About Us
Hi, Country Music Fans!
I’m John Henderson, Your Classic Country Music Storyteller.
My interest in country music started before I reached grade school. I was four years old when my uncle, Jack Henderson, the program director of 50,000 watt KCUL-AM in Fort Worth, Texas, came to visit my family in southwest Missouri in 1959. He brought me around 150 records from his station (duplicate copies they no longer needed) and a small record player that played only 45 rpm discs (not albums). I played those records day and night and completely wore them out.
From that point, I wanted to be a disc jockey. But instead of going for the usual “comedic” approach most deejays took, I tried to be more informative by dropping in tidbits of a song’s background, something that always fascinated me. However, program directors of radio stations generally dislike the stopping of the music on a radio show to talk about the song. They prefer that deejays keep the music flowing.
Originally with my “Classic Country Music Stories” page on Facebook, and now with this website, I can tell the whole story, something that time restraints on radio wouldn’t allow.
I started in radio in 1971 at the age of 16. Along the way, I landed deejay jobs at WENO-AM and WKDA-AM, both in Nashville, WPCV-FM in Lakeland, Florida (past winner of the CMA “Radio Station of the Year” award), and Springfield, Missouri’s KTTS-FM (also a CMA award winner) and KWTO-AM (the originating station of the famous “Ozark Jubilee” in the mid-1950s). With syndication and automation which overwhelmed radio some 30 years ago, my final DJ position ended in 1992.
From November 1995 until my retirement in April 2021, I was a studio engineer at Meyer Communications, a group of radio stations in Springfield, Missouri. Joining this company sent me back to KWTO, as that station had been sold to Meyer Communications in 1994.
My parents actually met at KWTO in 1944. My future dad was hired away from KRLD in Dallas, while my future mother was already working at the station as part of Aunt Martha Haworth’s “KWTO Belles” group. It was love at first sight and after a whirlwind courtship and marriage, they left KWTO and moved on to Nashville’s WLAC-AM to begin their duet act.
My former boss, the late Ken Meyer, owner of Meyer Communications, used to get a kick out of telling people that I got my “start” at KWTO, a term most often humorously used to describe an announcer’s first radio job.
In Nashville, my parents adapted their stage name of “Ted and Wanda,” and achieved some regional success throughout the South via WLAC’s 50,000 watt signal. After only a few years, however, Dad grew disenchanted with the music business. They retired from the industry in 1951 and moved back to southwest Missouri where my mother’s family lived. I was born in 1955.
Dad’s older sister Dot, along with her husband Smokey, appeared for several years on the Grand Ole Opry and toured with Ernest Tubb’s entourage in the late 1940s, performing with Tubb at New York City’s Carnegie Hall in 1947, at the first of two famous country music concerts held there. Dot and Smokey’s daughter, Dottie, was married for a number of years to Hank Snow’s son, noted evangelist Jimmie Rodgers Snow. Dottie later married songwriter Glenn Douglas Tubb, nephew of Ernest Tubb. Glenn’s most famous composition was Henson Cargill’s 1968 classic “Skip a Rope,” which he co-authored with Jack Moran. Tubb also co-wrote Johnny Cash’s 1957 hit “Home of the Blues,” and the final hit of George Jones and Tammy Wynette called “Two Story House” in 1980. Dad’s younger sister, Irene Gibbs, worked for Johnny Cash, serving as his personal secretary from 1973 to 1988.
Between my Country Music experience and that of my family, I guess you could say that Classic Country Music is in my blood. With that being the case, it is my privilege to bring you these stories of the classic years of America’s very own… Country Music. I hope they entertain and inspire all who read them.