Hank Penny - Biography
By Jonny Whiteside
The brilliant singer-guitarist Hank Penny was one of country music's most thorny iconoclasts and affectionate boosters. A musician whose career spanned the key decades of hillbilly's evolution, he was as at ease with old-timey corn as he was with modern jazz. Penny's aesthetic, a combination of analytical intellect, dry humor and spontaneous bandstand improvisation, was, in the context of mid-century country music, altogether unique. Born August 18, 1918 in Birmingham, Alabama, Penny felt compelled to take up music after hearing the hot Texas fiddle records of Milton Brown & his Musical Brownies and Bob Wills & his Texas Playboys. These were decidedly unorthodox stylists in the Deep South's tradition-steeped brand of hillbilly entertainment, but for Penny, the level at which those jazz-inflected players operated was intoxicating and, from his teenage start with local act Happy Hal Burns & his Tune Wranglers in 1936, Penny always valued communicative musicianship above commercial success. This ethic was solidified during a 1936 stint broadcasting at New Orleans' WWL.
Penny formed his own band in 1937, the Radio Cowboys, and within several years, had formed a souped-up unit of skilled players, notably the innovative steel guitarist Noel Boggs and fiddler Boudleaux Bryant, all of whom were eager to expand Milton Brown's legacy (the bandleader had died following a 1936 car accident) and give Bob Wills a run for his money. Penny made his first records in 1938 for Art Satherley's ARC records, cutting titles from the Milton Brown repertoire and Penny's "Flamin' Mamie," the most successful of his early releases; in 1939, he recorded his pal Rex Griffin's "Won't You Ride in My Little Red Wagon?," which became Penny's de facto calling card; the youth was much sought after, but he turned down offers to replace Eddy Arnold in Pee Wee King's Golden West Cowboys and a job in Wills off-shoot the Light Crust Doughboys. When the Radio Cowboys traveled to Nashville and auditioned at the Opry, management refused to let them perform unless Boggs switched from steel to Hawaiian guitar--the Cowboys declined. Penny wanted to do things strictly on his own terms.
The Radio Cowboys snagged a contract to broadcast on Atlanta's WSB and toured across the Southeast, but often had difficulty securing good bookings due to the ubiquitous presence of touring Grand Ole Opry road shows that monopolized the best venues--often by undercutting price guarantees. Tiring of the Opry stranglehold, Penny headed up to Chicago for another recording session and wound up staying on as a disk jockey at WSB. Arriving at Cincinnati superstation, WLW, in early 1942, he performed along side fellow Alabamans the Delmore Brothers, Grandpa Jones and George Gobel. Penny also accompanied the station's pop singer Doris Kappelhoff (soon to attain national fame as Doris Day) and grew particularly close to the Kentucky-born guitar genius Merle Travis.
When Travis headed West to Los Angeles, Penny followed and by 1945, he was hitting his peaks as a performer and songwriter. One of the first country bandleaders to actively encourage improvisation at a time when lead guitarists rarely strayed from a tunes melody (a practice he lost at least one job over), Penny's career went into overdrive, performing regularly at Los Angeles' huge dancehalls, appearing in B-movie Westerns and living it up Hollywood's thriving country music set. That year he signed to Syd Nathan's King Records, but the first few releases barely caught on, despite the fact that Penny's music was typified by wry whimsy, a solid beat and dazzling musicianship. In 1946, he had regular jobs at Hoot Gibson's Painted Post club and the fabled Los Feliz dancehall, the Riverside Rancho, and scored two Top Five country hits with "Steel Guitar Stomp" and "Get Yourself a Redhead."
Penny was classified as a Western swing artist, a label he always repudiated by pointing out that the term was a press concoction which first appeared over a decade after the music was first recorded, and defied convention further with such instrumental titles as "Progressive Country Music for a Hollywood Flapper" and "Hillbilly Bebop." He also excelled at daft, slightly twisted novelties like "White Shotguns" (as in "we had a formal wedding . . " ), usually presented as fast-moving talking blues with memorably clever choruses and a red-hot swing arrangement. In 1949, Penny opened the Palomino nightclub on North Hollywood's Lankershim Boulevard, which went on to become the focal point of Los Angeles country performers and one of the music's most historically famed venues. Penny presented all the top stars, most of whom invariably lingered for the nightly, after-hours feed of black-eyed peas, cornbread and buttermilk; he also promptly instituted a regular Monday jazz jam, where the likes of Barney Kessel frequently sat in. Penny, with his Penny Serenaders regularly appeared there, and he was also doing DeeJay shows on KGIL and KWIK, and was a regular cast member on Spade Cooley’s television show, That Plain Ol’ Country Boy, a comedic character that led him to incorporate more and more comedy into his own stage show.
In 1950, his “Bloodshot Eyes” made the country Top Five, and when another King artist, R&B shouter Wynonie Harris, recorded it, the song became a number one R&B hit the following year. A 1953 re-make of "Won't You Ride in My Little Red Wagon?" became one of his biggest-ever sellers, but Penny’s headstrong commitment to artistic excellence became a hindrance more than once, souring a record deal with RCA after he complained of being offered only mediocre material. But Penny could hold his head up, having more work than he could handle in Western movies, on radio and television; from the mid-1950’s until early 1970‘s, he was a mainstay in Nevada, first at seven year stretch at Las Vegas’ Golden Nugget and later at Harrah’s in Northern Nevada. He headed back to Nashville in 1970, left for a radio job at KFRM in Wichita, Kansas, and returned to Los Angeles in 1975. He remained in Southern California for the rest of his life, occasionally appearing at nightclubs and festivals, but seemed more interested in penning his as-yet-unpublished memoirs and hosting the Penny Pickin’ and Grinnin’ Party, an annual private affair where just about every surviving member of the post-war era Hollywood country scene would perform. Frustrated perhaps, but never bitter, Penny died from heart failure on April 17, 1992
