Happy Feet Friday

Arthur Smith performs his own composition, "Guitar Boogie".

Smith was a prolific song writer and recording artist, and headed up the first nationally-syndicated country music television program in the early 1950s (based in Charlotte, NC). I remember watching it when we visited with Grandma Paco in Albemarle, NC (one of the main sponsors was Martha White Flour, which I forevermore associated with Smith). We weren't able to get the program in Raleigh (and subsequently Cary, NC) where we lived, because the station which aired it was an NBC affiliate, and the only channels we got where we lived were affiliates of ABC and CBS, and the Educational TV station - boy, are those days long gone! Correction: we could pick up a fairly decent picture of the Greensboro NBC channel from whenever the broadcasting day began in the early morning up until about 10 or 10:30 am; then the picture disappeared in image-shattering wave lines and dissolved into static until the next day.

Anyway, here's Arthur Smith from the mid-1940s.