The Nashville / Hong Kong / Manitoba Connection
Excerpt from Hillman Gig Notes Ch. 3
During my teen years I regularly tuned in to WSM radio from Nashville to listen to the Saturday Night Grand Ole Opry. Our big old Westinghouse radio usually brought this far-off station in fairly well, but occasionally I'd have to sit out in our '49 Meteor or '60 Pontiac for better reception from our car radio. Sometimes dial surfing would even bring in the Louisiana Hayride where Elvis had been so popular in his early days. It was a thrill many years later to visit and explore both Opry houses and the Shreveport Auditorium and to try to visualize the entertainers who had worked these stages in another time. 

Even though I was obsessed with early rock 'n' roll, I was just as inspired by the singers and musicians from these live country shows. One standout singer on the Opry was Patsy Cline. One morning while sitting in an English class at Brandon College a classmate whispered that CKX had just reported news of a tragic plane crash that had taken Patsy's life along with fellow Opry stars Hawkshaw Hawkins and "Cowboy" Copas. Ironically, it was while sitting in a University of Manitoba summer school class a year later that I learned of a similar plane crash killed Jim Reeves.

After Sue-On and I married in 1966, I introduced her to Cline songs such as Crazy, I Fall To Pieces, and Faded Love (country music wasn't well known in Hong Kong where Sue-On had grown up). Sue-On even recorded her version of Sweet Dreams for our second album. One of the first songs I had learned for stage was Copas' Alabam, which had some neat country guitar runs. A few decades later we heard inside stories of the plane crash when we worked for almost a week with Hawkshaw Hawkins' widow, Jean Shepard, at the Boggy Creek Music Festival.