John Wooley

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Staying Gold on Broadway

In March 1943, the musical Oklahoma! – based on the play Green Grow the Lilacs by Claremore native Lynn Riggs – made its Broadway debut....

A Farewell to Mr. Mystery

His name was Jim Millaway, but to a generation of Oklahomans, he was Sherman Oaks, or Mr. Mystery, or even sportscaster Stan Sharpe (“It’s not...

Horror as a Safe Space

In the summer of 1953, my father died of polio. I was four years old. A few years later, I was a full-blown fanatic for...

Tulsa Terrors

Thanks to RSU TV – northeastern Oklahoma’s public-television station – and its senior producer-director, Bryan Crain, I was recently able to co-produce and direct a...

Home and Happy

Tulsa’s Cathy Venable spent five years on the road as principal keyboard player and associate conductor for the national touring companies of three major musicals:...

Part of the Tulsa Holiday Soundtrack

Twenty-five years ago, at pretty much exactly this time of the year, Davit Souders got an idea. A Tulsa-based vocalist and bandleader as well as...

To Linda, Love Don

Most music is, in some sense, a collaboration. Often, it’s a posthumous one. Anytime an artist sets out to perform a piece of music he...

The Good Kind of Tears

One of the biggest characteristics of the Stillwater-born music known as Red Dirt is its emphasis on lyrics that are honest, real and sometimes painful....

A Man of His Word

Last month in this space, I wrote about the Tulsa-based nonagenarian country-music impresario Jim Halsey, manager of the Oak Ridge Boys for the past half-century...

A Man with a (Five-Year) Plan

Jim Halsey may be pushing 93, but the Tulsa-based country-music impresario remains remarkably busy, doing what he’s done for decades, and still doing it the...