-
John Wooley
Posts
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...
Going Back to T-Town
Author Carmen Fields prefaces Going Back to T-Town, a fine new book about her Tulsa-based band leading father, Ernie Fields, with lyrics from a well-known...
