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Cowboy Copas

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In my spare moments, I have been reading from and enjoying Cowboy Copas and the Golden Age of Country Music by John Roger Simon.

The 1940s, 50s, and early 60s were the Golden Age of Country Music. It was the age of legends, like Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Red Foley, Carl Smith, and Hank Williams. It was the developmental period for the sub-genres of country music, such as Bluegrass, which Bill Monroe was fine tuning during those years. Other singers were blending honky-tonk style songs with ballads, gospel hymns with folk songs, and mountain dance tunes with western swing.

Pure country music was not something thought up by a record producer as an angle to increase sales. Rather, the accustic guitars, usually accompanied with steel guitars, fiddles, pianos, were the heart of what country artists and rural America knew. There was a strong blend of the values of rural and small town America with the myth of the cowboy riding the range. As America was rapidly losing contact with its roots, country music sought to highlight both the good and the bad from American life. For this reason, one country song might speak of drinking and cheating, while the next one would praise marriage, faith, and family. Country music was like Norman Rockwell paintings in a sense.

Lloyd Copas, known on stage as Cowboy Copas, exemplified much that was the best of country music. His reportoire of songs included love ballads, dance tunes, songs about God, and story songs. He was the model of the male country singer--tall, slender, decked out in fancy clothes, topped off with a cowboy hat. And he had a rich voice and an incredible guitar style.

This book, however, has a tragic tone to it. In March of 1963, Copas joined fellow Grand Ole Opry stars Hawkshaw Hawkins and Patsy Cline on a trip to Kansas City where they performed a benefit concert for the family of a disk jockey who had been killed in an auto accident. In a small engine plane flown by Copas' son-in-law, Randy Hughes, all four passengers were killed when bad weather brought the airplane down in middle Tennessee. They should never have taken that last leg of the flight in such weather.

Patsy Cline is the best known of the three singers today. Her career was just beginning to skyrocket. Her recordings, especially those of the last several years of her life, are stunning. Her music is still played, bought, and loved. She is rightly honored as one of the great stars of country music. (I'm still listening to the songs I first discovered around 1967.)

Copas and Hawkins have not been remembered nearly as much. At the time of the crash, Copas was the most successful of the three stars. He had a great hit ("Alabam") shortly before his death, and Hawkins' song, "Lonesome 77203" topped the charts after the airplane crash. The trends in country music shifted away from Copas' style of singing. Since then, there have been revivals of interest in that style. Singers such as Randy Travis and George Strait have been successful in that tradition, yet Copas remains obscure. (Hawkins perhaps even more so.) In what must be an incredible blind spot in the process of choosing members, Copas is not even in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

I have been a long time fan of Copas and am glad this biography has been written by Dr. John Roger Simon, who has devoted his retirement years to collecting this information and writing this worthy book. Cowboy Copas and the Golden Age of Country Music is published by the Jesse Stuart Foundation in Ashland, Kentucky. That organization is dedicated to reprinting the works of that great American author Jesse Stuart and it also publishes other works related to Appalachian culture and American folk traditions. Again, a wonderful book by a great publisher.