Minnie Pearl

Minnie Pearl, a member of the Grand Ole Opry cast from 1940 until her death in 1996, was country music's preeminent comedian and one of the most widely recognized comic performers American culture has ever produced. With her straw hat and its dangling $1.98 price tag, her representation of herself as a man-chasing spinster in the small town of Grinder's Switch, TN, and her great-hearted holler of "How-DEE! I'm just so proud to be here" as she took to the Opry stage, Pearl became an icon of rural America even as she lovingly satirized its ways. Cousin Minnie Pearl grew up among people quite different from the Uncle Nabob, Brother, and boyfriend Hezzie who populated her comic routines. Born Sarah Ophelia Colley, she was the daughter of a prosperous lumberman in Centerville, TN, and she attended tony Ward-Belmont College in Nashville as a theater major. As a young woman she favored classical music, not country. In college she focused especially on her dance classes, which would serve her well as she developed her top-notch stage presence, and after college she taught dance for several years. Then she took a job as a dramatic coach with a touring theater company based in Atlanta. As the group barnstormed through the Depression-era south, she would try to promote the group's shows by making brief appearances at local Lions' clubs and the like. She hit on a routine in which she delivered an impression of a small-town girl, Minnie Pearl, and then began to amplify the impression with traits she observed in people she met along the way. By 1939, the Minnie Pearl character was well developed, but Colley had to return to Centerville that year to help care for her ill mother. In 1940 Colley appeared at a banking convention in Centerville at which some of the executives of the...