Related:

• Gallery: West Virginia Music Hall of Fame inductees

Playing and directing music for a TV show ain't a big thing for Charlie McCoy.

Just last week, McCoy, who was music director for "Hee Haw" for 19 years, oversaw the music production for the International Musicians Hall of Fame ceremony in Nashville.

But come Thursday, the award show gig gets even more personal.

McCoy, who has been the top harmonica sessions player in Nashville for the past 40 years, joins nearly a dozen other fellow West Virginians who will be honored at 7:30 p.m. Thursday during The West Virginia Music Hall of Fame's second induction ceremony at the Cultural Center Theater in Charleston.

The two-hour-long ceremony will be broadcast live throughout the state on West Virginia Public Television.

McCoy, 67, who also plays another half dozen or so instruments, has worked as many as 400 sessions a year, releasing 34 of his own records. He has recorded with Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and virtually every classic country artist from George Jones and Johnny Cash to Dolly Parton and Alabama.

Like several of the inductees, McCoy will be playing music on the show, as well, with fellow West Virginians, longtime friends and Nashville session players Wayne Moss and Russ Hicks.

McCoy, who worked with Moss and Hicks on "Hee Haw," said he didn't meet them until he moved to Nashville.

"I met Wayne in probably 1961 and Russ later. He was playing steel with Kitty Wells and Johnny Wright, and we got to talking and he said, 'I am from West Virginia,' and I said, 'Where?' And he said, 'Beckley', and I said, 'my gosh I'm from Fayetteville,' about 12 miles down the road."

Born in Oak Hill in 1941, McCoy's family moved to Florida when he was in elementary school, but he came back to spend his summers in Fayetteville.

A multi-instrumentalist, McCoy first picked up the harmonica at age 8, ordering it out of a comic book. He didn't get back into the harp much until he moved to Nashville.

"Once I got a guitar, I was pretty eat up with that," McCoy said last week by phone. "I got back into the harp in the 1960s when I heard Jimmy Reed. I heard one of those records and I was like 'what is that?' It's a harmonica, and I have one of those. I got back into it big time, and it was exactly the right thing to do."

With guitar pickers on every corner, McCoy, who also plays bass, keyboards, guitar, mallet percussion and percussion, picked up his own harmonica style.

He got his first gig in Nashville playing on an Ann Margaret song.

The producer heard a demo with McCoy on it, and demanded that same player for the session.

"While I was there, the bass player said, 'Are you busy Friday?' I was free for the rest of my life. I said no, and he said well come back here and record with Roy Orbison. After 'Candy Man,' my phone started ringing."

It hasn't stopped.

That is his harmonica on the Jones' hit "He Stopped Loving Her Today," and that's his harmonica, guitar and horns that can be heard on such seminal Dylan records as "John Wesley Harding,' "Highway 61 Revisited," "Blonde on Blonde" and "Nashville Skyline."

McCoy said there was nothing like those 1960s and 1970s times in Nashville when music was flowing wide open.

"Nashville was in the late 1960s and early 1970s for me, a peak of Nashville creative music," McCoy said. "Because Dylan had come here, we had a lot of artists that were coming in who had never come in before like Joan Baez, and Peter Paul and Mary. Also, the major labels here, the country labels, had great artists like George and Tammy, and we were still making records the old way. Everybody got together in the room with great energy. I think some of the new music is lost because they've lost that energy.

"Nowadays, all my work for a major label, I will never see another musician. It is all after the fact. I don't know, there was something special about everybody being there, and all these artists all singing and they all have great songs and it was the thing to do, all get together to make it. ... Technology can either be a great thing or it can be a crutch."

McCoy said one legendary story about him has been told in Al Kooper's book about how McCoy, playing on a Dylan session, showed Kooper he could play the bass with his left hand and play the trumpet with his right hand.

McCoy, who won a Grammy Award for his 1973 album "The Real McCoy," said he's currently working on a book that's broken into four sections: "The Kid," "The Studio Musician," "The TV Tuy" and "The Artist."

"It's all coming back," McCoy said. "Last night, we were honoring record producer Billy Sherrill, who did George Jones' 'He Stopped Loving Her Today,' which I played on and when we got to play this with George at this concert, when you do that, it really brings it back to you."

McCoy said Jones' hit is one of his favorites he played on, as is Olive Hill, Ky., native Tom T. Hall's hit "Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine."

He said there's a hundred little stories about studio work.

"One of the things I talk about in my book is when we'd go into a session and everybody in the room thought they were playing on a hit and that feeling was in the room," McCoy said. "I've felt that several times. Every once in a while, one of those records come along and that is cool."

McCoy said Dylan was standoffish and shut off from the band.

"He never said anything to us so I guess we were doing it right," McCoy said.

That's a far cry from The Statler Brothers, a group that would become good friends.

"They could get more goofing off and work done than anybody I have ever been around," McCoy said laughing. "The minute you hit the door, you'd be laughing, yet when they did the music, it was great and they were great."

For 18 years, McCoy brought a summer concert to Fayetteville, W.Va., and The Statler Brothers performed at the show twice, raising money that went back into the community.

A former member of two legendary Nashville bands, Area Code 615 and Barefoot Jerry, McCoy had such friends as The Mandrells, Jerry Reed, Tammy Wynette and Mel Tillis at the Fayetteville concerts.

McCoy said he loves to come back to his home area in the New River Gorge and has been whitewater rafting five times.

"I really love it," McCoy said of the mountains. "When I was on my own and living in Tennessee, it seemed like when I came back to West Virginia that I noticed things I never noticed as a kid. Just how beautiful is that New River Gorge. When you're young, I think there's things all around you that you never see but later on you get a better view and appreciate things."

Courtesy of the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame

Charlie McCoy

Courtesy of the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame

Charlie McCoy was a member of two legendary Nashville bands, Area Code 615 and Barefoot Jerry.