Country star Roy Clark, host of ‘Hee Haw,’ dies at 85
Roy Clark, a country guitarist, singer and cornpone comedian who headlined the hit variety show Hee Haw and was known for crossover hits including “Yesterday, When I Was Young,” died Nov. 15 at his home in Tulsa, Okla. He was 85.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, according to a statement from his publicists, Sandy Brokaw and Jeremy Westby.
While Clark often performed with the banjo, fiddle and mandolin, he was best known for his brilliance on the guitar. Flashy and quick-fingered, he was as adept on flamenco standards such as “Malagueña” as on country-pop songs like “Yesterday, When I Was Young,” written by French singer Charles Aznavour.
He played with bands in the Washington, D.C., area in the 1950s before a gig performing alongside country singer Wanda Jackson helped launch him to prominence — and to a recording contract with Capitol Records — in the early 1960s.
Clark went on to become a staple of Las Vegas, Nev., showrooms and Atlantic City, N.J., casinos and performed at leading venues such as Carnegie Hall in New York and the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tenn., the country music mecca where he was enshrined as a member in 1987. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2009.
Most listeners knew him from their television screens, where he filled in for Johnny Carson as a guest host of The Tonight Show, played recurring characters on The Beverly Hillbillies and, beginning with the show’s premiere in 1969, cohosted Hee Haw with singer Buck Owens.
Originally airing on CBS, the show went into syndication and ran until 1997, after leaving the air for several years in the mid-’90s. Mr. Clark served as a host for its full run, while Owens — who later dismissed the program as a “cartoon donkey” — left in 1986.
A source of comic relief as well as musical flair, Clark played alongside musicians including Owens, banjo player Grandpa Jones and singer Kenny Price, with whom he formed the Hee Haw Gospel Quartet. He also performed with members of the program’s Million Dollar Band, a supergroup that featured artists such as guitarist Chet Atkins, pianist Floyd Cramer, saxophonist Boots Randolph and fiddler Johnny Gimble.
More enamored of the program than Owens, Clark likened Hee Haw to a family reunion, one that extended from the stage into the audience and out to the living rooms of TV viewers across the country. “The viewers were sort of partowners of the show,” he told the Associated Press in 2004. “They identified with these clowns, and we had good music.”
Roy Linwood Clark was born in Meherrin, Va., on April 15, 1933. He was 14 when he got his first guitar — a Christmas present, according to the AP — and within a year was playing in a square-dance band with his father, who also played the guitar, fiddle and banjo.
Clark toured with Jones, the banjo player, and appeared on TV programs including Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts before joining Jackson’s group in 1960.
He toured the Soviet Union in 1976, bringing country behind the Iron Curtain, and in 1983 opened the Roy Clark Celebrity Theatre in Branson, Mo., helping turn the Ozark town into a country music destination.