In its Jazz Age and Depression-into-wartime heyday as the principal broadcasting offshoot of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, WBAP Radio generated so much original programming that its discoveries made the station resemble an ambitious network as much as a local source of news.
Manager Harold Hough parlayed his very initials into a comical show called “The Hired Hand,” which centered upon a cigar-mooching career loafer and inveterate liar, like a Cowtown Munchausen. This character’s misadventures would launch a fan club that proposed to “save the truth from overwork.” An original Star-Telegram cartoon feature, also titled “The Hired Hand,” was developed by Hough as a spinoff, with sports-page artist V.T. Hamlin — himself destined for prominence as the originator of an adventurous comic strip called “Alley Oop.”
Hough had a keen ear for musical talent, as well. One of his discoveries, the vocalist-pianist Bessie Coldiron, was neither a natural-born Texan nor a Texas-based stage personality, but her billing as “the Sunflower Girl of WBAP” helped to assure her of a major-label recording career, however brief. Her broadcasts and records would leave a small but lasting mark upon Texas’ musical heritage — ranging from blues to comedy to sentimental balladry. (Much essential research into Coldiron’s local-to-national career has been compiled by Fort Worth-based Radio Dismuke, a web-archive site devoted to long-hidden treasures of the local scene.)
A short stack of phonograph records has survived from the 1920s to drop tantalizing hints of Coldiron’s commanding range: She belts it out like a cross between Sophie Tucker and Bessie Smith on the suggestive “Real Estate Pa-Pa (You Ain’t Gonna Subdivide Me)” — then turns on the charm with “What’s the Use of Crying?” — and then radiates countrified innocence with “She’s a Cornfed Indiana Girl,” a composition associated with the Jazz Age bandleader George Olsen.
Coldiron’s instinctive fusion during the mid-1920s of melodic idioms, combining a citified, blues-based attitude with down-home sentimental touches, anticipated the emergence of a more fully realized musical form called Western swing, which would originate in Fort Worth during 1929-1930 as a spontaneous crossbreed of country-style fiddle-and-guitar music with blue-note influences.
Originally billed as “the Sunflower Girl from Kansas” (an allusion to that state’s sunflower image), Coldiron was born Bessie Ellen Warrington in 1902 in Oklahoma, then raised in Kansas City. There, in 1923, she married Ray Orville Coldiron, a carpenter from Nebraska. The Coldirons visited Fort Worth in 1925 and became acquainted with WBAP-Radio’s Harold Hough, likely through family connections. Impressed with her vocalizing chops, Hough invited Bessie to audition for a showcase program, accompanying herself at the piano. A well-received début led her to a series of featured broadcasts, initially spanning five months and foreshadowing national recognition.
On Oct. 31, 1926, the Dallas Morning News reported: “During her radio engagement last winter, the applause mail received was often over 4,000 letters a week, and before each night’s program, scores of wires, some filed two or three days ahead, were asking for numbers. It was a slack day that did not bring at least one dozen boxes of candy, among other gifts of all descriptions from all parts of the world. And she didn’t eat candy because of a feminine whim that it was fattening — she didn’t want to weigh over 104.”
Coldiron spent the spring and summer of 1926 on a tour of the Majestic-Orpheum circuit of vaudeville theatres. The appearances landed for her a recording contract with the Brunswick-Balke-Collender gramophone company in New York — prefacing her return to Fort Worth and WBAP. Six of her eight tracks of September 1926 were issued on three phonograph platters from a Brunswick subsidiary, Vocalion Records (two songs per each 78-rpm shellac disk).
Coldiron would record again in 1927, this time for Columbia Records in Chicago, cutting four sides in two consecutive days. All the Columbia tracks were issued, bringing her commercial discography to five records.
Radio listings from the Dallas Morning News of 1938-1940 show “Sunflower Girl” programs at KGKO Radio in Fort Worth. Like WBAP, KGKO was owned by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. WBAP shared a clear-channel frequency with Dallas based WFAA-Radio, owned by the Morning News.
Star-Telegram chief Amon Carter had acquired KGKO as an alternate outlet for programming during the hours that WBAP would leave the frequency to make way for broadcasts from WFAA. The respective Dallas/Fort Worth stations would sign off at regimented intervals and swap places on the dial. Documentation has proved uncertain as to whether the “Sunflower Girl” shows of 1938-1940 represented a return engagement for Coldiron or if KGKO’s management had assigned that title to some other performer. In any event, Bessie and Ray Coldiron appear to have moved from city to city, turning up in St. Louis during the early 1930s and returning to Kansas City by 1938.
Localized broadcasts during the 1920s often reached distant cities. Favorable reviews of Coldiron’s Fort Worth broadcasts appeared in newspapers as far away as Ohio and Indiana. In January of 1928, the Decatur Evening Herald of Illinois raved about Coldiron’s extravagant medley of “Fifty-five songs in a trifle over nine minutes. [An announcer] called the selections..., and [Coldiron] sang snatches from the choruses. One hundred percent entertaining!”
Coldiron remained affiliated with WBAP Radio and its companion station, KGKO Radio, at intervals through the 1930s. Some reports have described her as moving into secretarial or telephone-switchboard duties at WBAP. Coldiron appears to have quit performing by 1941, for she does not appear in the WBAP-KGKO-WFAA Family Album brochure for that year. Bessie Coldiron died in 1990, in Hayward, California.
