Luck and Persistence, ‘Not Talent’--Are Key

“I don’t really know what the hell I am,” Cliffie Stone claims, at age 76. “I haven’t grown up yet. I’m not sure what I want to be.”

Saturday, beginning at 2:30 p.m., the Country Music Assn. Hall of Famer will lead a band and play bass at the National Dyslexia Research Foundation fund-raiser at South Coast Plaza Village in Santa Ana. Next week he flies to Bowling Green, Ky., to take part in a book symposium, and then will go on to Nashville to meet with record and publishing execs about a couple of new acts he’s representing.

In his spare time, he’s working on a book about his experiences in country music, which should make for quite a thick volume.

Stone began performing on Los Angeles radio when he was 14 and has been a disc jockey or comedian on 52 stations. His 11-year “Hometown Jamboree” TV show, which debuted in 1949, was one of the first and most influential programs to boost country music, featuring all stripes of country and admitting young upstarts such as Elvis Presley. Stone also managed Tennessee Ernie Ford for 23 years, was a TV producer, a record producer for Capitol Records, a successful songwriter and a music publisher.

“I happen to have been lucky,” he said modestly. “I think luck and persistence--the more persistent you are the luckier you get--is the answer to the entertainment world. It’s not talent. That sounds weird, but I know a lot of talented people that are starving.”

Stone’s start in show business followed that of his banjo-playing father. The family raised dogs, and his dad was hired to bring 60 dogs to Wyoming to be in the 1930 film “The Big Trail,” an early talkie that introduced John Wayne to the world. To befit the film’s rustic look, he wasn’t allowed to shave for months, and when he returned home it was with long hair and a beard. A DJ renamed him Herman the Hermit, fabricating a story about discovering him in a cave above Burbank, and featured him on his show.

Stone joined that same radio show when he was 14, playing bass. His real last name, Snyder, was changed to Stonehead for the show. When he took over hosting the show years later: “I lost my ‘head’ and became Stone.”

He said he feels a lot of ties to Orange County. He lived in Newport Beach for several years in the ‘50s, and his first dance as a bandleader was at the Placentia American Legion Hall in the ‘40s .

“It was way out in an orange grove. It was just a little town and I thought we’d never get any people in for the dance, but that first time about 300 people showed up. I couldn’t believe it,” he recalled. Stone had trouble with the little hall’s sound system, and he called a Fullerton radio repairman named Leo Fender in to watch over it. Fender went on in a few years to revolutionize the music world with his guitars and amps.

Stone now lives in a new development north of Los Angeles. “I’m not anybody to speak of out here. To people I’m just the residential cowboy-type guy. But when I come into Orange County, that’s where all my people are.”

He’s pleased to have lived to see a time when country music is respected.

“For a long time it was almost like racial discrimination when you said you were country. It used to be if you were listening to country music on your radio at a boulevard stop, you’d turn your radio down so nobody would know you were listening to it. It was looked down on by the musicians’ union, everybody. We were like second-class citizens, which is OK because we did nothing but make money,” he said with a laugh.

While other musicians had their noses in the air, Stone, Spade Cooley and other hillbilly bandleaders were so popular that they had to play several shifts a day to accommodate all the fans who had migrated to California to work in the defense plants during World War II.

The entertainment business was a much simpler thing back then. He got started in TV with $700, which at the time bought you an hour of broadcast time and a full two-camera crew. His 23-year partnership with Ford wasn’t firmed up with a contract but by a handshake when the two were in a pickup on a hunting trip.

“Ernie said, ‘Would you manage me?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve never done that,’ and he said ‘Well, Cliffie, I’ve never been managed, so maybe we can start out even.’ So we did that,” Stone recalled.

Record-making, which can take some artists more than a year to do now, was also more direct then. Two of Stone’s band members, steel guitarist Speedy West and guitarist Jimmy Bryant, recorded albums of their brilliant duets in the ‘50s that are still marveled over. Stone played bass on all the sessions.

“At no time when we went in to record did we know what we were going to do. We’d just start the tape, those two guys would jump in with a lick and we’d go with it. Then we’d come up with a title for it, like ‘Whistle Stop,’ ‘Speedin’ West’ or ‘Bryant’s Boogie.’ That was the hardest work we did, figuring out the titles,” he said.

Though now part of a country music dynasty--his son Curtis is in Highway 101--Stone doesn’t anticipate quitting the business any time soon. Along with the book he’s working on, he’s also busy promoting a book he issued last year, “Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Songwriting.”