As northeastern Oklahoma resident Jana Jae recalls it, the whole thing began back in early 2017. That’s when she and several other alumni of the long-running Hee Haw TV show gathered for a meal in a Nashville restaurant, following a memorial celebration for the program’s recently deceased producer, Sam Lovullo.
“There was a house band, and they asked me, ‘Where’s your fiddle?’” she says. “Well, it was packed up, in the bottom of my trunk, so I said, ‘Oh, it’s all put away.’
“A little more time went by, and then Misty Rowe said, ‘Well, Jana, if you’ll go get your fiddle, I’ll dance.’”
Jae laughs. “Long story short, that’s what happened. I went out and got my fiddle, we went up there with the band, Misty danced, and we brought the house down. Then, as we were eating our dinner, I said, ‘You know, this is so much fun. I have a bus. We ought to take this show on the road.’”
It didn’t happen immediately. In fact, it didn’t happen for a year or so. But, notes Jae, during that stretch, she was busy “asking people about it,” getting a booking agent, and forming a company, Kornfield Friends LLC.
“I lost about $19,000 getting things going,” she says, “because we took my bus, and I also bought plane tickets for the band when we played a couple of casino dates up in the northwest, which was too far for the bus. I was paying for all sorts of things until I woke up and realized this was going to run me into bankruptcy!”
Still, she persevered, putting together a quartet of well-known former Hee Haw cast members that included actress-entertainer Rowe, multi-instrumentalist Buck Trent, and comedian-singer Lulu Roman, backed by Jae’s band.
“At the time, I thought, ‘This is kind of like the Oak Ridge Boys – four of us, and we’re a unit,’” she recalls. “We were so darned good, and we just had so much fun. We had lots of bookings going then, multi-multi-thousands of dollars worth of signed contracts for 2020.”
Then, like so many other things across the country, it was all, she notes, “wiped out” by the pandemic.
It’s taken nearly four years for her to relaunch the project, with a Jan. 25 show set for the Grove Performing Arts Center, and there’ve been some changes in the interim.
Trent passed away last year, and Roman is no longer able to travel. However, says Jae, “Misty and I are going pretty strong,” and she’s been able to add three other acts to the show. One, Irlene Mandrell, actually did some dates with the pre-COVID Kornfield Friends; her Hee Haw stint began after she’d co-starred on the NBC-TV show Barbara Mandrell & the Mandrell Sisters, along with her sisters, Barbara and Louise. Like Misty Rowe, Mandrell was one of the “Hee Haw Honeys,” a group of highly attractive women dressed in scanty backwoods-style clothing who enlivened both the music and comedy portions of the show.
Then there’s Rex Allen Jr., a country-music hitmaker of the ’70s and ’80s, when Hee Haw was at its peak. During the show’s run, he was a guest performer on several episodes.
“I knew he’d been on Hee Haw; he was part of the 50-year celebration we did in Nashville [in 2019] with the Kornfield Friends,” Jae says. “I knew him, and I thought, well, ‘I’ll just ask him.’ He said yes and was real tickled to do it. He’s a great guy and he’s got a great voice, too. [Country-music impresario] Jim Halsey told me he’s got the best voice in the business.”
Completing the roster is Buddy Alan Owens, who scored his own hit country singles in the ’60s and ’70s. More important, as far as Hee Haw goes, is his pedigree. He’s the son of Buck Owens, who co-hosted the program with Roy Clark for most of its long run.
“I called Buddy, because he had just been with us at the National Fiddler Hall of Fame [in Tulsa] to induct [Buck Owens’ longtime band member] Don Rich,” says Jae. “He was so gracious and so good there, and he did four or five songs really well. I knew he was probably way too busy, but I asked him to join us and he said yes immediately. He was happy to do it and excited to do it.”
Jae, who was briefly married to Buck Owens in the ‘70s, was a featured member of his band, the Buckaroos. She estimates that she did five seasons of Hee Haw.
“It was, I guess, 26 shows a year, so you can figure that up,” she says. “It was a wonderful, wonderful experience that brought me to a new career pinnacle. Everyone who was on Hee Haw had a career advancement.
“It really was a phenomenal show. It brought families to the TV screen. People would tell me, ‘Oh, yeah, I watch you every Saturday night.’ Then, a few years went by, and it was, ‘Oh, yeah, my folks watched you every Saturday night.’ Now, it’s ‘My grandparents watched you every Saturday night.’”
She laughs again, but there’s plenty of truth in that observation. Hee Haw, which ran from 1969 through 1993 and is still around in reruns, was one of the early syndicated-show successes. Dropped by CBS after a couple of years, it went into syndication and ended up running for a quarter of a century, which means that at least three generations of viewers were exposed to its combination of cornpone wit, fast-moving blackout-style sketches and lots of country music, all unfolding in a mythical setting known as Kornfield Kounty. There were singalongs, jokes told by cast members and guests rising up out of a cornfield, and the famed “pickin’ and grinnin’” segments featuring Clark and Owens.
“It was a mix of humor and good music and jokes and silliness and fun and laughing – I mean, what could be sillier than some of those singalongs, like ‘I’ve searched the world over and thought I’d found true love; you met another and pfft you were gone.’” She chuckles. “In fact, that’s what everybody wants – those old singalongs. So we do those in the show. We do pickin’ and grinnin’. We pop out of the cornfield with jokes. It’s really just a fun show filled with good music.”
The five principals will be joined at the Grove performance by a four-man band, all from Oklahoma: drummer Steve Short and bassist Richard Sharp (who are also members of Oklahoma Swing, the band profiled in my November column); keyboardist Richard Kennedy, a former linchpin of Roy Clark’s band; and longtime Tulsa guitarist Pat Savage. According to Jae, “They’re all top-notch guys, and they know the show.”
With this new beginning, she adds, “We all want to carry on the Hee Haw spirit. It’s the spirit of fun, the spirit of a family get-together, and having Buddy there is nice, because it’s kind of like a blessing from Buck. When we started off last time, we had Roy’s wife and sister-in-law come out and give us their blessing, and that was really special. The country music industry is an extended family, but that’s especially true of Hee Haw. All of us in the cast had such a great time, and we still feel like we’re family.”
