”Cutting a 2-year-old’s hair is like trying to cut the mane of a horse on a merry-go-round.“ That’s how a fellow barber once described the ordeal of a boy’s first haircut to Robert Craighead when Craighead first started cutting hair back in 1940. Sooner or later, though, most boys come to look forward to their trips to the barbershop. ”My grandfather always made it fun,“ remembers barber Randy Smith, speaking of Walter Beard, the man in whose footsteps he would eventually follow. ”We got to have a bottle of soda whenever we went, which was a treat back then, and it was just neat to be in the shop with all those grown men.“
Trips to the barbershop with Dad on a Saturday morning are one of the first male bonding experiences little boys have, akin to their first Little League team or Cub Scout troop. Climb up onto the barber chair, a strip of paper is wrapped around your neck, a cloth laid over your shoulders, and the barber wets down your hair and takes up a pair of scissors. ”How would you like it today?“ There you are, 5 years old or 75 years old, engaged in a ritual that has changed little since the barbershops in ancient Greece, which were headquarters for male discourse on politics, sports, and society.
The barber trade took a hit back in the 1960s and ’70s, what with longer hairstyles and the popularity of California-influenced unisex salons that specialized in hairstyling. Belle Meade Barber Shop was down to just four barbers back in 1974, when Ralph Dishman bought it from Tom Cooper, but it has come back strong, with five full-timers and three more working part-time.
Still, old-fashioned barbershops, like many slices of Americana, are slowly fading from our country’s landscape. It’s getting hard to hire barbers these days, say the old-timers; most kids coming out of barbering school are lured to national chains like Fantastic Sam’s, the haircutting equivalent of fast food. But those who still operate their own shops claim a devoted legion of customers who would sooner cut their own hair than go anywhere else. Following are profiles of five barbershops that, to paraphrase Popeye, are what they are. Fortunately, plenty of Nashvillians still like them that way.
Smitty's
Barbering goes back a couple of generations in Randy Smith’s family. He got his very first haircut at Happy’s Barber Shop; the barber was his maternal grandfather, Walter Beard, also known as Happy, who owned the shop at Douglas Avenue and Gallatin Road in East Nashville. One of Beard’s apprentices was Randy’s father, William K. Smith, also known as Smitty. In 1965, the senior Smith bought a barbershop in the Parkway Towers building on James Robertson Parkway, renamed it Smitty’s, and began building a clientele, starting with Randy. ”Anytime there was a new haircut or a new style, I got it,“ Randy recalls with a laugh. ”I was his best guinea pig.“ Thanks to his proximity to Capitol Hill, Smitty had plenty of politicians in his chair, including Govs. Winfield Dunn and Lamar Alexander and Mayor Richard Fulton.
In 1978, right out of high school, Randy enrolled in the International Barber College on Fifth and Broadway, near where the Arena is now. Once he got out of school and spent a little time in his father’s shop, he decided he wanted to try something else, so for the next 17 years he worked in the restaurant industry. It was during this time, around 1975, that Smitty moved his shop from Parkway Towers to the 14th floor of the Commerce Union Bank building (now the Bank of America building) at Fourth and Deaderick. ”He had a great view there,“ Randy recalls. ”From the shop, you could see the boats going down the Cumberland“—that is, until a hotel went up next door and blocked the view.
In 1987, Smitty moved his shop to the second floor of what was then the new SunTrust building at Church and Fifth, where it remains today. It is still called Smitty’s, but it’s owned and operated by Randy Smith since his father’s death in June 1995. ”We had talked about me one day coming back into the business and taking over the shop, but I thought I had more time than I did.“ Randy not only inherited most of his father’s customers—who would sit down in the barber chair and say, ”Do it like your father did“—but also his nickname. The unhurried pace of the small shop remains as well.
In the last five years, Smith has steadily built his own clientele, including Jack Diller, president and chief operating officer of the Predators, who came by for a trim recently carrying a copy of Gaylord Entertainment Company’s annual report. ”You’re running around to meetings all day long, always in a hurry, and the barbershop is a relaxing, stress-free respite from that,“ Diller says. ”If you want to talk, Randy knows what’s going on. If you want to read over some papers, he respects that too. I hope he never figures out how to give a haircut in less than 30 minutes.“
Belle Meade Barber Shop
In old-fashioned barbershops, there is a time-honored tradition of chair position: Newcomers to the business take the rear chair, while the most senior barber usually has the first chair in a shop. When he retires and a new barber comes in, everybody moves up a chair. Since barbershops are typically operated on a first-come, first-served basis, the theory is that the first chair will get the first customer in the door, and so on down the line. On slow days, the barber in the last chair may end up doing a lot more sitting than cutting.
There are eight chairs, lined up like soldiers, in the Belle Meade Barber Shop, and it’s busy enough that no one ever does much sitting, except the customers. On the wall behind each of the eight barber chairs, with the exception of the first, are name plates: Leslie Lee, Doug Blair, Ralph Dishman, Paul Scales, Rick Davis, Hilary Yaney, and Red Saulis. To a degree, these men follow the formula for barbershop chair placement. The name plate that’s been there the longest, since 1959, is Leslie Lee’s, over the second chair. The one that’s been there the shortest amount of time, less than six months, belongs to Rick Davis at the sixth chair, which has been set up on a platform to accommodate his 6-foot, 8 1/2-inch frame. Though the owners of the seventh and eighth chairs—Yaney, Saulis, and Jim Baker—have considerably more experience than the 25-year-old Davis, they are part-timers, thus they share the back two chairs. They come in on Tuesdays and Saturdays, the shop’s busiest days.
The man in the third chair is Doug Blair, a barber since 1962, who’s been at the Belle Meade Barber Shop for the last 12 years. Paul Scales got the fifth chair when he was hired to replace Shorty Bryan, who had been at the shop as long as Leslie Lee until he retired four years ago.
The owner of the fourth chair, right in the thick of things, is Ralph Dishman, who also owns the shop. He came to work there in 1960, fresh out of Nashville Barber College. Dishman’s brother Ed, also a barber, knew Leslie Lee, who told Ralph about an open chair at the shop, which was then owned by Tom Cooper. ”Mr. Cooper was a good man,“ Dishman remembers. ”He was about 50 when I came to work there, and he put up with about six young kids. He used to say, ‘If you can’t cut hair, I’ll learn you.’ I figured you can’t go wrong with that.“ Dishman spent almost 15 years in the sixth chair; when he bought the shop in 1974 from Cooper, he claimed the fourth chair and has been there ever since.
The Belle Meade barbers’ longevity is matched, and sometimes even surpassed, by their clientele. Five members of the Vanderbilt Medical School’s class of 1963—Bill Long, Newt Lovvorn, Howard Rosen, Bob Ikard, and David Thombs—began coming to the shop when they were still in med school. Thombs, head of Old Harding Pediatric Associates, is one of four generations in his family who have sat in Dishman’s chair: His father, Charles Raymond Thombs, now 93, used to have his hair cut there; now his two sons, Charles Raymond Thombs II and David Dawson Thombs Jr., and his grandson, Palmer Thombs, are customers.
”For years, Ralph has acted as a sort of conduit for messages between my father and me, and my sons and me,“ Thombs explains. ”I would go in for a haircut, and Ralph would tell me about something my father had done recently, or that one of my sons had just been in there and was looking for a new car. I found out about my grandson’s first haircut there from Ralph. For us, the Belle Meade Barber Shop is a solid part of our family culture.“
Craighead Barber Shop
In the late 1920s and early ’30s, Robert Craighead was hopping curbs at Candyland at the corner of West End and 29th Avenue. ”A nickel was a fair tip,“ he remembers, ”but you’d run over somebody to get a dime.“ In 1938, he married Mary Smithson, with whom he’d eventually have six children. Three years later, he got a job on the railroad as a Pullman porter. ”They didn’t pay but 50 cents an hour, but if you stayed on long enough, you could make a fair amount of money.“ When overtime pay was cut, he decided to leave the trains and get a steady job at home. Barber colleges in Nashville didn’t admit African Americans, so he learned to cut hair from Fleunaud Reynolds, who owned the University Barbershop on Jefferson Street. At the time, Jefferson was the center of African American entertainment, education, and commerce. There were restaurants and nightclubs that booked top talent, including Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Dinah Washington, and Count Basie.
When he had saved $300, Craighead decided it was time to open his own shop. He bought the property at 1505 Jefferson St., tore down the house that was there, and with the help of friends built the building that would become the Craighead Barber Shop. ”I had three chairs, but nobody but me was here. I had customers galore. I guess they all felt sorry for me.“
Craighead had a front-row seat when the civil rights movement began in Nashville. Many of the meetings to plan acts of civil disobedience downtown took place at the Clark Memorial United Methodist Church, around the corner on 14th Street, and many of the participants came from nearby Fisk and Meharry. There were often informal gatherings of both African American and white activists in Craighead’s shop.
Around the same time, the construction of Interstate 40 cut a swath through the heart of the Jefferson Street neighborhood, turning through streets into dead-end walls of concrete. I-40 took out an estimated 100 businesses and homes, and the residents were given little warning or recourse. ”The first I heard of it was what I read on the front page of the paper one morning,“ Craighead remembers. ”They had a picture of it, and it looked like it was coming right through my front door. I went down to the state highway department, and the lady told me they were going to miss my shop. But they still put up a government fence, and some of my customers couldn’t get through.“
Craighead believes that the end of segregation contributed more to the demise of Jefferson Street than the interstate. ”It was integration that killed Jefferson Street. When blacks had the opportunity to go to other places and shop in white businesses, they deserted the black businesses.“
But not Craighead’s Barber Shop. He still has many of the customers he had 25 and more years ago. ”I can still fool someone into my chair,“ he says. About eight years ago, he sold his shop to one of his part-time barbers, Joe Trotter Sr., who attended barber college on the GI Bill when he got out of the military in 1970. Trotter, who works the afternoon shift at the Peterbilt plant, is about three years away from retiring there, and then he’ll be at the shop full-time. Chances are, he’ll be working alongside Craighead, who still comes to the shop five days a week for a few hours. According to Trotter, ”As long as Mr. Craighead wants to stand behind his chair, that’s where he’ll be.“
Dedman's Barbershop
Every day, hundreds of cars probably drive right past Dedman’s Barbershop, on Highway 100 about 30 miles from Nashville in Lyles, Tenn., without ever noticing it. The one-room, shack-like building sits back from the road and is mostly hidden by trees. The barber pole is actually a piece of rusted tin, and the red, white, and blue stripes that were painted on years ago have nearly faded away. One small sign is posted outside that says, ”Shop Hrs: Fri. 12 pm-7 pm; Sat. 7:00 am-5:00 pm.“ But on a Saturday afternoon, all six folding chairs in the shop are occupied with waiting customers, and one 7-year-old boy sits in the barber chair. Jesse Dedman is giving the kid a flattop, one of about 20 to 30 haircuts he’ll give that day. He is using a clipper-vacuum combination that he fashioned himself out of a pair of barber clippers and a ShopVac. The mirror on the wall behind the chair is hazy from years of accumulated cigarette smoke, which hovers like a cloud over everyone’s head. In the summer, an air-conditioning window unit moves the musty air around a little; in the winter, a small space heater is the only source of warmth.
Like many barbers of his generation, Dedman went to barber college on the GI Bill. He says he had no intention of going into barbering and in fact has never worked full-time at the craft. Instead, he spent about 30 years working five days a week in the garment industry, and every Saturday in a barbershop on Clarksville Highway. He built his one-room shop—which shares a driveway with his house and the Beacon Light Tea Room next door—about 25 years ago. When he retired from his garment-industry job a few years ago, customers wanted to know if he would be extending his barbershop hours; he said nope, he didn’t retire from one full-time job to start another.
The price of a haircut from Jesse Dedman is about the cheapest you’ll find anywhere, just $3. But don’t ask for any extras. ”Some boy came in here a few years ago and told me he wanted his hair styled,“ Dedman says, dragging on his cigarette and shaking his head. ”He wanted a $12 style for a $3 haircut. I told him I didn’t do styles. You can’t style and barber in the same shop. If you start stylin’ in a one-chair shop, you’ll run off all your barber customers. Nobody there for a haircut wants to wait an hour while somebody else gets a hairstyle. I don’t cut women’s hair neither. It’s hard enough to please a man, much less a woman.“
Leonard Maynor Barber Shop
On the day Smilin’ Jay McDowell got married, he wanted to look his best. Before walking down the aisle, the bass player for BR5-49 went to Leonard Maynor’s barbershop on Music Row and asked for the works. He got a shave, a shampoo, a haircut, and a head massage. But you don’t have to be a country music celebrity to get the star treatment; Maynor has been doing it that way since 1960, when he started barbering in Ira Johns’ shop at 717 Commerce St. When Johns passed away in 1964, Maynor bought the shop, which also had a full-time manicurist and shoeshine boy. It was there he came to know members of the music industry, who had offices downtown before there was a Music Row; among them were Webb Pierce, Floyd Cramer, manager and talent booker Buddy Lee, and Gene Autry’s manager Troy Martin, who came in every single morning for a shave. The colorful characters who owned and worked the bars and clubs on Printers Alley were also his customers.
”We still didn’t have liquor by the drink back then,“ Maynor recalls, ”but you could get a drink if you knew where to go. There was also a lot of gambling going on in those clubs. When they finally cracked down on the gambling, I lost about 35 of my best customers.“
One he didn’t lose then was David ”Skull“ Shulman, who owned Skull’s Rainbow Room and was known as the Mayor of Printers Alley. ”Back then he had striptease dancers, but they were really tame. Other clubs started opening that were a lot dirtier. He didn’t want to go that way, so he started booking music instead.“
Maynor stayed on Commerce Street until 1983, when construction began on the Convention Center; he moved to 19th and Broadway for six years, then to the rear of the building at 19 Music Square West. The manicurist retired just before Maynor left downtown, but the shoeshiner came along. ”He loved to watch soap operas, so I got him this little TV. He died not long after I moved to Broadway, but I’ve still got his television.“
Many of Maynor’s downtown customers followed him across town as well, including Skull. On Jan. 21, 1998, Shulman came to Maynor’s shop for ”the works,“ then left about 4:30 p.m. in a cab. That evening, Maynor was at home in Madison watching the news when he heard that Skull had been stabbed in his club. Shulman died the following day. The police called Maynor soon after to interview one of the last people who had seen the legendary figure alive. A year or so later, he was interviewed by America’s Most Wanted for a segment on the murder. Early this year, the two perpetrators were caught and remain in jail awaiting trial. Skull’s dog Sweetie, found in his playpen near his owner’s body, lives with one of Maynor’s two daughters.
Maynor’s shop is filled with memorabilia, newspaper clippings, and photos, including one of Smilin’ Jay with Skull. He still mixes up his own shave soap in a mug he’s had about 20 years; the products he sells are tried and true, Clubman and Jeris. He takes a 10-day vacation every year from the end of June through July 4. Beginning July 5, he’s going to cut back his days from six a week to three-and-a-half, opening Wed.-Fri. from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturdays until noon. ”I’d like to have some more time to work around the house, do some other things,“ he says. ”Life is short, you know.“
