A subject long overdue for mass recognition is celebrated in DeFord Bailey: A Legend Lost, an original documentary airing 9:30 p.m. Sunday on Nashville Public Television. Bailey, the first black performer to appear on the Grand Ole Opry, was a country-music pioneer, an artist who extended the influence of black hillbilly music across the nation’s airwaves. But in a move that remains controversial, the Opry unceremoniously dumped the popular harp player from its lineup in 1941. He retired from performing, going into the shoeshine business and vowing never to work for another man.
The question of what happened to Bailey’s career fascinated Kathy Conkwright, who wrote, produced and directed the 30-minute documentary. “What happened to someone who had such potential,” Conkwright asks, “and who influenced so many people?” The documentary, she said, doesn’t offer a conclusive answer: It lets viewers decide whether Bailey fell victim to racial stereotyping, to corporate hardball or to the crossfire between ASCAP and radio broadcasters, who were incensed by the threat of paying higher licensing fees for popular songs.
More than anything, Conkwright says, she wanted “to make people aware of who DeFord Bailey was and what he did.” To that end, she interviewed his son, musician DeFord Bailey Jr., as well as biographer and Opry historian Charles Wolfe. In her portrait, Bailey emerges as a dogged professional, a 4-foot-11-inch flyspeck of a man who weighed less than 100 pounds, yet repeatedly endured humbling conditions and hardships to be heard. At one point, in the Jim Crow South, he slept on the road in unheated cars and in funeral-home hallways. There is the suggestion he was fired because he realized how much money was being made off his music—the last thing an industry controlled by whites wanted to hear from a black artist.
Conkwright says there is a chance DeFord Bailey: A Legend Lost will be picked up nationally, like her recent NPT documentary on Rachel and Andrew Jackson. If so, it may add momentum to a long-simmering issue: the campaign to see Bailey elected to his rightful place in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Kudos to Conkwright for tackling the subject, and for attempting ambitious projects with NPT’s unjustly limited resources. For more information, check out the documentary’s Web site, www.wnpt.net/deford/index.html.
—Jim Ridley
