Ernie Ford, the Radio, and the Hard Truth of the American Pea Picker

An excerpt from 'River of No Return: Tennessee Ernie Ford and the Woman He Loved'

MISTAKEN BELIEF AND HARMLESS SOPHISTRY FORM THE FOUNDATION of much of our modern mythology, particularly when it comes to entertainers and persons of notoriety...persons of celebrity. My father was, and remains, no different. Even today, these thirty-three years since his death, I continue to float somewhere between intrigued and not a little suspicious when I learn some heretofore hidden 'truth' about him, or our family, particularly when I know it to be anything but. Those of us who deal with this every day, whether by blood or paper, understand that the term 'legendary' can be a double-entendre'd sword.

In the case of Ernest Ford, however, the misconception this writing seeks to dispel arose by his own doing, his own hand...or rather, his own voice. Moreover, it is a misconception that has become far more than a simple cultural rumor, a quaint pastoral sobriquet; it has become literally synonymous with him, as if it were a part of his given name. One so integral to his persona, but so misplaced, that the origin of the legend--its inception and its unvarnished truth--has faded over time, leaving in its place a benign fiction more in keeping with cracker-barrel fables than its real roots. Roots that reach back in history...to 1946...to a time when America was seeking its own promised land and healing from the scars of war.

For many, the salve was radio.

As much fun as Ernie Ford was having on the air, a staff announcer‘s afternoon shift-even in the high-pressure, fast-lane world of 1946 San Bernardino-could make the leap from fun to boring in about the time it took to play a Spade Cooley record. The job required massive intravenous feedings of black coffee, a wholesale account with the local Lucky Strike distributor, an ego matched by an unabashed desire to entertain people, and-perhaps most important- an acute need to entertain yourself - something my father'd never had any problem doing.

To break the tedium, he reinvented himself, splitting his personality in the process, creating a character that would immediately resonate with his audience, and become an alter ego he would forever be associated with for the rest of his career. Like Edgar Bergen’s Charlie McCarthy, it was a character that would become like his second skin, a twin that had somehow grown out of him.

But the character was only one part of a larger concept; one borne out of several ideas, all inherently integral to the medium of radio in nineteen forty-six. It was a medium of imagination, a theater of the mind that allowed for a spontaneity television would be hard-pressed to succeed. There were, to be sure, scores of dramatic serials that were tautly scripted and tightly timed. But for the biggest part, there was a freedom and an intimacy that existed on the air that lured, hooked, and magnetized listeners.

Although 78’s remained the primary source of the music programmed and played on radio, live entertainment was an important staple. Stations all over the country featured shows that put the spotlight -figuratively- on local and regional talent: singers, musicians, bands, soloists, comedians and actors. Occasionally somebody would book a juggler, or a magician - on a show without an audience. Careers were made and lost overnight. ‘He’s putting his hand into the hat. Now he’s waving his magic wand, and…yes! Here it comes! He’s pulled a rabbit right out of the hat, folks!”

I told you…it was a medium of the imagination.

Drawing on that concept, Dad created not only a character, but an entire illusion. He stopped being Ernest Ford, and became Tennessee Ernie, proprietor of the Bar Nothing Ranch, where you could come in for a spell, eat some home-cooked food, and listen to the latest and greatest on the Hit Parade.

For thirty minutes every day, his alter ego took the mic; a loud, obnoxious, crazed hillbilly from Tennessee who turned the stolid afternoon shift on KFXM on its ear, and into an all-out bunkhouse party. Adding his own props and sound effects, he expanded on the illusion with cowbells, and livestock sounds to punctuate the craziness. And in a moment he couldn’t have known would be looked back on as inspired, he did something that would change his career, and his life. He turned his mic on during one afternoon’s show and sang along with the records he played. Not all of them, of course; the songs he knew and could lend harmony to.

Like the station Bar Nothing Ranch was broadcast from, Dad and his alter ego knew his audience. He identified with them, and related to their calloused, sweat-of-the-brow lives. They were people much like Betty’s family; hard-working folks who’d been part of the vast numbers of migrants who’d fled Oklahoma, Kansas, or points further East, looking for, but never finding that Golden State that beckoned to them from postcards and billboards.

In the late 1930‘s, they formed entire communities throughout the Southern California valleys; camps swelling with families who’d left everything believing that a land of plenty awaited them. Driving from San Bernardino to Ojai, you motored past the outskirts of those camps, past smaller sites, marked by makeshift lean-to’s or tents, past foremen’s lines, where the men, women, and children who were old enough waited for the chance to work the fields.

They were the second great wave of American refugees. In 1937, their faces, lives and deaths were etched forever in the American psyche through the lens of photographer Dorothea Lange, commissioned by the Farm Services Agency to chronicle their plight. Her powerful images in turn inspired Steinbeck to pen his classic, “Grapes Of Wrath”.

By forty-six, many of those sprawling camps had thinned. And although migratory labor was still a vital sub-industry, the post-war boom offered the immigrants from the plains a far more stable environment for finding regular work and raising their families.

In Southern California’s Inland Empire, the fields many of those families sought a day’s wages in were noted for many crops. Of those crops, one in particular grew abundantly, didn’t require the vast reservoirs of watering that other crops did, and didn’t impale your fingers when you threshed the rows. It grew low to the ground, lush and green, and when it was ripe, the pods stretched to the bursting point; the seams taut and rich. A hungry worker could spread a ripe husk and eat a handful of the sweet things inside without getting sick, and without getting caught. It grew best along coastal routes, near towns like Nipomo, where Dorothea Lange photographed her famous “Migrant Mother” portrait in 1937, and its abundance required massive labor forces of field hands, whose seasonal camps hearkened back to the camps of the thirties. Great herds of the workers would appear almost overnight, flood the fields during the months of the growing season, and then move on, blown by the dust and winds of need. They worked long hours, lived on barely passable wages, and passed their free time lost in the etherworld of the radio.

The crop was known simply as the basic Green, or Garden variety, and the workers were simply called pea pickers.

Their prevalence in the valleys, especially during the season, made them a part of the daily press, of the conversations among business leaders, gas station attendants and reporters. They became objects of derision and ridicule, eventually making the name for what they did, ‘pea pickers’, a name synonymous with an entire class of people: a sub-strata of the working poor not deserving of even the most common respect.

As a man, and as an entertainer, Dad recognized these people; he knew these people, and spoke to them directly. Before long, he was opening every Bar Nothing Ranch broadcast by welcoming “…all you pea pickers” to the show. It became as much a part of the show as the skits, music, and sound effects for him, and would evolve to become an integral part of his professional signature, but not for the reasons that the world was led to believe.

For nearly thirty years, the press and fans believed that it was a reference to his life growing up in Tennessee; to a life they mistakenly assumed was spent among unschooled hillbillies who lived in a shack on the edge of a pea patch that grew next to the still in back of the outhouse. Nothing angered me more. It angered me as a boy, and continues to hound me today.

The truth is, Ernie Ford wasn’t raised by, around, or anywhere near hillbillies. Nor was he cut from that cloth.

Google ‘Pea pickers’: the first references have nothing to do with Ernie Ford. Wikipedia defines the term with this entry:

“A Pea-picker is a derogatory reference to poor, migrant workers during the Great Depression. These people were unskilled, poorly educated workers, suitable only for menial tasks, such as harvesting crops, and, as such, received poor wages for working long hours under dreadful conditions. Many of these people were photographed by Dorothea Lange. The term "Pea picker" is used to distinguish a group as a lower social class from some other similar group, such as the "Pea-picking" Smiths, as opposed to the "Respectable" Smiths. Temporary communities of Pea-pickers are called Pea Picker Camps and farms that employed them were Pea-picker farms”.

My father was never a pea picker, never a laborer, never a hillbilly. But he was a man who recognized the innate dignity of those people, and an entertainer who saw the wisdom and value of brightening their lives. By appealing to them as his core audience, he gave them an identity that brought pride and place to an entire class of people, and made it o.k...indeed, made it a mark of the highest social order... for anyone to be a pea picker.

Ernie Ford: unsung social activist.

You're welcome.

____________________________

An excerpt from 'River of No Return ~ Tennessee Ernie Ford and the Woman He Loved'

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