DEEP ROOTS KENTUCKY HEADHUNTERS KEEP THEIR TIES ALIVE BY JEN CALHOUN
W
hen the Kentucky Headhunters started hitting the Billboard music charts in the 1990s, the country/ Southern rock/blues band experienced the kind of respect that opened the doors to international fame and awards.
“My dad said there were many women who’d try to plan their shopping around some of the phone calls so they could eavesdrop on what the other people were saying,” Young says with a laugh. “Daddy said it got to be a thing that all the local ladies would know when somebody was calling about something, so they’d just go to the grocery store and sit around the fire there and listen. There was no such thing as a private call.”
But Richard Young, one of the band’s founders and its designated spokesman, doesn’t really want to talk about all that. Not just yet, at least. What Young really wants to talk about are telephones. Specifically, he wants to tell the story of the old-time phone installed at the store his grandparents once ran in the crossroads village of Wisdom, Kentucky. Back in those days, few rural people owned phones or even had lines running to their homes. But the Young family needed one to order supplies for the store. As a result, shoppers would borrow the phone for calls, making it a gathering place for all the local newshounds.
Years later, Young himself remembers his grandmother, Effie Young, occasionally listening in on the party line — a telephone circuit shared by more than one family in an area. She, he says, was a bit of a spitfire — a mover and a shaker in the community who was instrumental in getting blacktop on the old dirt roads. He thinks she may have even worked with SCRTC to get phone lines run to the rural areas. She loved the region and her community, and that meant she wasn’t afraid to speak up when she got irritated. “There were a lot of young couples — high school kids, or whatever — courting in the community,” he says. “My
12 | May/June 2019
PARTY LINES
South Central Rural Telecommunications Cooperative
