Eddie Stubbs - now that's a gol dern country music name - plays classic country from the '40s, '50s and '60s on the radio:
- Country music has its share of wild characters, but old-fashioned, clean-cut, suit-and-tie-wearing Eddie Stubbs isn't one of them. He abstains from bad habits ("dadgummit!" is as close as he comes to swearing), goes to church every Sunday and has a work ethic that would put Puritans to shame. Above all, he is an evangelist, a spreader of the word, eager to initiate the uninitiated and bring those who have strayed back into the fold. It is not belief in God, though, that he is trying to sell. Eddie Stubbs is on a mission to save the soul of country music.
He'll come right out and tell you as much if you ask him. Country has forgotten its roots, he'll say. It has neglected its pioneers and forsaken its heroes. What he won't say out loud, but what you think he secretly believes, is that most new country music isn't country music at all.
For a radio disc jockey faced with media conglomeration, target audiences and shrunken playlists, filling commercial and even public airwaves with classic country — music from its golden era of the 1940s, '50s and '60s — is a tall order. But as any listener to his Sunday afternoon show on Washington's WAMU-FM or his weeknight and Saturday morning shows on Nashville's WSM-AM knows, Stubbs is diligently stoking the embers of old-time country, bluegrass and honky-tonk. "Yes sir, friends, that was Johnny Paycheck singing 'The Real Mr. Heartache.' I'll tell you what, he makes you believe he's been there. Wow, it doesn't get any better than that. Great stuff." Stubbs is standing in front of the microphone in his fishbowl of a studio in the lobby of the Gaylord Opryland Resort hotel. Tall and fence-post thin, he has a slightly haunted face that's all bone and little flesh.
Unless he's flashing his grimace of a smile, he looks straight out of a Depression-era photo. Listeners, he says, are often surprised by his appearance. "They usually think I'm 65 to 70, bald, portly, smoking a pipe and do the show every week with a dog at my feet," he says. "Well, I don't like dogs, I don't smoke, I'm far from portly and I'm 41."
....As the music plays, he takes calls off the air from listeners like the 37-year-old trucker speeding along I-70 in Missouri who thanks him "for playing all that old music 'cause no one else does." And the elderly woman in Chillicothe, Ohio, who praises him for digging up a favorite Hawkshaw Hawkins song she requested. "How'd you find that so fast, Eddie?"
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Article comments
1 - Bill Carlisle, Jr.
One advantage Eddie has over a lot of DJ's is that he is a musician. He knows quality when he hears it, whether it's technical quality or commercial. Eddie's knowledge of country music history plus his musical talent enables him to tell the difference between what is just "today" and what will endure.