Foggy Mountain Boys - Number Three Edition of Radio Favorites ･ﾟ✧

Dating the Booklet

I love using this booklet to showcase how internal clues can help us date it -- to a range within a few months! Sure, folks on the internet provide you the date, as do academic websites. But where's the fun in that? This pretty pamphlet allows us to delve into Music History Detective Work, a fun way to flex the facts we know. Here's why I absolutely, positively, beyond all shadow of doubt is from 1949:

1). "Lester is married to the former Miss Gladys Stacey, and they have one child, Brenda Carolyn, who is three years old." Brenda was born April 11, 1945 to Lester's sister Eunice; Lester and Gladys adopted Brenda sometime after Eunice died August 3, 1946. For Brenda to be three years old, printing would have to be between April 1948 and April 1949.

2). "Earl was married in April to the former Miss Louise Cirtain. They have no children." Assuming the text of the third edition is up-to-date and not copied from previous songbooks, that they say "April" without the year implies another April has not happened yet. Earl and Louise were married April 18, 1948. Their first son, Gary, was born May 18, 1949.

3). "We also wish to thank you, too, for your nice cards and letters we have received since being here at WROL, Knoxville, Tennessee, on the "COUNTRY PLAY-HOUSE" from 8:15 to 10:00 a.m., and "THE DINNER BELL" starting at 12:15 through 1:45 p.m."

Radio hopping was the norm those days; a band would stay in a location several months, "play out" the area with local concerts, then move to a new town and station. New Flatt & Scruggs songbooks appear to have been released when the band moved. It's safe to assume they were performing at WROL when they printed this booklet; and logically, it's more likely they printed early in their tenure at WROL.

The Foggies started at WROL around March 1949. WROL began broadcasting a daily 8:15 to 10:00 AM musical variety show called Country Playhouse in the spring of 1949 and the Foggies were selected to headline the Dinner Bell program that debuted May 30, 1949. Flatt & Scruggs left WROL by October. Assuming the Dinner Bell launched before the songbook released, printing would have to have been between June 1949 and October 1949.

4). Bouquet in Heaven, Down the Road, Why Don't You Tell Me So?, Baby Blue Eyes. Songs in hillbilly songbooks are representative of the band's stage and radio performances but aren't fully representative of record output. For instance, this booklet contains the lyrics to Brother, I'm Getting Ready to Go, which they didn't record until the end of 1951.

That said, it was typical for the Foggies to concentrate songbooks on their most recent or upcoming releases. And in April or May of 1949, the Foggies recorded the four songs listed. That they all appear in the songbook appears intentional and might suggest the songbook was compiled around the same time they decided to do these four tracks.

(Mercury 6200 Baby Blue Eyes / Bouquet in Heaven was released around July 1949. Mercury 6211 Down The Road / Why Don't You Tell Me So? was released by October 1949.)

Howard Watts authorship for The Letter Covered with Tears, You're Blooming in Heaven, and That Waltz and the Tennessee Moon

Several songs in the songbook were composed by musicians who were never part of the Foggies - fairly normal in hillbilly songbooks. However, a large chunk are credited to Howard Watts, who worked in the Foggies from 1948 to May 1950. The focus on Watts makes sense in light of him being a contemporary band member.

Band member photographs

Speaking of band members, we can look at more than Watts. Several outdated photos appear in the songbook, showing the 1948 configuration. A more recent configuration is also featured with Lester Flatt (guitar), Earl Scruggs (banjo), Curly Seckler (mandolin), Art Wooten (fiddle), and Howard Watts (bass). The most recent photographs are clearly all from the same day, and in one of these, they are standing near an NBC microphone. Curly Seckler joined the band in March 1949, Art Wooten around the same time, and Art Wooten left around the time the Foggies left WROL in the fall of 1949. It's common for bands to have outdated photographs depicting their lineup, but the NBC logo on a microphone in one shot can help us determine where the images were taken.

To summarize, a yummy table:

There are a several small contradictions if we operate on base assumptions and face value. The Scruggses's (sssssssssss's's's) provided family information suggests mid-May or even March 1949 could be the latest date of print, but WROL's Dinner Bell program didn't launch until the second-to-last day in May 1949. There are no overlapping dates between these two factors.

However, not all dates we've been provided are necessarily 100% accurate. Reconstructing bluegrass history involves deciphering faulty newspaper blurbs and detangling unreliable oral history over decades-old memories. So there's wiggle room to our dates.

Even if these dates are all correct and treated strictly correct, I think discrepancies can be explained. We can walk the line between "slightly outdated printed information" and "created while anticipating upcoming events." It's easy for people to forget to clarify year (April 1948 versus April 1949) when doing a minor biography update, it's feasible for the Scruggses to not reveal a newborn's birth so soon, it's possible for Flatt & Scruggs to plan what they would record before entering the studio, and it's reasonable for Flatt & Scruggs to anticipate the first date of the Dinner Bell for several weeks before its debut.

Given all the factors analyzed, I suggest the most likely time this songbook got printed was May 1949. That's straight in the middle of the mess and wallowing in as much overlap as possible.