You’re old if you remember the original ‘WBT Briarhoppers’

Happy 90th anniversary in 2024 to North Carolina’s Briarhoppers, a country music band that was formed in 1934 “on a wing and a prayer” by radio station announcer Charlie Crutchfield at WBT in Charlotte.

It’s a great story, one that helped lay the foundation of the Tar Heel State’s rich musical culture and heritage.

Crutchfield was not a musician, but he became the “voice” of the Briarhoppers. He took a telephone call that came into the station one day from a potential advertiser in Chicago – the Consolidated Royal Chemical Corporation – inquiring if WBT had a “hillbilly band” to endorse the company’s products?

 

Crutchfield fibbed and said “yes.” He scrambled together a band using “volunteer musicians” and promptly named the ensemble as “The WBT Briarhoppers.” He always insisted the name came from a rabbit hunting experience in which a fellow hunter flushed a rabbit from a thicket and exclaimed, “Look at that briarhopper!”

The original members of the band were: Johnny McAllister, Jane Bartlett, William “Big Bill” Davis, Clarence Etters and Thorpe Westerfield. Also, one boy and one girl were selected as junior members, He was Homer Drye, and she was Billie Burton.

 

Beginning in 1934, the band performed live on the radio for one hour a day, six days a week. At the time, string band music and country humor were an effective way to reach the rural and working-class audience of the Piedmont textile region.

Between numbers, Crutchfield would come on the air to pitch products such as Peruna miracle tonic, Radio Girl perfume, Kolor-Bak hair dye and Zymol Trokeys cough drops.

 

This Briarhoppers were at the heart of the “Golden Age of American Radio.” It seems that “everyone” tuned in to WBT to listen whenever the Briarhoppers came on.

“At the height of the Briarhoppers’ fame there were two touring versions of the band, dubbed Unit One and Unit Two, crisscrossing the Southeast playing mill villages and courthouse towns,” reported Dr. Tom Hanchett, a community historian in Charlotte and creator of the History South blog.

 

Musicians and vocalists regularly moved in and out of the band, but through it all, the anchor of the Briarhoppers was Davis, a classically trained violinist who also performed with the Charlotte Symphony. 

Others country music stalwarts who served a time as Briarhoppers included Don White, Arthur Smith, Fred Kirby, Claude Casey, Cecil Campbell, Jack Gillette, Roy “Whitey” Grant, Arvel Hogan, Shannon Grayson and “Fiddlin’ Hank” Warren. (Warren also played the role of “their baggy-pants comedian.”)

 

Roy “Whitey” Grant and Arvel Hogan performed countless duets.

During the summer of 1945, WBT originated “Carolina Hayride,” a Saturday afternoon barn dance broadcast coast-to-coast via the CBS radio network, featuring the Briarhoppers. Fan mail to the band peaked at about 10,000 letters a week, bringing a lot of attention to the city, according to author Daniel Coston, who has written extensively about Crutchfield and the Briarhoppers.

In fact, later in life, Crutchfield commented: “Charlotte could well have become the Nashville, the center of country music, if I just had the foresight to see its potential.”

As it was, the Briarhoppers show ended its run on WBT in 1951, “a victim of changing public tastes in country music,” Dr. Hanchett remarked.

In the 1970s, five “alumni” members of the band – White, Grant, Hogan, Grayson and Warren – reformed the Briarhoppers (shown below). 

Now into the 2020s, the band still performs occasionally, under the leadership of Tim Warlick and Alana Flowers.

 

For information, contact Warlick at (803) 222-5737. Emails are wbtbriarhoppers@gmail.com or tomwarwick @hotmail.com.

 As for Crutchfield, his rise in radio…and then television…was full of adventure to be explored soon.