Happy Birthday Minnie!

Ophelia, Dixie and Frances Colley
Fannie Tate Colley seated

One hundred eight years ago today, the fifth daughter was born in Centerville to Tom and Fannie Tate Colley. To the world, this little girl became known as Minnie Pearl. To me, she was my great- aunt Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon, who I called “Phelia.” I have a letter she wrote to me just after I was born, written on her birthday to celebrate my birth-day. In the letter she wrote, “If things don’t go to suit you, you holler for you Dixie Grandma – let her run a few errands for you. That’s what I did when I was your age!” She was in Galveston, Texas, and finished with the promise to see us on Sunday.
What she said about my grandmother was true. Phelia was born when my Nanny was already in first grade and she became like a live doll for the four sisters to dress up and wheel around Centerville in a baby buggy or drive through town in the pony cart. They weren’t content with that so they taught her to play the piano and sing and dance – all at the same time! When she was a toddler, her sisters taught her a song and dance and convinced their music teacher, Miss Daisy Nixon, to give her a spot in a recital.
I think the seed of Minnie Pearl was planted in the mind of that little blonde haired, freckled faced child standing in front of the piano, picking out a tune, singing at the top of her lungs and dancing a little jig. As soon as she was old enough, she performed every chance she got. And a dream was born. Her mother taught her to be a lady, but Phelia’s daddy carried her with him on the front of his saddle to the lumber camps, taught her to whistle and introduced her to the rough-hewn men who cut the virgin timber in the county in the early 1900’s. I can see her now – a young girl absorbing the tales they told at dinner or around the stove at the depot where they loaded railroad ties.
I can remember sitting around a big dining room table as I grew up with all the sisters and my great-grandmother, who I called Ma Ma, listening to their stories of growing up, or stories about people in Centerville from long ago. They knew the art of storytelling. Phelia’s daddy was a great storyteller – I’m sorry I never knew him, but I was blessed to have known my great grandmother and she was a storyteller in her own right. I suspect much of Phelia’s storytelling ability came from Tom Colley. His motto was “Never let the truth interfere with a good story.” That’s good advice, especially for a child who would one day be famous for her storytelling!
Phelia never meant to become a comedian. Her ambition lay in a different direction entirely. She wanted to be a great dramatic actress – perhaps another Janet Gaynor. Her goal was to attend drama school in New York and seek fame on Broadway. But the stock market crash during her senior year in high school put an end to any hope of such a thing. Two years at Ward Belmont in Nashville was the best the family could afford. After graduation, she returned to Centerville until she turned 21, then took a job with the Sewell Company, traveling the southeast directing plays using local talent. It was during that time that the character of Minnie Pearl began to emerge, taking inspiration from an Alabama mountain lady who Phelia boarded with for one snowy week. Her career was cut short when her much-loved father died unexpectedly and she returned home to take care of her mother. It was a dreary time, with hopes of a career in entertainment seemingly over. But, the hand of fate that had been guiding her footsteps all along was still with her, for it was in Centerville, of all places, that the break came that would change her life.
In 1940, the Centerville Lions Club produced a minstrel show that featured a “hillbilly skit” performed by Ophelia Colley as Minnie Pearl. Shortly afterward, a bankers convention was held in Centerville. J.B. Walker, the bank president, asked Phelia to entertain the bankers with some of her music students during dinner. As an afterthought, he said that the main speaker might be late arriving and if he was, could she do that character she did at the Lions Club show to kill time for a few minutes. She agreed, with no idea what a momentous night this would become.
Sure enough, the speaker was late, and Phelia performed her Minnie Pearl act (without a costume because she had left it at home). The performance lasted more than a few minutes – maybe the hand of fate delayed the speaker longer than expected. The next week, she got a call from the general manager of WSM radio. Bob Turner, who had been in the audience on that night, had told him about her and suggested she belonged on the Grand Ole Opry. She was invited to audition, then earned a trial spot on the late portion of the show. The rest, as they say, is history.
Of course, my memories of Phelia go beyond watching her on television. She was also the great aunt who took us to dinner, took me shopping when I went to Denver for a national competition as a senior in high school and gave me a bridal tea when I got married. She was so supportive of my mom during her bout with breast cancer and of me when I lost my husband at a young age. One of her gifts was an ability to listen intently to whoever she was talking to, and I can still see that focused look on her face when I would tell her about my activities and my own dreams of being a writer.
Phelia said that her drama teacher at Ward Belmont earnestly believed and passed along the belief that if you have a God-given talent, it is a sin not to use that talent to its fullest. Not giving your best effort to develop that talent is the ultimate ingratitude to the Creator. She was faithful to that idea. I’m afraid I’ve not followed her example as well as I should have but I have remembered it.
What I want people to remember about my great aunt is not so much her fame. I want them to remember that she had a dream, a pretty big dream for a little girl from a small Tennessee town. And when that dream seemed out of reach, she was willing to listen to a voice inside her and adapt that dream. She wasn’t destined for Broadway – she was destined for a different kind of performing. And when opportunity came, she was prepared. She gave people the gift of laughter and love, by creating in her mind a town called Grinders Switch, populated by a cast of characters that could live in any small rural town in the mid twentieth century. Uncle Nabob, Ceph Jones, Brother, Mammy sprang to life in Phelia’s head and became real for the people who listened to and love her. In later years, she would shake her head in wonder, “Those old jokes,” she would say. “They still laugh at them.” And they still do.
It’s hard to believe my great aunt has been gone 25 years. Of course, in a way, she is still alive. Minnie Pearl has never changed. Grinders Switch never changed. We can still see it – a place where there is no war, no disease, no quarrels. It was very real to her. Sometimes when I am up there (there really is a place called Grinders Switch), I have the strange feeling that if I could just slip quietly enough up the hill and hide behind a tree I could see it all, just like she laid it out in her imagination.
I saw the video of a talk she made to a group of students once. She talked about her unfulfilled dream of a career on Broadway. But she said that if she had gone that route, she would have missed the joy of making people laugh and the many friends and life she made in the country music family. Hers was a life well lived, or maybe you could say two lives well lived, one as Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon and the other as Minnie Pearl. I still miss her. I hope she knew how proud I was of her.

Harvest Song

Sometime in the night, fall stepped across the threshold. Each season seems to have its own approach. Spring tiptoes in, like a child dipping toes in the water before the first swim. Summer blasts in, like a flame that smolders briefly then flares up with heat and light. Winter, in my neck of the woods at least, is indecisive, with several false starts and stops until fields lie blackened by the first hard freeze. Fall’s commencement is defined not so much by temperature as by the change in the song of the insects, a quieting of the frenzied night time chorus, and a subdued bird song in the morning. The trees whisper “fall” and the feel in the air is unmistakable. The light is different, and rain, when it comes, has a different feel. Every day I hear the sound of the harvest. Harvest music, signaling a sense of urgency to gather in the crops before winter. Once upon a time, the harvest would have been gathered with mules, wagons and “hands” picking the corn by hand and hauling it to the cribs. But in my lifetime, the combine has become the instrument of the season, creeping through rows of corn and soybeans that are the livelihood of so many farmers. At this time of year, it is a race against time, to put away what was sown with shining hope in the spring. The machines sing from early morning to dark, and golden streams of grain pour into wagons and grain silos. In years like this, of good rain, there is a final cutting of hay. There is no more beautiful sight, or more intoxicating smell, than a barn filled with hay for the winter. Gratitude seems to be in short supply these days for a lot of people. I believe that the further away from the land we get, the easier it is to forget to be thankful. Farmers find it easier to give thanks, when the barns and silos are full, the harvest song is stilled, and the machinery has been cleaned and put away. Every year at Thanksgiving, congregations sing the words “Come, ye thankful people, come, raise the song of harvest home. All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin.” Country people understand those lines better than most. When my hay shed is full, I like to stop and just look at it, breathing in the fragrance. (Why don’t they make air freshener with that smell?) The winter ahead doesn’t seem so daunting when you have a barn full of hay. It’s the same feeling a family gets looking at shelves of canned food – jelly, jam, beans, peas, corn and tomatoes, waiting and ready to be enjoyed while the cold winds blow. I guess you can feel good about canned food from the store, but somehow I don’t think you get the same sense of happiness as you get from glass jars of rosy tomatoes or green beans. We don’t do as much canning now, but I still can remember row upon row of canning arranged on shelves in our basement and baskets of potatoes and onions. Hams and sides of bacon hung in the smokehouse, promising breakfast feasts on winter mornings. It was hard work, but easier then to be thankful. Here’s hoping Thanksgiving doesn’t get totally lost in the rush to Christmas and our hearts will be warmed when we sing, “Come, ye thankful people come, raise the song of harvest home.”