Homer Haynes
Homer Haynes was the guitarist and singer of Homer & Jethro, the duo with the mandolinist Jethro Burns whose parodies of pop and country hits made them one of country music’s most successful comedy acts from the late 1940s through the 1960s. Behind the comedy both were accomplished swing and jazz players, and Haynes’s guitar is heard on King and RCA Victor sessions by the Delmore Brothers and Chet Atkins. The duo won a Grammy in 1959 and entered the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001.
Henry Doyle Haynes was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on 27 July 1920. As a boy known as “Junior” he met Kenneth “Dude” Burns when the radio man Lowell Blanchard pulled both of them out of separate bands auditioning for the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round on WNOX in Knoxville. As the String Dusters they played country songs, hoedowns and current pop, and for comic relief the two sent up the solemn close-harmony duets of the day by wailing hillbilly versions of sophisticated standards. When Blanchard forgot their nicknames during a 1936 broadcast he introduced them as Homer & Jethro, and they kept the names for the rest of their careers.
After the String Dusters broke up in 1938 the pair carried on as a duo and became regulars on the Renfro Valley Barn Dance in Kentucky. Drafted into the Army in World War II, they served separately, then resumed the act on WLW in Cincinnati. King Records owner Syd Nathan hired them for the label’s house band in early 1946, and they backed other King artists on many sessions, among them Moon Mullican. In October 1946 Haynes played guitar, alongside Burns and the electric guitarist Roy Lanham, on a Delmore Brothers session at the E. T. Herzog studio in Cincinnati that produced “Goin’ Back to the Blue Ridge Mountains.” Their own King records began with a hillbilly version of Frank Sinatra’s hit “Five Minutes More,” and after leaving King and WLW they spent a spell on KWTO in Springfield, Missouri, with Chet Atkins and the Carter Family.
Steve Sholes signed them to RCA Victor in spring 1949 and steered them toward song parodies. On 17 May 1949 in New York, with Haynes on guitar and vocals, Burns on mandolin and Charles Grean on bass, they recorded “Tennessee Border No. 2” and, with June Carter, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” and both became best sellers. That year Haynes and Burns also began recording with Atkins, first as his Guitar Pikers in Atlanta in February 1949, then on Atkins sessions in Chicago, New York and Nashville into 1954.
In 1950 the duo moved to WLS in Chicago, appearing on the National Barn Dance and Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club. “(How Much Is) That Hound Dog in the Window,” cut in New York on 19 March 1953 with Atkins on guitar and Jerry Byrd on steel, went to No. 2 on Billboard’s country chart. “The Battle of Kookamonga,” their send-up of “The Battle of New Orleans,” was recorded in Nashville on 22 July 1959 with Grady Martin, Bob Moore, Buddy Harman and Floyd Cramer under Atkins’s production; it reached both the country and pop charts and won the 1959 Grammy for Best Comedy Performance, Musical.
The live album Homer & Jethro at the Country Club, recorded at Nashville’s Hillwood Country Club on 12 November 1959, came out in 1960, and from then on the pair concentrated on albums rather than singles. Two of them, Playing It Straight (1962) and It Ain’t Necessarily Square (1967), were instrumental jazz records, a sign of both men’s devotion to Django Reinhardt. Through the 1960s they were television spokesmen for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and played network variety shows, Las Vegas showrooms and city nightclubs, and in the 1970–71 season they made several appearances on The Johnny Cash Show. Their last RCA session took place in Nashville in March 1971. Haynes died suddenly on 7 August 1971 while preparing for a fair date, and the Country Music Hall of Fame inducted Homer & Jethro in 2001.
