‘When Bev sang or talked, you listened’
Musician, broadcaster remembered as a country gentleman
Broadcaster Bev Munro hung up the microphone on his popular country radio show 25 years ago, but he kept right on performing the hurtin’ music he loved.
Although ailing, Munro sang in March at the Nova Hotel’s regular “Traditional Tuesday” country dance and came to listen the following week before winding up in hospital with pneumonia, longtime friend George Myren said. He died April 4 at age 89. “He had a great country voice. It had a lot of authority. It was more on the baritone side. He demanded attention with his voice. When Bev sang or talked, you listened,” said Myren, who first played bass with Munro in 1968.
“Entertaining or on radio, he became, I wouldn’t say just a big name in country music — he’s an icon.”
Munro, born in Boissevain, Man. in 1929, grew up listening to Grand Ole Opry broadcasts. He formed his original band in the 1950s while in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis and later became an announcer at several radio stations, being chosen Mr. DJ USA in 1958.
But he moved west in 1963 to take a job with CFCW and remained an on-air staple for the next 30 years, making Bev’s Bunkhouse a mustlisten show for households across central Alberta.
“People said, ‘Those guys are nuts, nobody wants to listen to just country,’” said CFCW program director Jackie Rae Greening.
“Getting Bev on board gave them real credibility. He was a performer. He was larger than life.”
Greening, who began working at the station in 1989, remembers delaying going to school as a youngster so she could hear the man nicknamed Hoss tell his daily knee-slapper.
“He had that timing, that little giggle, the way he laughed. There was nothing like a Bev Munro joke, and he always had one for you.”
Myren, who hired Munro as part of his Alberta Country Music Legends that also include Myren’s wife, Joyce Smith, and fiddler Alfie Myhre, says his friend’s delivery often brought down the house during their shows throughout the province.
He recalled Munro’s story about a man who stopped to see a movie while he was taking a live chicken home to cook for dinner.
He hid the chicken inside his pants so the usher wouldn’t notice it, but once he reached his seat, he poked its head out his fly so the bird could breathe.
The shocked woman sitting beside him turned to a friend to complain the man was exposing himself.
“Oh, well, you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,” her companion replied.
“Yeah, but this sucker is eating my popcorn!”
Munro, with his guitar and trademark Stetson, performed steadily in bars and halls while maintaining his radio career, often playing late into the night and showing up for his early-morning shift on little or no sleep.
“He was a pretty active guy. Some of it came out of a Lamb’s Navy rum bottle, too. In his later days, he was a teetotaller, but in his early days, he could handle a drink. He was a lot of fun,” Myren said.
He was also a successful songwriter, penning such country hits as Hello Operator and Babysitting With The Blues for Capitol Records, which gave him the opportunity to travel with stars such as Kitty Wells.
“He didn’t like new country. He was adamant … It was three-four guitars, bass, drums. No steel guitar, no violins, no sound like traditional country and that’s what he wanted.”
Pete Hicks, a semi-retired broadcaster who worked with Munro at CFCW and the Legends, describes his friend as one of the kindest men he knew, someone who took time to talk to fans and loved touring.
He also enjoyed slot machines and the track, owning standardbred (harness) horses and joking in a Journal article about his retirement from CFCW that he planned to “go to Vegas whenever the dollar goes up so I can lose more valuable money.”
But he fell off a set of stairs a few years ago and hurt his back, which eventually forced him to stop travelling with the Legends.
However, he received a standing ovation when he sang for the last time at a January Legends show in Sherwood Park, where he helped present the Association of Canadian Country Music Legends annual Bev Munro Award for promotion of traditional country music in Alberta.
Munro, inducted into the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame in 2002, leaves his wife, Donna, and her two children, as well as two sons, four daughters, 11 grandchildren and four greatgrandchildren.
Greening, who says he did commercials and a 60th anniversary project for CFCW after his retirement, called her former colleague a personality, not an announcer.
“He loved country music, and he lived it. Bev Munro always had a smile, always had a joke. That’s how I will always remember him.”