Music and laughs so good they’ll make you cry

More than 50 years after “The Andy Griffith Show” went off the air, Maggie Peterson still laughs at the antics she found herself involved in playing Charlene Darling, only daughter of Briscoe Darling. She gets especially tickled remembering perhaps her most famous line, which was uttered at the title of several songs her dad and brothers performed on the show.

Songs like “Dirty Dirty Me,” “Boil That Cabbage Down” and “Never Hit Your Grandma With a Great Big Stick” each had Charlene saying, “That one makes me cry.”

“Oh, isn’t that the funniest thing,” Peterson says of the bit. “We had the best writers.”

She admits that the first time she read it, she didn’t think much of it and certainly didn’t think it would become such an iconic TV line. Asked about it today, she lets out a hearty laugh at the idea of it. She laughs even harder later in the conversation when talking about Ron Howard, who was then a child actor playing Opie Taylor.

Today he is a successful director with film credits including “Apollo 13,” “A Beautiful Mind,” “The Da Vinci Code” and “Cocoon.”

“I didn’t realize I was old until I saw Ron Howard on the cover of an AARP magazine,” Peterson says. Then she pauses and says, “Little Opie on AARP,” and the laughter starts.

Now 78, Peterson has nothing but fond memories of the show and enjoys meeting fans at Mayberry Memories events like the one she will attend Saturday at The Caverns in Pelham, Tennessee.

The “Mayberry Memories” show features actual stars from “The Andy Griffith Show”: Rodney Dillard of The Darling Family and Peterson, as well as comedy fun with “The Mayberry Deputy” David Browning.

“It was a very happy set,” she says. “That’s the way [show creator and star] Andy [Griffith] wanted it. He had say over everything.”

Despite that, she says rumors still persist that Griffith and actress Frances Bavier, who played Aunt Bee, didn’t get along.

“It’s not true. She was a well-respected actress and was not one to sit around the set joking with people. She was in her trailer studying her lines, but they got along fine,” Peterson says.

Peterson got the Darling role thanks to both her singing and acting talent and because she and Griffith shared the same agent in Dick Link. He’d heard her sing several years earlier and convinced her to move to New York to pursue a career there.

“I had to audition for it, but I’m so glad to have gotten the part,” she says.

“It is so special to me. That show made my life special. Who’d’ve thought one character would last 59 years? I feel so blessed.”

Contact Barry Courter at bcourter@timesfree press.com or 423-757-6354.