It will be down to earth for the ‘earthy.’” As if to illustrate his point, Hay introduced Bailey, whose train-imitation piece “Pan American Blues” recreated the sounds of the L&N Railroad express train he remembered from his boyhood. Countering the view that “there is no place in the classics for realism,” Hay declared, the upcoming program “will present nothing but realism.
One evening in 1927, Hay spontaneously renamed the “WSM Barn Dance” while introducing several down-home performers immediately after a classical music program broadcast. For the next fifteen years, Bailey remained one of the program’s best loved-and highest paid-stars. By June 1926, Bailey was making regular appearances, and Hay soon dubbed him “The Harmonica Wizard.” Bailey was a dazzling performer, whose renditions of “Fox Chase,” “Pan American Blues,” and other tunes became harmonica classics. Hay to let Bailey perform without an audition. Within months, Bate persuaded Bailey to come with him one night to appear on the show then called the WSM Barn Dance and then convinced station manager George D. Humphrey Bate, a country doctor from Castalian Springs, Tennessee, who began performing over Nashville’s powerful WSM not long after its October 5, 1925, debut. Here, Bailey met harmonica player and stringband leader Dr. “The Harmonica Wizard” on Radio, Records, and StageĪ trip to Dad’s Auto Parts to buy parts for his bicycle led to his meeting store owner Fred “Pop” Exum, who was fascinated by Bailey’s harmonica playing and began featuring him on radio station WDAD once Exum launched the enterprise in mid-September 1925. In doing so, he became a bridge between the rural folk music of his youth and the modern world of commercial popular music. Meanwhile, he learned jazz, blues, and pop songs from recordings and from live shows he attended in local theaters. Bailey moved to Nashville in 1918 and spent the next six years working odd jobs, including stints as a houseboy, drugstore errand boy, and elevator operator. He also learned songs in church and developed a keen ear for the music he heard around him: the chugging of trains, the baying of hounds chasing foxes, and the sounds of animals on the succession of farms Clark Odum managed in Davidson and Williamson counties.
The grandson of a fiddler, Bailey grew up in a musical family that played what he called “black hillbilly music,” a tradition of secular stringband music that drew upon the same core repertoire shared by rural black and white musicians alike. As he later explained to researcher David Morton, he began learning harmonica as a young child: “My folks didn’t give me no rattler, they gave me a harp.” Polio, which struck Bailey at age three, stunted his growth and left his back somewhat bent, but what he lacked in physical stature he made up for in talent and determination. Born into a farming family in rural Smith County, Tennessee, Bailey lost his mother soon after his birth, and his aunt Barbara and her husband, Clark Odum, became his foster parents.