In the mid-1950s, in the empty room over Creech’s Barbershop that served as the remote studio for WCKB, a group of pickers gathered around the microphone and sang the tune that opened every show. It started out:
Howdy, all you friends and neighbors
Out there in radio land.
Momma’s doing the washing.
Daddy’s hanging ‘round like a man.

Then, after cataloging what everybody else in the family was doing, it ended with:
So sit yourself down
And lean a way back,
And listen to the Smile Awhile Boys — James and Hayden.*

James was James Thornton, owner of a local grocery store. Hayden was Hayden Ivy, driver of the Benson trash truck. Together, they were the Smile Awhile Boys.

Not named, but arguably the greatest talent in the room and certainly the most durable one, was a teenager with an often goofy smile named Jimmy Capps. He played guitar, and in terms of being a musician, he started where most of musicians worked to get to — and most musicians probably don’t get there.

The Smile Awhile Boys moved to television with WTVD in Durham, Hayden’s name was dropped from the marquee, and James Thornton became Jim Thornton. The show was Saturday Night Country Style, and Jim Thornton hosted it wearing a pair of overalls.

Jimmy was the featured guitar player.

When he was sixteen, Jimmy dropped out of school, the combination of playing on school nights and the soporific drone of our social studies teacher’s voice making it too tough to stay awake. There was some tut-tutting by some parents, including mine, about Jimmy dropping out of school. They didn’t realize that he could already do what we were going to school to learn to do: make a living.

Jimmy left Saturday Night Country Style, passed through South Carolina, played with the Louvin Brothers for a while, and then joined the Grand Ol’ Opry in 1967. In about a half-century there, he’s played with everybody who’s anybody in country music. He also became one of the most popular session players in Nashville.

I had the privilege of playing with Jimmy twice. Once when I went with him to the empty room above Creech’s Barber Shop. He handed me a pair of maracas and told me to shake them.

The second time was more memorable.

One of the bands I had in high school was called the Hi-Five, simply because there were five of us. We tried to pass ourselves off as a Dixieland band. We did “loud” really well; intonation and other musical niceties, not so much. The Hi-Five was engaged to a civic club banquet in Erwin, and for a reason I still don’t understand, Jimmy agreed to play with us.

After all, he was a professional musician. The nicest thing you could say about the rest of us was that we weren’t.

A lot of the crowd recognized Jimmy when we walked in the door; they saw him on TV on Saturday night. I’m sure that raised the expectations. However, the gig went reasonable well for the first half-hour or so. Then it came — literally — to a crashing halt.

Glenn Baily stood up to take his solo. Somehow, his foot hooked under his chair, causing it to fall backwards. It hit the stand for Roy Jones’ crash cymbal just as Roy was about to hit the cymbal. Roy missed and fell off his throne. Jimmy, who had been leaning back, strumming along, saw Roy fall and started laughing. He laughed so hard, he fell over backwards. At that point, with a third of the band on the floor and the other two-thirds laughing so hard we couldn’t blow, the show shuddered to a stop. I’m sure that after everybody picked themselves up and stopped laughing we finished the gig, but I don’t remember any of that.

There is something else about that night that after sixty years strikes me as significant. Glenn Baily, clearly the best musician in the original Hi-Five, grew up to be a college administrator in a small denominational school in Georgia. Roy Jones, the drummer, ended up owning several automobile dealerships in Eastern North Carolina. Max Johnson became an engineer for North American Telecom. Keith Neighbors, the other trumpet player, taught math for years. I became a writer.

Of the six teenagers making a joyful, if not necessarily tuneful, noise that night in Erwin, one of us was doing what he was really supposed to do. And Jimmy’s been doing it ever since.

On March 16 of this year, the Tennessee legislature passed a resolution honoring Jimmy. In reading the resolution they said a lot of nice things about him and called him a legend. It’s not the first time he’s been honored. He’s a member of the Musicians Hall of Fame and the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame, among other things. And, since he’s still playing, it’s certainly not the last time.

For honors present, past and future, Jimmy, congratulations.

*This is as I remember it. Strangely, the program theme song does not show up in a Google search. That is probably a sad comment on our priorities.