Cas Walker, Dolly Parton, and the Country Radio Cradle
Near Knoxville, Tennessee
Caswell Orton Walker was born in Sevier County in nineteen oh two, grew up poor, and built a chain of discount grocery stores across the Knoxville region that at its peak operated several dozen locations in Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky. He was combative in business and politics, beloved and detested in roughly equal measure, and he had an insight that transformed Appalachian music history: he understood that a radio show could sell groceries and that mountain musicians could sell a radio show.
In nineteen twenty-nine, Walker started a program called the Farm and Home Hour to advertise his stores. It aired on WROL-AM and later WIVK-AM, and over the following decades it became the proving ground for more country and bluegrass talent than any other venue in the region. Roy Acuff performed on it. Bill Monroe performed on it. Jimmy Martin and Carl Smith and Carl Butler came through. The Everly Brothers, Don and Phil, were regulars in the mid-nineteen fifties, putting in the hours on Walker's show before they went to Nashville and became famous.
In nineteen fifty-three, Walker moved the program to television, making it one of the earliest country variety shows in the country. It ran until nineteen eighty-three. And in nineteen fifty-six, a ten-year-old girl from Locust Ridge in Sevier County performed on the show for the first time. Her uncle had brought her backstage at the radio station. Her name was Dolly Parton.
She performed regularly on the Cas Walker show through the early nineteen sixties, developing stage presence in front of a live audience while still a schoolgirl. She moved to Nashville the day after she graduated from Sevier County High School in nineteen sixty-four. The infrastructure that Walker built, the regional radio and television platform, the live audience, the proving ground for unpolished talent, preceded Nashville's commercial machine and fed it for decades.
The Tennessee Theatre around the corner was where Roy Acuff first performed publicly in nineteen thirty-two. Knoxville did not become Nashville. But Nashville could not have become Nashville without what Knoxville built first.
