Porter Wagoner hosted the The Porter Wagoner Show for 21 years, and performed for 50 years at the Grand Ole Opry. As USA Today notes:
When he thought he had the right audience, Porter Wagoner liked to reach into the inner breast pocket of his electric-blue sport coat and remove a slender electronic device.
“iPod!” he exclaimed. “One thousand songs! My entire career is on here.”
Like everything else Wagoner did in public, it was a beautiful piece of showmanship. It surprised people who were inclined to think of him as a spangle-wearing singer of old-fashioned country songs such as Company’s Comin’, reminding them that he was a bit of a technology geek — a country-music television pioneer and forward-thinking producer. It also let them know that he was still keeping up.
From The LA Times:
Porter Wagoner, the blond pompadoured, rhinestone-encrusted personification of Nashville tradition, host of the longest-running country-music variety show in TV history and mentor to Dolly Parton, died Sunday night of lung cancer. He was 80.
Wagoner died at a hospice in Nashville, according to an announcement on the Grand Ole Opry’s website.
Parton recently went to a Nashville hospital to visit the man who inspired her best-known song, “I Will Always Love You,” after their acrimonious career split in the mid-1970s.
She described him then as very weak, but said Wagoner “had his wits and joked around,” and she vowed she would sing with him again at the Grand Ole Opry when he was ready. Wagoner was released from the hospital Friday and transferred to hospice care.
A little more than a year ago, Wagoner had been seriously ill after suffering an intestinal aneurysm, but defied a dire medical prognosis and recovered sufficiently to mount a career comeback that led to appearances last summer on “The Late Show With David Letterman” and an opening slot at Madison Square Garden with upstart rock band the White Stripes, whose members are ardent Wagoner fans.
Country singer and songwriter Marty Stuart, a generation younger than Wagoner, coaxed his childhood idol into a recording studio last winter to record a new album, “The Wagonmaster.” The recording brought Wagoner renewed attention, some of the best reviews of his career and created a new cachet among fans who are yet another generation younger than Stuart. The album also is expected to garner Wagoner at least one Grammy Award nomination from members of an industry that has long favored rewarding veterans who successfully reignite their careers.
[...]
Porter Wagoner was born Aug. 12, 1927, in West Plains, Mo. He grew up helping out on the family farm, but when he wasn’t busy with farm chores he would spend hours standing on the trunk of a felled oak tree pretending he was host of the Grand Ole Opry, which he listened to religiously on the radio.
Once a neighboring farmer stumbled on the young man mimicking his act and asked what he was doing. When Wagoner told him of his dream to be an Opry star one day, the farmer told him, “You’re as close to the Grand Ole Opry as you’ll ever get. You’ll be looking these mules in the rear end when you’re 65.”
Recalling that incident backstage at the Opry earlier this year, Wagoner, who was surrounded in his kingly dressing room by photos showing him with hundreds of celebrity well-wishers who had joined him on the show over the years, just smiled and said with a gentle laugh, “I wish I could see him now.”
Porter Wagoner and The Willis Brothers, performing “I’ll Fly Away.”
