How to go
What: A Night at the Grand Ole Opry featuring Wayne Hobbs and Friends in a two-night showcase of traditional country
When: 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday
Where: Casey's Restaurant, 2205 Park Road
Tickets: $17.50 on Friday (includes hors d'oeuvres) and $30 Saturday (includes dinner); call (937) 322-0397.
SPRINGFIELD — It was 1971, and Wayne Hobbs had just been hired to back Jerry Lee Lewis on pedal steel guitar at a concert in Kansas City.
At the time, Lewis had rebranded himself as a country singer and was a huge success — Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton, after all, were the openers that night.
Enter Hobbs, a devout Christian from the age of 11 who never acquired a taste for alcohol and, maybe because of it, now doesn’t look anything like the 59-year-old he purports to be.
Cue the Killer.
“He walks in the room,” Hobbs recalled, “and says, ‘That?! That is a steel guitar player?’
“I probably didn’t look like I was 14 or 15 at the time.”
In actuality, Hobbs was two years removed from the Tecumseh High School class of 1969, but already he’d toured with Connie Smith and played the Grand Ole Opry with Jean Shepard.
Still, he had something to prove that night in K.C.
“I went out there,” Hobbs said, “and I thought, ‘I’m going to play every lick I know.’ ”
Today’s country music doesn’t sound the same or feel the same, but nobody is more aware of that than a pedal steel player like Hobbs.
The fact that he’s back living in New Carlisle and playing regular gigs at Casey’s Restaurant in Springfield is, in part, because pedal steel has practically gone the way of the harpsichord.
Well, that, and he just likes living in New Carlisle. Always has.
But what was once a fixture in every band is now a speciality instrument with a sound that evokes a specific period in time.
Then again, it’s safe to assume that after hearing a harpsichord concerto written by Bach, few people would find themselves suddenly wanting to go back and live in the 1740s.
On the other hand, one lick of pedal steel is all it takes for people to start thinking about greener pastures.
Everybody always talks about returning to a traditional country sound, but until they actually do, a man like Hobbs — a man old enough to have played with legends yet too young to put down his fingerpicks — will keep the fires burning.
Once upon a time, the steel guitar gave country music its unmistakable, trademark sound.
“Steel guitar is like banjo is to bluegrass,” he said. “If you take the banjo out of it, it wouldn’t sound like bluegrass.”
Hobbs is no longer playing the Opry with the likes of Marty Robbins, but no matter where he’s playing, just as long as he’s playing, it’ll be enough to convince people that this music anymore just ain’t the same.
Now, someone slip those fat cats on Music Row a couple of tickets to his next show at Casey’s.
No, seriously.
This next one, a two-night showcase of traditional country this weekend, will feature Hobbs along with such friends as Chubby Howard, the 84-year-old WBZI music host who himself played pedal steel with the likes of Buck Owens.
“You see the changes and you’ve lived the changes,” Hobbs explained recently. “You were there with the guys who created the music. To see all of that crumble and fall apart, it’s so sad for a legend to have to die to be recognized.”
All he can do is keep playing.
It’s practically all he’s ever known.
Singing the blues
Hobbs was only 9 when he started performing at VFW halls and clubs.
By 13, he was fronting Little Wayne Hobbs and the Country Wranglers on acoustic guitar three nights a week at a nightclub in New Carlisle called The Garage.
The Wranglers were all teens except for Red Hobbs, Wayne’s dad, on steel guitar.
“We used to introduce him as 21-year-old Red Hobbs,” he joked.
At the time in the mid-1960s, “People made fun of us for playing country music,” Hobbs said.
That’s because, at school, The Beatles were all the rage. (And kids apparently were clueless to the fact that Ringo sang a Buck Owens song on “Help!”)
But it was at The Garage that Hobbs developed a love of performing.
On Sundays, the band led a jam session that started at noon and sometimes lasted until midnight.
Springfield country legend Donnie Bowser frequently sat in.
Hobbs himself started playing steel guitar during those jams.
“It was just natural, I guess,” he said, pausing. “I put a lot of work into it.”
He practiced for hours, so couple that with an encyclopedic knowledge of country music and he was more than ready when a friend called in 1970 to say that Connie Smith’s band needed a pedal steel player for a gig in Pennsylvania.
As Hobbs remembers it, Smith, an Opry member since 1965, was more than a little skeptical of this kid who was fresh from high school — until, that is, the very first song of the night.
“I kicked it off just like the record,” Hobbs said, “and she came over and embarrassed me by saying, ‘I’m takin’ this one with me.’ ”
And she did.
For the next year, Hobbs backed Smith, which then led to a stint with honky-tonk legend Jean Shepard and the first of many trips to the Opry.
“That was scary,” he said. “When you go do the Opry, there’s something about it that triggers, I don’t know if it’s fear, but you just go, ‘Wow.’ I couldn’t play I was shaking so bad.
“It seemed like an eternity. We might have only been out there for one or two songs, but it seemed like forever.”
He’s since played the Opry hundreds of times during the course of a career that makes it hard to believe he now can be seen playing from 6 to 9 p.m. Wednesdays at Casey’s as people dine on the prime rib special.
He’s played everywhere from “Hee Haw” (with Smith) to “Arsenio” (with the Forester Sisters).
Tiny bubbles
Back in ’71, he ended up backing Jerry Lee Lewis for a year.
“Believe it or not,” Hobbs said, “Jerry was going to church at the time. So I got in at the right time and out at the right time.”
That led to work with Barbara Mandrell, then, after a three-year stint in the Army stationed in Hawaii, time with Hawaiian music legend Don Ho.
Eventually, in 1981, Hobbs landed with the great Marty Robbins during the last year of his life.
In fact, when Robbins played the Clark County Fair in the summer of 1982 — just months before his death from a heart attack at 57 — Hobbs was a member of his band.
They don’t make ’em like Robbins anymore, and when Hobbs listens to country radio nowadays, it’s painfully obvious.
“It all sounds the same to me,” he complained. “Before, they signed you because you were different. Jim Reeves was different than Marty Robbins. Those guys had individuality.”
It was a different era, for sure.
Robbins never even specifically asked Hobbs to be in his band.
“He said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow night.’ Tomorrow night?” Hobbs recalled. “He said, ‘Yeah, see you at the Opry.’ ”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
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