Arney Gospel Hour - 

From 1964!

If you watched TV in the Tri-Cities in the fifties or sixties, you remember J. Norton Arney. He was a little man with big ears and a big heart. You probably didn’t know about the big heart. More on that in a few paragraphs.

Arney was a fixture on local TV, promising “a square deal or no deal” if you would just buy a car from Arney Motors, “the used car supermarket” on North Roan in Johnson City.

He had been selling used cars in Johnson City since 1924, when he was 22. For a time he was the Oldsmobile dealer. Arney advertised his cars first on radio and then later on TV. And by “on TV” I mean all over TV. If you watched TV in Tri-Cities, you saw J. Norton.

 His passion, after selling cars, was gospel music. He promoted local gospel sings and sponsored a Sunday morning show he modestly called the “Arney Gospel Hour.”

And amazingly one of his shows from 1964 has survived.

In the sixties and seventies most local shows, if they were videotaped at all, were later recorded over. Videotape was expensive. And in the fifties they were live (!) so there were no recordings to survive. (The fifties shows you see today are usually kinescopes – films of the TV screen.)

 As a result we have no surviving examples of such early local shows as “Mountain Music Makers” with Bonnie Lou and Buster and the “Uncle Herb Show,” a kiddie program hosted by WJHL radio announcer Herb Howard (later famous as UT journalism professor Dr. Herb Howard).

But a Sunday morning episode of “Arney Gospel Hour” has survived, perhaps because a handwritten card was videotaped at the beginning of the show:

ARNEY

CHUCK WAGON

GANG

SAVE THIS TAPE

“DO NOT ERASE”

It was a special show. Arney devoted the entire hour to the legendary gospel group out of Texas, the Chuck Wagon Gang.

In May 1964 they had just published a songbook collection. They were also in the process of finishing up a new album, “That Old Time Religion,” which was released in November.

I found a review in the Oct. 31, 1964 edition of Billboard which gave the album four stars and noted it had “sufficient commercial potential … to merit being stocked by most dealers. “

Enough with the introduction…on with the show.

Here are two clips.

(Click on the picture for the first clip.)

(Click here for the second clip.)

Many thanks and a tip of the Hatlo Hat to George DeVault, Mr. WKPT, for making me a copy of the rare recording. (That’s a reference to the old comic strip “They’ll Do It Every Time” by Jimmy Hatlo, which ran in the Kingsport Times News for many years. Hatlo would acknowledge a reader contribution with “A Tip of the Hatlo Hat to….”)

As for J. Norton Arney’s “big heart.” Arney and his wife Minnie had no children so they funded an orphanage near Morristown.