Who was/is Carl + Pearl Butler ? - CDs, Vinyl LPs, DVD and more
Carl + Pearl Butler
Carl Roberts Butler was born in Knoxville, Tennessee on June 2, 1924. Little is known of his father Jim, who left the family while Carl's brother Allen (born January 7, 1932) was still young. Their mother, Annie Mae Butler, a native of Tellico Plains and granddaughter of an American Indian, raised them while working at Knoxville's Brookside Mills. A fine cook who loved gospel music, she encouraged Carl's interest by buying him Gene Autry and Jimmie Rodgers records. He cited Jimmie Rodgers as his main influence, but a $7.50 Gene Autry guitar, a Christmas gift from his mother, was his first instrument, one he kept pasting together as repairs were needed.
At twelve Carl won an amateur contest at a neighbourhood theatre, his entry to radio work on WROL; grocer and talent scout Cas Walker sponsored his broadcasts there for some nine years. As historian Charles Wolfe noted, Knoxville was a fertile musical hub dominated by Walker, who relished amateur shows, bluegrass and gospel, and WNOX broadcaster Lowell Blanchard. At WROL, Butler came to know local entertainers such as Carl Smith, Archie Campbell, Junior Tullock, the Sauceman Brothers and the Webster Brothers. Wartime service took him for three years to a field hospital unit in North Africa and Italy.
Home in 1945, Butler resumed his music career around Knoxville. At an outdoor dance just after the war he met the love of his life, Pearl Dee Jones, born in Nashville on September 20, 1927 and raised around Knoxville. They married on February 27, 1946; for several years Pearl earned much of the family income as a meat cutter for Cas Walker. Carl worked for about three years in Raleigh (with the Bailey Brothers) and Lexington, singing lead and playing rhythm guitar with the Bailey Brothers and the Sauceman Brothers, and made his first records in the late 1940s for Jim Stanton's Rich-R-Tone.
In the summer of 1948 Carl's career was derailed by an auto accident near Blaine, Tennessee, when the driver fell asleep and struck a bridge at 80 mph; Carl's head went through the roof and he lay unconscious for three weeks. A benefit show funded his reconstructive surgery, and he returned to work for Cas Walker, backed by a group he named the Lonesome Pine Boys, with George 'Speedy' Krise on dobro, Clarence 'Tater' Tate or Art Wooten on fiddle, Junior Tullock on bass, Smokey White on guitar and Johnnie Whisnant on banjo.
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