The blue-tail fly covered some remarkable stories, including the following piece that appeared in its last issue, Volume 11 published in 1971, and written by Guy Mendes. Cowboy Steve Taylor was a local celebrity to those who knew him, a smalltime radioman with a love for the bigtime. Surrounded by the smiling faces of his greatest musical loves, Cowboy Steve sent out a signal that may have only reached a block or two, but to him, it wasn't about how many people he could reach, it was about the music. Cowboy Steve Taylor died in 1993 and is now buried in Lexington Cemetery, his grave marked with his signature cowboy hat and guitar.
It came as if by Magic out of the cool Madison County night, high, wide and handsome, staking claim to a sizable portion of a young black kid's imagination. The Grand Ole Opry. Every Saturday night brought with it such greats as Oscar Stone and the Possum Hunters, Uncle Dave Macon, George Wilkerson and the Fruitjar Drinkers and many more, all fading in and out of an old second-hand Crosley Showbox radio; their sounds giving form to a world that was a far sight different from that of a poor auto mechanic's son. It couldn't be too long before young Steve Taylor, his head filled to the brim with Music City, U.S.A., would strike out for other parts; like up to Lexington, for instance--just the first stop, you understand.
But wait, that was years ago, close to 40 in fact, and there are other things to think about right now; there's a show to do tonight.
The old radioman steps out of the restaurant on Lexington's south side where he clears tables for a living and heads for the bus stop in a slow, rheumatic walk. A smile plays across his face and his head bobs slightly, obeying the dictates of a nervous tic, or maybe just following the rhythm of a tune that's playing way back in his head. Resting on his ears, fairly covering half his head is a large brown cowboy hat, pushed back at an angle, looking like some kind of frontierland nimbus.
A short bus ride, a few words with the driver and he is downtown, where he stops in to visit his friends at the Esco Hankins Record Center, the best place in town for country music. There he looks over the new 45s, thinking on which ones he might buy come next payday, exchanging pleasantries with Esco and "Miss Jackie" (Mrs. Hankins) and maybe taking time for a plate of brown beans that Miss Jackie has cooked up in the back. Then it's back on to another bus for the ride to his one-room walkup in the west end, where he takes the stairs one at a time, removes the little padlock on the door, goes in and immediately flips on a couple of old switches that are worn like rocks under a waterfall. It's a little late, so he hardly has his coat off and the bare On-The-Air bulb screwed in when he leans into a professional-looking microphone and says:
"Good evening. This is radio station WSEV signing on the air at seven minutes past six o'clock, Eastern Standard Time. WSEV is owned and operated by Steve Taylor and WSEV is located on Jefferson Street, near Fourth. And now, we begin our one and only broadcast here on the Country Jamboree." The theme song, 'Flatt & Scruggs' "Shuckin' the Corn" blares out for a minute and then, in a rough voice-over, "Well, we're a little late getting started tonight friends, but we're gonna carry on here until long about seven o'clock. Eastern Standard Time. Right now we're gonna start the program off with one of the old ones, a little number by the Stanley Brothers, Carter and the late... Ralph and the late Carter Stanley; called 'Stone Walls and Steel Bars.' Come on in here, boys."
When they do, he fishes a transistor radio out of his coat pocket, puts it to his ear and adjusts the tuner. "There it is," he says handing it to a guest, who takes it, listens to the beleaguered signal and wonders, "But is there anyone out there?" hoping there is and not pausing to consider that maybe it isn't a vital concern.
The old radioman continues on with his show just as he's done for nearly 10 years, three or four or five nights a week, an hour a night, commanding his simple array of unhealthy-looking equipment: two worn turntables that look like they might have come out of children's record players; a poorly made wooden workbench that is brightened by a coat of pink paint and some leftover Christmas wrapping paper; an old amplifier with a metal cover that got a coat of that same pink paint; a frayed "Rockola" speaker that sits on top of a wardrobe on the other side of the room; a clock radio that, in spite of its cloudy dial and the weak eyes of the disc jockey, always gives the correct Eastern Standard Time; and the tiny build-it-yourself transmitter that would be hard pressed to deliver even the one-tenth of a watt that the FCC limits unlicensed broadcasters to; on a good day it will push Steve's signal out four or five houses up and down the street, about three-quarters of a block in all. Which suits him fine.
"It's just a tiny little station, you can knock it out real easy," Steve says with a grin. "But I have me a time with it, yessir, I have me a time."
Compared to the station he had when he lived "over on Brown Street, where there isn't even a building now," it's a vast improvement. "You could hardly pick that one up outside the house," he says, and friends say that was only what was coming through the cracks, because it was little more than a make-believe station. He played live music into that "station" five nights a week and for awhile had a few friends who came over and played with him. But they gradually stopped coming and left Steve playing his guitar, fiddle, and mandolin (he's self-taught on all three) into his make-believe microphone.
The "studio" is nicer, too. For a long time he lived in a garage that had a dirt floor and a lot of rats. "I had to declare war on those rats. When you're sleeping, they think you're dead, you know, and they crawl up on you and bite you."
And of course there's someone out there listening; there are the letters that come into his post office box. They don't come terribly often, and when they do they're not from folks within range of his weak signal, but rather from old friends in other parts of Lexington and other towns. Even so, he dedicates tunes to them, saying, "Maybe someone can tell 'em about it, or maybe. . .maybe they'll be driving by."
And then there are his Country & Western friends lined up on the wall above his workbench looking down on him day after day, smiling their fetching smiles and saying things like "Best wishes" and "Thinking of you this holiday season." They're listening. There's Miss Loretta Lynn ("the Decca Doll, the little Coal Miner's Daughter"), Marty Robbins, Miss Peggy Sue ("You know who she is, don't you? She's Loretta Lynn's sister"), Ernest Tubb, Miss Lynn Anderson, Miss Dottie West, Lefty Frizzell, and Esco and Jackie Hankins--recording stars in their own right. Elsewhere in the room are a few dime-store picture frame portraits that seem a bit incongruous: one of June Allison and two of Eva Marie Saint.
They all know that Steve is one of the best radiomen around. Sure, he may cue up a record badly now and then, but that's only because his eyes are bad. And so what if the show doesn't get started on time? When he gets to talking that radio talk, he's as good as any licensed DJ. He'll tell you with pride that his advertisements are "just like the real thing." Actually, since WSEV is not a commercial station, it doesn't have to air advertisements and can't be paid for them if it does. But all the radio stations he has known have had advertisements, so Steve rambles through long, ad lib commercials (the best kind, according to some pros) that can run a full five minutes, extolling the virtues of one of several concerns that he either does business with, works for, or is run by friends; and he caps them all by saying, "Öand remember, tell 'em Cowboy Steve Taylor told you to come in."
He even advertises for a local finance company: "By the way, how's the money situation out at your house, friends? Need a little cash to work on your home, or to get those bills paid off? If you do stop in to see. . ." all of which grates on your ears like bad chalk on a blackboard when you know that a large slice of Steve's small paycheck is bound for that company for many months to come, leaving Steve little to spend on his big appetite and records ("Yeah, I buy a lot of records, but I have me a time with 'em.")
He knows country music as well as any bigtime DJ; he can rattle off the birthdates of the big stars as easily as he could tell you the brand names of the different radios he's had through the years. And it's no wonder, he's been with it a long time. He started his first country music band when he was 14 ("Hank Williams was only 14 when he got started, don't you know"). For a number of years he played where he could around Lexington and now and then in little night spots in Cincinnati, where he got 25 cents a song--hardly enough to cover the roundtrip busfare involved. To support himself he worked as a household servant, a tobacco cutter, at eateries around town, and in campus hangouts in later years, where drunk frat boys would talk him into getting out his guitar for a few songs and would then howl with laughter and throw pennies at him as he performed.
Through it all Steve had three of his songs recorded; Esco and Jackie did a hymn called "Fall on Your Knees and Be Born Again" on one of their albums, and the Rogers Sisters, a pair of Lexington girls who never really made it, did a 45 for Excellent Records (a Cincinnati company that also didn't make it), both sides of which Steve wrote. He even did a recitation on the side called "Jealous Hate." "That was recorded on October 11, 1955--I'll never forget that night; boy, was I ever nervous."
Quite possibly Steve's is a case of having been born a little too soon. It has only been in the past few years that a black fellow like Country Charlie Pride could think of making it to the Opry--if not Tex Ritter's "Hillbilly Heaven" itself. Times have definitely changed, and if ever anyone deserved a complimentary ticket to the great C&W hereafter that Ritter sings about, Cowboy Steve Taylor does; for he embodies the best elements of country music. The simplicity of emotions--the goodtime joys and the mournful sorrows that stem from the lives of real people, like truckers on their way home after six long days on the road, or the embattled partners in a sour marriage and the clear, primitive perceptions of the earthly, they're there in the best of the music and they're there in Steve Taylor.
When Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty croon, "Love is where you find it/when you've found no love at home/there's nothing's cold as ashes/after the fire is gone," you know exactly what they're getting at. Similarly, when Steve tells you, "You know, we used to hear a lot of bad things about the Germans and the Italians and the Japanese back during World War II. And after the war was over I met some of those people and you know, they weren't as bad as we'd been told. Now I'm not talking about their leaders, just the people, you know. And well, what I mean to say is, a lot of people these days been running the hippies down. And well, some of you folks been awful nice to me, and anyone that's nice to me is my friend. People say that all the people with long hair are bad, but you can't say that; there's bad people in all groups and there are good people in all groups"--when he tells you that, you know what he means, you know he's talking in his plain way about the very nature of prejudice.
Or when he's just sitting around playing his guitar for a few friends and he starts talking about how glad he is to be "up on the show tonight," you know that, for him, being with friends is one and the same with being "up on the show."
Steve's sense of friendship and loyalty verges on the heroic, especially his efforts on behalf of Miss Jeanie Pruett, a songstress with such hits to her credit as "King-Size Bed" and "Make Me Feel Like a Woman Again" (not much on women's liberation, this girl). She's been Steve's favorite of late, rivaling even Loretta Lynn and Lynn Anderson. Like Loretta, Jeanie Pruett records for Decca, but Steve thinks someone there is "doing her dirty" because she doesn't get a very good promo job. So Steve has been writing letters to radio stations all over the country requesting songs by Jeanie Pruett. Every so often he will call down to Nashville, to the Decca offices to find out if she has any new songs out, so he can keep his requests up to date.
Steve has been down to see the Opry three times to date; some friends got some money together and sent him down for the first time in 1968. "Oh boy," he says, his face lighting up, "they have themselves a time down there, they sure do!" Last summer, on his third visit, he was going to get to see Jeanie Pruett for the first time, but his bus got caught in traffic and he arrived just a little too late to see her perform. "I sure hated to do that," he says now.
Esco and Jackie are on now doing a fine job on "Mother Left Me Her Bible to Guide Me to Heaven," and the old radioman is rooting through a large pile of his "sacred" records--it being time for the final quarter hour of the Country Jamboree, the Country Hymn Program. The routine varies only once a year, for the Easter show on Good Friday when the "sacred" portion of the show runs a full half-hour; "I look forward to that one all year."
He ran into an embarrassing situation recently when he put a new record called "Help Me Make It Through the Night" on during the final segment, figuring that it was surely a hymn. "Oh boy, I had to take that one off right in the middle," he chuckles. "That wasn't no hymn."
Tonight he decides on Dolly Parton's "Daddy Was an Oldtime Preacher Man," Skeeter Davis' "Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus and a Lot Less Rock and Roll" (which he dedicates to me) and a fine rendition of the old spiritual "Amazing Grace" by "Miss Judy Collins, a little lady fast comin' up in the country music field."
"Well, that's all we have time for tonight, folks. If the good Lord's willin', we'll be back with you again tomorrow night long about six o'clock, Eastern Standard Time. This is Cowboy Steve Taylor saying kneel at your bedside and say just one little prayer before saying good night. Join us again tomorrow afternoon at the same time. Until then, this is Cowboy Steve Taylor saying thank you and goodnight and stay happy, everyone."
With that the old radioman quickly begins to put away his records and turn off his equipment; he wants to catch a ride back across town because the city buses don't run at night anymore and cab fare is a dear expense.
As I wait for him to finish up I sift through a few loose thoughts and decide: that the title of "Cowboy" is not something assumed, but something conferred, like the "Country" in Country Charlie Pride; and that the Cowboy Steve Taylor Show has something to impart--something very basic--to my own show and to a lot of other folks' shows, especially when those shows start ballooning around full of self-importance, certain in the knowledge that they are the most significant and most tormented of shows.
Tomorrow I'll come back down and park on Jefferson Street, near Fourth, set the tuner a little to the 900-side of 1000 and try to weed out the whistles and buzzes and whines that cling to the WSEV signal like so many strands of a parasitic vine. If the day is right and the buses haven't gotten held up in traffic, maybe I'll be able to hear the voice of Cowboy Steve Taylor, sounding like it's being filtered through a bullhorn and several pillows, like it's coming from a very faraway place, saying, "...and remember, tell 'em Cowboy Steve Taylor told you to come in."