The country music-and-comedy TV series ”Hee Haw” starts its 21st year this week with executives shamelessly ballyhooing the birth of a new star. And, even allowing for bias, their claim merits more than the customary guffaw.
The long-running show`s newest cast member is a lovely West Virginian named Vicki Bird who had kicked, and been kicked, around the country scene`s bargain basement for more than 15 years before Nashville recently discovered that she`s funny.
Bird isn`t bitter about her long apprenticeship. She admits she was no wiser to her humorous proclivities than Nashville was.
”I knew all along I was makin` people laugh sometimes-because I heard
`em, you know,” she says in a wondering drawl. ”But it never was no planned, big thing. I`ve done stuff real serious that people laughed at.
”On `Hee Haw,` they`ve got me doin` this Advice To The Love-Worn, and one of the bosses said, `We patterned it after Vicki.` I said, `Did you?` And he said, `Yeah, she (the character in the routine) never knows what`s goin`
on.` ”
Bird, who looks to be in her 20s rather than her early 30s, does have a memorable Appalachian innocence. That, coupled with her outback lexicon, piques the curiosity. When her impassioned, adept singing is added to the mix, she graduates from interesting to admired.
Now, for the first time in her long, low-profile career, ”Hee Haw”
(shown in Chicago at noon Saturdays on WGBO-Ch. 66) is giving Bird`s distinctive personality a chance to shine. To her, though, it has been a mixed blessing. After well over a decade of performing publicly, she still gets stage fright. Make that stage terror.
”I found out I was gonna be on `Hee Haw` about a month before we taped, so I had to spend that whole month in a nervous state,” she says. ”I tried not to think about it. But how can you put out of your mind the biggest thing that`s ever happened in your life?
”I`d picture me poppin` up out of the cornfield and a-doin` this and a-doin` that-with all them (the show`s stars), and the more I pictured, the more nervous I got. I`ve watched `Hee Haw` since I was a little kid. It was our favorite show back home.”
Back home was Bird`s Holler, W. Va., a semi-hamlet buried somewhere in Clay County. There Bird`s father, a farmer and industrial worker, sired nine children in such difficult circumstances that the first doorknob Vicki ever saw adorned the entrance to the local grammar school. The daughter, however, is quick to point out that one thing the Birds were never deprived of is a sense of humor.
”All of us, my brothers and sisters, kinda did funny stuff all the time,” she recalls. ”I was the fifth one down in age-there was three younger`n me-so I`d get a whole lot of stuff pulled on me because I was young. ”Sometimes, we would make Mommy set on the porch, and here we`d all come, out of the garage, to put on a show and make her watch. We`d make plays up and do `em, and Mommy would watch and laugh.
”Then Mommy would go back in the house and shut the door. Her comments wasn`t always the best.
”We all thought each other was funny, but we never knowed the public would laugh at us.” She smiles mischievously. ”But I reckon we was laughed at a bunch. You know: `There`s all the funny people.` ”
Bird seems to treasure such memories as much as audiences devour her way of describing them.
Sam Lovullo, ”Hee Haw” producer, recalls first learning of Bird two or three years ago, but says he became interested in her as a result of a series of talk-show appearances she made on cable TV`s The Nashville Network.
He sees her as a throwback to such authentically rural celebrities as Loretta Lynn, the original coal miner`s daughter; ”Hee Haw`s” own Junior Samples, a late, unlettered Georgia fisherman; and recent ”Hee Haw” addition Mike Snider, a cannily hilarious West Tennessee hog farmer.
”I don`t think we had a female on the show who was like that,” Lovullo reflects.
Considering she is a newcomer, Lovullo has accorded Bird unusual prominence in ”Hee Haw`s” pantheon of bucolic personalities.
In addition to allowing her to sing two of her original songs on the season-opening show, he has cast her in ongoing segments opposite Snider as an incompetent but endearing new housewife; on her own as a dizzy radio love-psychologist in Advice To The Love-Worn, and as a member of the Hee Haw Honeys, the show`s corps of beauties.
For Bird, the last-mentioned role appears uncomfortable, although she doesn`t really say so. She just laughs and makes a brief joke about the Honeys` minidresses:
”You can`t figure out whether to cover your bottom first or your top. I`ve always worn pants, and if I do wear a dress it ain`t up there.”
The odyssey from Bird`s Holler to ”Hee Haw” was a long one. After achieving a low-profile Nashville recording contract and a spot opening for George Jones` roadshows while still in her teens, Bird, for more than a decade, descended into the smoky oblivion of the honkytonk circuit.
A profound natural shyness (”I couldn`t even look up when they clapped for me”) consigned her to the status of just another vocalist in several bands in which she and her husband, keyboardist Donnie Wilson, survived for a decade.
About four years ago, though, they moved to Nashville determined to get her a shot at stardom. It began to take shape in unexpected fashion a couple of years ago, when she got a chance to perform on cable`s ”Nashville Now”
talk show.
”We was always in bands where other people talked, so I didn`t have to,” she recalls. ”But when I got on `Nashville Now,` I had to talk, because there wasn`t nobody else there to do it. And I started findin` out that if I just be me, some people like it.
”I think what made me start bein` myself was talkin` about home on
`Nashville Now.` Ever` time I went on there, that`s what we talked about. If the host had wanted to talk about something else, like my career up to then, we coulda been done in two minutes.”
The stories she told ”Nashville Now” host Ralph Emery, obviously off-the-cuff, were hilarious and wackily distinctive. There was the one about the first doorknob she ever saw. There was one about seeing her first motorcycle, which-with its helmeted occupant-terrified her and a smaller sister into thinking it had come from outer space.
For a show such as Lovullo`s ”Hee Haw,” she was a walking gold mine. Getting her onto it, though, required the persistence of recently acquired manager Jerry Thompson, whose greatest claim to fame so far has been guiding Ricky Van Shelton from obscurity to white-hot limelight.
”Somebody had took a videotape of me to `Hee Haw` a long time ago, but they didn`t pursue it,” Bird recalls. ”Then Jerry took another one over there, and that time they got interested.”
In one of the ”Hee Haw” videotaping sessions last fall, Bird and another performer repeatedly popped out of the show`s ubiquitous cornfield delivering the same one-liners to an obviously dissatisfied director. A half- dozen times, they hid themselves, jumped up, did the lines and sank back out of sight into the stalks, only to be ordered ”Again!” Sinking back into the field after their umpteenth try, they heard nothing. After a pause, Bird rose slowly into view to deliver a wide-eyed line not written on the cue-cards.
”Are we done yit?” she anxiously intoned.
