It's amazing when a close friendship goes back more than 50 years, and it's even more amazing when those friends are show business veterans who got their start in North Augusta.
Brenda Lee was singing on the Peach Blossom Special program on television station WRDW in the mid-1950s when Flo Carter was singing with Jim Nabors (later to become Gomer Pyle) on the Today in Dixie program on WJBF.
WRDW program director Sammy Barton suggested the singing prodigy change her name from Brenda Mae Tarpley to Brenda Lee. She went on to sell more than 100 million records.
The TV stations were next-door neighbors on Georgia Avenue in North Augusta until WJBF burned. The station was rebuilt on Reynolds Street in Augusta.
Though the stations were business rivals, the performers and staff of the two stations were supportive of each other in those fledgling days of television.
"I went over to Channel 12 a lot, and Brenda would come over to Channel 6," Mrs. Carter remembers. "We also crossed paths often at shows in Bell Auditorium and other places."
Flash forward 55 years to last week in downtown Nashville, Tenn., at the Country Music Association's Hall of Fame & Museum, where many of the movers and shakers of the country music industry gathered for a VIP party opening the Hall's new exhibit: Brenda Lee, Dynamite.
The exhibit runs through June. See countrymusichalloffame.com.
Party guests included Hank Williams' daughter Jett Williams; Patsy Cline's husband, Charlie Dick; producers, top booking agents and songwriters; musicians Duane Sciacqua, Stanley Abernathy and Becky Hobbs; and Grand Ole Opry artists Little Jimmy Dickens, Jan Howard, Jeannie Seeley, Charlie Louvin and Ralph Emery.
In the midst of them all were Brenda Lee and Beech Island's Flo Carter, hugging and catching up on old times as they have several times over five decades.
"I was totally blown away by the exhibit," Mrs. Carter said. "When you start at one end of it and come around, you realize her life is a phenomenal story, and I'm so proud to be a part of it. Brenda took me around at the party several times and kept bragging on me and saying, 'Flo and my mother (Grace) were good friends.' "
The next night, Ms. Carter and her singing daughters, Cookie Dodson and Donna Williams, and I were guests at a family affair for about 60 people at the suburban Nashville home of Brenda's daughter Julie Clay.
Mrs. Clay is the co-author of her mother's 2002 biography, Little Miss Dynamite: The Life and Times of Brenda Lee .
"I'm about Brenda Lee-d out," the singer said at the gathering. "I didn't even put on any makeup because I knew tonight I'd be around my family and close friends."
The Hall of Fame honoree from the previous night was helping wash plates in the kitchen sink the next night at her daughter's home.
"It is still overwhelming," she told me. "I am so honored that the Hall of Fame would do an exhibit about me, and the quality and the magnitude that they did is so special."
Don Rhodes has written about country music for 38 years. He can be reached at (706) 823-3214 or at don.rhodes@morris.com.
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One proud American to have seen Brenda perform as a little girl at Political Campaigns throughout Augusta, Georgia. Especially remember her performance on the flatbed of a truck at Allen Park where the Augusta Tiger Baseball Team played. She was great and I believe she was affiliated with "Wake Up JC" radio show at WAUG. Those political rallies really drew crowds. Congratulations Brenda. For those that may remember, Allen Park ran from the Augusta Canal at Archibald Bridge along 15th Street to Walton Way and down close to present University Hospital.