Connie B. Gay ’35 stood backstage at the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall on an April night in 1948 looking out at 4,000 patrons done up in dinner-party duds. They had each paid $2 to hear music that not so long ago would have more likely been heard along some country backroad down South than in a formal concert hall in the nation’s capital. This was Gay Time, a live three-hour show that was being broadcast over the radio to thousands of Northern Virginia residents. It was also Gay’s time, for this was the culmination of his promise to expand the reach of the music that he grew up with in the tiny town of Lizard Lick, N.C. With more than a dozen acts lined up for the first of 26 sold-out shows, Gay walked his gangly, suited-up frame on stage and proclaimed that country music was here to stay.

“Hi, neighbor. We’re happy to present the world’s greatest hillbilly show. Pull up a nail keg, sit down and join us.”
— Connie B. Gay ’35

“Hi, neighbor,” Gay said into the mic, his voice dripping a deep, North State drawl. “We’re happy to present the world’s greatest hillbilly show. Pull up a nail keg, sit down and join us.”

The show symbolized Gay’s transformation from North Carolina farm boy to musical promoter wanting to, as he would say, “bring hillbilly music uptown.” In the 1950s, he became a “hillbilly king,” as one newspaper described him, owning radio stations, producing coast-to-coast network shows and promoting concerts in venues known more for classical pianists than country crooners. Gay became a multi-millionaire (he claimed he lost money in country music only once —$32 when a Roy Acuff concert he promoted lost out to a last-minute Gene Autry show). His influence spread south to Nashville, Tenn., where he helped create the Country Music Association in 1958 and served as its first president. He’s even credited with popularizing the phrase “country music,” which had earlier been known “hillbilly music.” Gay took country music from lost highways to city avenues, paving the way for country music’s modern-day ubiquity, where Carrie Underwood serenades the NFL on Sunday nights, Brad Paisley sings along to a Nationwide Insurance jingle and Garth Brooks sells out Yankee Stadium shows in the Bronx. 

“Connie B. Gay was one of the first to recognize that force,” says country music historian Bill C. Malone. “It was just rural and urban people ready for this music. And he was astute enough to make it available to them.”

The Stinkingest Mule

Of all the things that could have helped set in motion the future of country music, it was the stench of a mule. 

“We had an old mule named Bob, and he was the stinkingest mule ever to come out of North Carolina. I was tired of following that mule. … So I figured if I got a college education, someday I could get away.”
— Connie B. Gay ’35

Gay grew up the youngest of 10 children on a 17-acre tobacco farm during the Great Depression. Farm life didn’t appeal to Gay, so he yearned for a way out. “We had an old mule named Bob, and he was the stinkingest mule ever to come out of North Carolina,” Gay said in a 1974 oral history with the Country Music Foundation. “I was tired of following that mule. … So I figured if I got a college education, someday I could get away.”

Gay arrived at NC State in 1931 with $2.52 in his pocket. He studied agriculture, but college life provided his first taste of the entertainment business. He booked shows, took up tickets and drove the bus for his friend, Jimmy Gerow ’32, and his dance band, the Collegians. “I did everything in the world … trying to get a little publicity for the band so we could play the tobacco warehouses and dance halls,” Gay said. After graduation, he landed a job in North Carolina as a soil scientist for what was then called the Soil Conservation Service, based in Caswell County. He worked his way up through the state level, leading him to work in various positions over the next decade all over the world for the U.S. Department of Agriculture before finally moving to Washington, D.C., in the early 1940s. The same dirt he had plowed and resented as a boy had given him a ticket out of North Carolina. 

Once settled in D.C., Gay found he had a knack for fashioning speeches for higher-ups in the agriculture department. The White House took notice and tapped him to craft parts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fireside chats. That rekindled an old flame with radio that had burned in Gay since his days in Lizard Lick. 

Growing up, Gay depended on the signal of Nashville’s iconic radio station, WSM, to reach the easternmost edges of Wake County at night and serve as his first exposure to the hillbilly sound he loved. When he was in high school, he won a contest to be a student announcer on Raleigh’s WPTF radio. Gay had even left the agriculture department in D.C. for a brief period in 1943 and returned to Raleigh to work at WPTF as the station’s farm program director. He mixed in country tunes between offering advice to his listeners, one time locating a merchant for an Autryville, N.C., woman who needed overalls for her five children. So Gay was interested in 1946 when, back in Washington, he heard a new station, WARL, was beginning broadcasts out of Arlington, Va. He approached WARL management about hosting a farmer-centric show like the one he’d worked on in Raleigh. After all, the market was flooded with transplants who had come to the D.C. area from places like Lizard Lick seeking out factory jobs with high wages. When the suits bit, Gay sensed an opportunity. 

Radio Days

Gay’s voice was captivating, relaxed and friendly as if he was reading a bedtime story to a child. But he wanted to do more than simply talk. Before he came along, transplanted listeners tuned in to the Northern Virginia radio and didn’t hear the acts they listened to back home on the Grand Ole Opry out of Nashville. “So it had given me an idea,” he said, remembering that in his previous radio work he’d receive mailbags full of letters any time he’d play country music by acts like Milton Estes and his Lone Star Quartet or the Delmore Brothers. “There’s got to be a way to put hillbilly music in the cash register in a big city like Washington, D.C.” 

It was a deliberate shift from depending on the hillbilly, hay-bale image to sell the music, and it led Gay to market the genre as “country music.”

He trademarked the name “Town and Country Time.”

Gay hit WARL’s airwaves in 1946 hosting morning and after-noon shows featuring music, and he named the afternoon show Town and Country Time. It was a deliberate shift from depending on the hillbilly, hay-bale image to sell the music, and it led Gay to market the genre as “country music.” He trademarked the name “Town and Country Time.” “By using it as a moniker, he contributed to adding class and respectability to the music,” says Jocelyn Neal, a music professor at UNC-Chapel Hill who teaches courses on country music. 

Taking the music to the streets, Gay began promoting concerts around the District, hosting country concerts at Griffith Stadium, home to professional baseball’s Washington Senators, and DAR Constitution Hall. Gay got creative in getting people to his shows. Sometimes, he employed spectacle, an old trick he’d learned in the 1930s when he sold knife sharpeners in carnival parking lots and threatened to eat a Gila monster to gain an audience. He had guitar pickers play and singers perform at an air circus show at a Fairfax, Va., airport while stuntmen walked on the wings of planes overhead. Steamboat rides on the Potomac were called “Hillbilly Moonlite Cruises” and featured performers like Hank Williams and Moon Mullican, a country pianist. “We could hardly pull out with all the people he’d have on there,” says bluegrass guitar legend Mac Wiseman, who was featured on some of the cruises.

Those promotions certainly made Gay money, and another D.C. radio personality alluded to Gay’s salesmanship in an on-air salute to him in the 1950s. “Connie, I tried to analyze you, boy, and I can’t quite figure you out,” he said to Gay. “You can’t sing. You don’t play a musical instrument as I understand. Your chief ability is counting money. And at that, you are a real professional.” But Gay’s appreciation for country music went deeper than just making a dollar. Gay had seen rural life and its harsh demands up close in Lizard Lick, and country music had helped him escape the drudgery. He related to others who shared those experiences, and felt a certain responsibility to get them the music that spoke to their lives. “‘Huckster’ isn’t the right word,” says Diane Pecknold, a University of Louisville professor of women’s and gender studies who writes about the country music industry. “He had charisma. Part of that was making people aware of a culture that mattered to a lot of people. I think he took that seriously.” 

His dedication to attracting stars, including some of his favorite artists like Eddy Arnold, underscored that commitment. Roy Clark and Grandpa Jones, both of whom would become household names on Hee Haw, popped up on broadcasts and at live shows. A deal with a Nashville booker enabled Gay to be the only promoter to bring famous acts like Minnie Pearl into D.C. and Northern Virginia. Patsy Cline and Jimmy Dean were at one point in his stable. Gay’s partnership with Dean even carried them to national fame when RCA syndicated a televised version of Town and Country Time. 

A letter from a listener held in the archives of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum underscores Gay’s influence. “I came here in the mid-forties when Hillbilly music was classed poor in the D.C. area,” wrote a Takoma Park, Md., resident to Gay in 1959, “but you promoted and lead [sic] the Hillbilly music to the top. The Air Force broke the sound barrier, but you had already broken the listening barrier. I don’t go much for Rock & Roll as I’m a family man of 32. Just good Hillbilly music suits me fine.”

Let’s “B” Organized

By the late 1950s, Gay’s influence was felt in new markets as he owned radio stations spreading from Fairmont, W. Va., to Little Rock, Ark., and reached 2 million listeners on a daily basis. To raise country music’s profile, he organized all his stations under one umbrella, calling it the Town and Country Network. “His organization was like no other,” says Wiseman. “Connie was a business.”

“His organization was like no other. Connie was a business.”
— Mac Wiseman

The same wasn’t true of country music as a whole. Fractured and spread throughout regional pockets, the industry lacked infrastructure, says John Rumble, senior historian at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. Sure, there was a loosely organized network of successful promoters and deejays — Jim Brooker in Miami, Fla., Nelson King in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Jim Halsey, Tulsa, Okla. But there was no centralized organization, making it hard to keep up with rock ‘n’ roll. And there was a new medium emerging. “ TV was keeping people at home instead of going out and seeing shows,” says Rumble.

So in 1958, disc jockeys and promoters decided at their annual convention, which Gay attended, to organize the Country Music Association, designed to convince more station owners to convert to an all-country format. The CMA worked to persuade advertisers to sell their products with a little twang and started using market research for the first time to target audiences. 

The organizers selected Gay to be the CMA’s first president. He traveled the country, reaching out to radio stations, advertisers and listeners, and turning them on to country. “I predict that the next big wing or trend in the world of entertainment will be toward country music,” he said at a fan festival in Nashville in 1958. “I foresee hundreds or thousands of radio and TV stations and networks, publishers, writers, promoters and artists — all in a mad scramble to get on the bandwagon.”

Gay, who bragged of being clairvoyant as the seventh son of a seventh son, was prophetic. Jo Walker-Meador, a former CMA executive director who calls Gay “one of the most valuable people the CMA ever had,” says that in 1961 there were 100 radio stations that primarily played country music. Today, she says, there are about 2,000. That’s more stations featuring country music than any other genre. The CMA celebrated its fifth decade of influence last fall during a broadcast of its awards show. The annual event has become appointment television for viewers, keeping up with the Grammys with its red-carpet splendor and crossover appeal. (At the November show, Matthew McConaughey introduced Tim McGraw.) And the organization hosts a signature event every summer with the CMA Music Festival in Nashville. “Last year, they took in $60 million. There’s people there from South Africa, Australia, from around the world,” says Wiseman, the only living member from the association’s original board. “That’s the impact the CMA has had.” 

“I remember one night my sister and I were at the top of the stairs in our pajamas. I peeked over the railing, and I saw Charley Pride. And I saw Grandpa Jones. I even think Elvis came over one time.”
— Cecilia Ashley, daughter

Gay did a lot for country music, but life in the industry didn’t always pay him back. He battled alcoholism early in his career, but sobered up by the 1960’s, trading in drinking for other vices, like Coca-Cola and Breyers vanilla ice cream. His first marriage, which gave him a son and a daughter, ended in divorce, but he remarried in 1961 and had two daughters. Gay was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease in 1965. He started selling off his radio stations and other businesses, phasing out his involvement during the 1960s, but still finding time to make music a family affair. “One night my sister and I were at the top of the stairs in our pajamas,” says daughter Cecilia Ashley, who is now 51 and lives in McLean, Va. “I peeked over the railing, and I saw Charley Pride. And I saw Grandpa Jones. I even think Elvis came over one time.”

Gay formally retired in 1972 at the age of 58. He served in various advisory roles in country music until his death in 1989. He was 75. For many years, the CMA acknowledged service to the industry by giving out the Connie B. Gay Award. 

The Country Music Hall of Fame inducted Gay in 1980 alongside Johnny Cash. The museum moved into a new space in 2001, and one of the building’s signatures is a rotunda. Inside, a panorama of busts depicting the hall’s 130 inductees adorns the wall. On the far right wall suspended like notes on sheet music are the faces of icons like Merle Haggard, outlaws like Waylon Jennings and musical matriarchs like Tammy Wynette. But above them all on the top set of five bars, Connie B. Gay’s plaque reads: “His love for country music and business foresight made him a premier force in modern country music. His pioneer use of the term ‘country music’ and registered trademark ‘town and country’ were instrumental in bringing country music ‘uptown.’”

Gay’s bearded bust peers out over that message, a slight grin forming in the left corner of his mouth. It could be a sign of the satisfaction at his place alongside other hillbilly heroes who raised country music’s profile. 

Or, maybe it’s the smile of a one-time farm boy who left home and never had to follow his stinking plow mule again.

Editor’s note: The author used sources including newspaper and magazine articles and alumni records. John Rumble, senior historian at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, was a valuable resource and provided an Oct. 18, 1974, oral history with Connie B. Gay held by the Frist Library and Archive of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. The library also provided access to hundreds of letters, clippings, documents and photographs.

---

Tell Us What You Think

Do you have a personal connection to this story? Did it spark a memory? Want to share your thoughts? Send us a letter, and we may include it in an upcoming issue of NC State magazine.

---