Christine L. Craig is a woman with a mission: she wants to see her father, harmonica virtuoso DeFord Bailey, granted his rightful place in the pantheon of country music greats. Bailey, who died in 1982 at the age of 82, is the only major figure from the early days of the Grand Ole Opry who hasn’t been inducted into Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame. It’s Craig’s opinion, and that of many others, that Bailey’s exclusion from the hall would count as a glaring historical omission even if he hadn’t also been the first black star of a musical idiom generally understood to be a white thing.
Bailey was a frequent guest in his daughter’s home. “My best memories are his visits here,” Craig says. “He’d stay week after week in the summertime. I’d stay down the hall and he’d move in the bedroom. We went to church at Man-dell United Methodist on the west side. He’d find a bench and play harmonica in the park we used to have here.” Often, she
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says, friends would drop by with a fresh-baked sweet potato pie for the visiting dignitary, who was admired around the neighborhood for his natty appearance. “My father never left the house with-out a suit, a tie, a hat, and his shoes shining like new money,” Craig says.
It was in the course of introducing one of Bailey’s sets that George Hay renamed WSM’s Barn Dance program the Grand Ole Opry. It was the fall of 1927, and WSM had recently become an affiliate station of the newly formed NBC network, the bulk of whose musical programs then were distinctly highbrow in comparison. One evening Hay, who did his announcing duties under the pseudonym of the Solemn Old Judge, was moved to poke some fun at the NBC program preceding his broadcast. “For the past hour,” he said, “we have been listening to music largely from Grand Opera, but from now on, we will present the Grand Ole Opry.” Hay then turned the show over to Bailey, who launched into “Pan American Blues.”
Indignant that anyone should presume to tell him what or how to play, Bailey refused to toe the line, which is almost certainly what led to his dismissal. Just a few months later, the broadcasters and ASCAP negotiated a new contract, signaling a return to business as usual at the Opry. But no one, it seems, thought of bringing Bailey back from his premature retirement. Embittered, Bailey turned his back on the music business, henceforth supporting himself with his shoe-shine operation.
Morton keeps in touch with Craig, who fights her father’s battle in various ways. In addition to having donated a collection of Bailey memorabilia to the Country Music Association (including several of his hats and a megaphone he used to amplify his harmonica), she regularly goes to the hall of fame and speaks informally to other visitors about her father’s neglected legacy. And when the TV documentary on her father first aired in May 2001, Craig was down in Nashville doing unpaid publicity rounds of local radio and television studios.
