anyway, Lee [right name??] hired us to go on that show with Ben Bernie on CBS. We did that for a while and Ben Bernie decided to make a tour–a personal appearance tour–with the orchestra. And we started–I’ll never forget–in Cincinnati at the Shubert Theatre in Cincinnati. And this was in November of 1941. And we played in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Steubenville, Ohio, Dayton, Ohio, Akron, Ohio and we were in [can’t understand word]. And by the way, I might mention this: When we started out, it was Ben Bernie and his Orchestra with–there was a girl singer–I can’t remember her name now–Girl Singer–and the Atcher Trio. So we did get billing. And after Cincinnati, I think we went directly to Pittsburgh and after that one, the next town we played which was Steubenville, Ohio: it said, The Atcher Trio with Ben Bernie’s Orchestra

[laughs]. We had a reputation; I mean people just loved what we were doing. And we were singing strictly the Western style, the Western kind of pretty song–like “Cool Water,”

“Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds.” We had a song we sang then called “Madonna of the Trail.” And all of that type music. And we did songs with the yodel parts to them, too–like “Way Out There” and “One More Ride” and those things.

We both wrote songs and wrote many of them that were recorded. I wrote the theme song for our Frontiersmen–it’s a little bit similar to “Tumbleweeds.” But mostly the songs we wrote were in the country vein rather than the Western vein. [Wade Hall says: So you sang the Western songs that....]