Entertainers Hall of Fame salutes seven Arkansans
BY KYLE BRAZZEL
http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Style/243958/
Posted on Tuesday, November 18, 2008
HOT SPRINGS — At its best, the Arkansas Entertainers Hall of Fame induction ceremony blends the laudatory completism of a lifetime achievement award with the uncontainable jocularity of a front-porch storytelling session.
The 2008 induction, which Saturday night welcomed seven Arkansans distinguished in the performing arts, was both.
The biographical film introducing the evening’s first inductee, actress Tess Harper, showed the Mammoth Spring native performing in movie scenes with Academy Award-winning co-stars such as Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones, also noting Harper’s Oscar nomination for her role in 1986 ’s Crimes of the Heart. But it also encompassed her earliest roles, playing up Ozark mannerisms as theme-park characters on the streets and stages of Silver Dollar City and Dogpatch U. S. A.
Accepting her award at the Hot Springs Convention Center, the 58-year-old Harper observed that the last time she had traipsed across a Spa City stage was when she competed in the Miss Arkansas pageant as Miss Arkansas State University-Beebe. Completing the evening, which drew a standing ovation for each honoree and tears from nearly every new Hall of Fame member present, was Gov. Mike Beebe’s induction of rock legend Ronnie Hawkins. The governor offered apologies for the story he told, recalling sneaking into Newport’s Silver Moon nightclub when he was 15 to hear Hawkins’ band The Hawks, later to become The Band and retaining fellow Arkansan Levon Helm on drums.
“They wouldn’t serve you any beer, people,” Beebe said, in anticipation of any raised eyebrows among the crowd gathered for a surf-and-turf dinner at the Hot Springs Convention Center.
Hawkins, wearing tinted glasses and a Santa Claus beard, made no such apologies. He recalled one evening at home in Canada when he and songwriter Gordon Lightfoot placed a drunken 4 a.m. phone call to Hawkins’ friend Ray Thornton, the former U. S. representative from Arkansas. Hawkins, a native of Huntsville, goaded Lightfoot into serenading the friend he called “Cowboy Ray” with Lightfoot’s song “Early Morning Rain.” Hawkins, who played and palled around with Bo Diddley and was once declared an “endangered species” by a presidential act of Bill Clinton’s, gave the audience what they might have expected from an unabashed, aging rock star. He spoke in self-assured, salty language and used much of his time on stage to ogle the current Miss Arkansas, Ashlen Batson, who distributed the award plaques.
“What time does she get off ?” he asked.
HOT SPRINGS — At its best, the Arkansas Entertainers Hall of Fame induction ceremony blends the laudatory completism of a lifetime achievement award with the uncontainable jocularity of a front-porch storytelling session.
The 2008 induction, which Saturday night welcomed seven Arkansans distinguished in the performing arts, was both.
The biographical film introducing the evening’s first inductee, actress Tess Harper, showed the Mammoth Spring native performing in movie scenes with Academy Award-winning co-stars such as Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones, also noting Harper’s Oscar nomination for her role in 1986 ’s Crimes of the Heart. But it also encompassed her earliest roles, playing up Ozark mannerisms as theme-park characters on the streets and stages of Silver Dollar City and Dogpatch U. S. A.
Accepting her award at the Hot Springs Convention Center, the 58-year-old Harper observed that the last time she had traipsed across a Spa City stage was when she competed in the Miss Arkansas pageant as Miss Arkansas State University-Beebe. Completing the evening, which drew a standing ovation for each honoree and tears from nearly every new Hall of Fame member present, was Gov. Mike Beebe’s induction of rock legend Ronnie Hawkins. The governor offered apologies for the story he told, recalling sneaking into Newport’s Silver Moon nightclub when he was 15 to hear Hawkins’ band The Hawks, later to become The Band and retaining fellow Arkansan Levon Helm on drums.
“They wouldn’t serve you any beer, people,” Beebe said, in anticipation of any raised eyebrows among the crowd gathered for a surf-and-turf dinner at the Hot Springs Convention Center.
Hawkins, wearing tinted glasses and a Santa Claus beard, made no such apologies. He recalled one evening at home in Canada when he and songwriter Gordon Lightfoot placed a drunken 4 a.m. phone call to Hawkins’ friend Ray Thornton, the former U. S. representative from Arkansas. Hawkins, a native of Huntsville, goaded Lightfoot into serenading the friend he called “Cowboy Ray” with Lightfoot’s song “Early Morning Rain.” Hawkins, who played and palled around with Bo Diddley and was once declared an “endangered species” by a presidential act of Bill Clinton’s, gave the audience what they might have expected from an unabashed, aging rock star. He spoke in self-assured, salty language and used much of his time on stage to ogle the current Miss Arkansas, Ashlen Batson, who distributed the award plaques.
“What time does she get off ?” he asked.
The entertainers who passed across the stage between Harper and Hawkins seemed more humbled than hedonistic. (The country singer and Rogers native Joe Nichols, at 31 the youngest-ever Hall of Fame inductee, could not attend the ceremony because of a throat infection, and blues icon Sonny Boy Williamson, a one-time resident of Twist in Cross County, as well as the country and western stars Doyle and Teddy Wilburn were inducted posthumously. )
Trumpeter Wayne Jackson was moved to tears expressing his wish that his parents could see his induction. Jackson recalled that his mother bought him a trumpet in grade school when his report card reflected poor performance. Soon, he was sneaking out of the bedroom window of his family’s West Memphis home to play in bands at the old Jungle Inn on the highway between West Memphis and Forrest City.
This led to a career with Stax Records, playing in a house band that backed Otis Redding and Sam and Dave. He also played on the 1961 Top 10 hit song “Last Night” by The Mar-Keys.
“It sold a million and a half copies,” Jackson said. “When I was 18 and a total failure, I drove home in a brand new car. My dad liked that.” Jackson has also played with U 2, Aretha Franklin, Willie Nelson and Billy Joel. “You rock !” an audience member yelled, interrupting Jackson’s acceptance speech.
Each career-spanning highlight reel showed the Arkansans working with luminaries of their respective fields. Loretta Lynn appeared in the video spanning the variety-show and country music recording career of the Wilburn Brothers. The biography of Williamson included the notation that he had played with a 19-year-old Eric Clapton, in addition to being one of the first black entertainers heard on American radio airwaves, with his 12: 15 to 12: 30 p.m. slot on the King Biscuit Time radio program.
But the film introducing Ed Wilson, a Rison native and currently president of Chicago’s Tribune Broadcasting after stints at almost every major broadcast network, contained the widest, and arguably oddest, spectrum of entertainment world faces. Katie Couric, Tom Brokaw, Mario Lopez and Dan Aykroyd were among the celebrities who had lined up to film congratulatory messages for Wilson.
Taken together, the biographical films presented a timeline of changing entertainment industry mores. The Wilburn Brothers, for example, were once barred from the Grand Ole Opry because their performances there as a young family act in the 1940 s violated child labor laws. But the Nashville, Tenn., code has relaxed to the point that two of Nichols’ biggest hits, represented in music video clips during his induction, carry either innuendo — “Size Matters” — or straightforward raunch, as with “Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off.” The retrospectives also exploded the myth that the 67-member Arkansas Entertainers Hall of Fame, founded in 1996 and including a museum in Pine Bluff, only enshrines performers at the end of their careers. Al Green, after all, an inaugural inductee, released an album this year poised to make the yearend best-of lists of many music critics. Harper had a role in No Country for Old Men, which won the 2008 Best Picture Oscar. She flew to Arkansas for her induction from New York, where she had been filming an episode of Law & Order.
And the work of Jackson can be heard in movie theaters, accompanying the vocals of Jack White and Alicia Keys on the theme song for Quantum of Solace, the new James Bond film.
Gord tidbit from the Hawk, back in Arkansas
