ROY CLARK DIES
Roy Clark, the guitar virtuoso and singer who headlined the cornpone TV show “Hee Haw” for nearly a quarter-century, died Thursday. He was 85.
Country Music Hall of Fame member and versatile entertainer Roy Clark died Thursday at his Tulsa, Oklahoma, home of complications from pneumonia, his publicist said. He was 85.
A fleet-fingered instrumentalist best known for his 24 years as a “Hee Haw” co-host, the affable Clark was one of country music’s most beloved ambassadors.
He brought heart and humor to audiences around the world, guest-hosted “The Tonight Show,” worked with greats like Hank Williams and blues artist Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, and inspired countless pickers, including a young Brad Paisley, with his instructional guitar books.
“He’s honest,” said fellow Country Music Hall of Famer Harold Bradley when Clark was inducted in 2009. “Whether he’s playing guitar or singing, he’s honest. Whatever he does, he sparkles.”
Roy Linwood Clark was born April 15, 1933, in Meherrin, Virginia. The oldest of five children, he grew up in a musical family.
He learned how to play banjo at a early age, but it was the guitar that spoke to him. “When I strummed the strings for the first time, something clicked inside me,” he told the Tennessean in 1987.
Within weeks of learning his first chords, the teenage Clark was playing behind his father at area square dances. Not long after that, he was performing on local radio and television.
“The camera was very kind to me, and I consider myself to be a television baby,” Clark said in 2009. “At first, it wasn’t that I was so talented, but they had to fill time . ... So they’d say, ‘Well, let’s get the kid.’ Later, I got to where when I looked at the camera, I didn’t see a mechanical device, I saw a person.”
While still in his teens, he won banjoplaying championships, and, in 1949, worked briefly on a show fronted by Hank Williams.
Clark’s deft musicianship caught the ear of Jimmy Dean, who performed on television and radio in the Washington, D.C., area. Dean hired the young musician, then fired him because of his repeated tardiness. “He said, ‘Clark, you’re gonna be a big star someday, but right now I can’t afford to have someone like you around,’ ” Clark remembered in a 1988 Tennessean article.
Dean’s prediction came true, eventually.
During his early days in Nashville, Clark and banjo player David “Stringbean” Akeman worked any stage they could find. “We would play drive-in theaters, standing on top of the projection booth,” Clark told the Tennessean in 2009. “If the people liked it, they’d honk their horns.”
In 1960, Clark joined rockabilly and country artist Wanda Jackson’s band, playing guitar and opening her shows at the Golden Nugget Hotel in Las Vegas.
Jackson was on Capitol Records, and after Ken Nelson, the label’s A&R man, heard Clark at one of her concerts, he signed him.
As a solo artist, Clark’s breakout hit came in 1963 when his version of Bill Anderson’s “Tips of My Fingers” hit No. 10 on the country charts, and he found crossover success with the 1969 smash “Yesterday, When I Was Young.” (In 1995, he performed that song at Mickey Mantle’s funeral.)
Clark’s role as Buck Owens’ overallclad comedic foil on “Hee Haw,” combined with hits like “Thank God and Greyhound” and “Come Live With Me” endeared him to country audiences in the 1970s. In 1973, he won the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year Award; later in the decade he won a slew of CMA Instrumentalist of the Year Awards, both as a solo musician and with Buck Trent.
As an entertainer, Clark forged his own trail. He became one of the first country stars to tour the Soviet Union when he embarked on an 18-date excursion with the Oak Ridge Boys. Twelve years later, he returned to the USSR for a “friendship tour.”