Merle Kilgore was just a disc jockey at the little radio station in Springhill where I grew up, but he was about the biggest star any of us had ever been around back in the 1950s.
He had played the guitar and sung a few times on the Louisiana Hayride. That country music show at the Municipal Auditorium in Shreveport was nationally prominent. Elvis Presley and Hank Williams performed there.
Mr. Hill, who ran the radio station, liked to give local kids some good experience and a little spending money by hiring them to spin records and do other jobs at the station.
My interest at the time was sports writing, and he let me have a Saturday morning show to talk about the Springhill Lumberjacks and other high school teams in the area.
Bob Wainwright, a veteran radio engineer who knew how to hold the fragile equipment together enough to keep the station on the air, would call me if a disc jockey didn’t show up for work. I would go in and chat between records that he put on the turntable.
It was big news for that little town when Mr. Hill announced that Merle Kilgore would be coming to work for the station. He had, after all, been a DJ at a big station in Shreveport and at Ruston when he was going to Louisiana Tech.
I’m not sure Merle was famous at that time, but a lot of us who kept up with country music had heard of him. Stories about him carrying Hank Williams’ guitar when Hank played at the Hayride and Merle was a student at Byrd High School spread pretty fast.
All of us country music fans back then knew of Webb Pierce, a singer from West Monroe who performed at the Hayride and had some hit records. We knew Merle Kilgore wrote a song for Pierce called More and More that went to the top of the charts.
We were impressed with Merle’s appearance when he walked in the station the first morning on the job. He was tall with wavy black hair and sideburns, jeans without a single wrinkle in them, a crisp western shirt, shiny cowboy boots, a big belt buckle and a white hat.
It didn’t seem like it at the time with all of his impressive credentials and experience, but Merle was just five years or so older than me and my classmates. He graduated from Byrd in 1952, and most of us guys at the station would graduate in 1957.
He had written More and More before he was 20-years-old. Royalties for big hits like that must not have been as good then as they are now. I don’t think he would have been working for the kind of money the Springhill station paid if he had been rich.
In retrospect, it’s pretty clear that Merle, who was still in his twenties at the time, was just trying to make a few bucks and get a foothold in the music and entertainment business.
When he was not disc jockeying and promoting records, he was selling advertising for the station to businesses like Tennyson’s Drugs and Springhill Feed and Seed.
Merle had some kind of connection with Dave Bartholomew, a songwriter and musician who played the trumpet on most of Fats Domino’s recordings.
Bartholomew also had some records of his own. Merle paid some of us to take Dave’s records to disc jockeys at little radio stations in Louisiana and Arkansas and try to talk DJs into playing them. We made enough for gas and hamburgers.
So Merle must have been a promoter for Bartholomew, who wrote songs like Ain’t That a Shame with Domino and I Hear You Knocking on his own and ended up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Merle went on to much bigger things from Springhill. He wrote a hit called Wolverton Mountain about his Arkansas uncle named Clifton Clowers. He also wrote Ring of Fire, and there was controversy over whether Johnny Cash’s wife was the co-author.
Mike Haynes, a high school disc jockey at the station who later gained fame as The Winchester Man, told me about Kilgore returning to Springhill once to show friends the house on Butler Street where he wrote Ring of Fire.
Joe Stampley, another Springhill boy who made it big in country music, told me when he was here for a Christmas Festival that Merle was one of the top promoters in the music industry and that they crossed paths often.
When Kilgore died in 2005, he was the manager for Hank Williams, Jr. He wrote many more songs, performed at the Grand Ole Opry and was a member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES