Editor’s Note: This is the 440th in a series of articles recalling vanished Huntington scenes.
Before his life was tragically cut short in an airplane crash, Hawkshaw Hawkins was one of West Virginia’s best known country musicians.
He was born Harold Franklin Hawkins in Huntington in 1921, the son of Icie Graham Hawkins and Alex Hawkins, who retired from Kerr Glass in Altizer. Growing up in the city’s West End, he gained his nickname as a boy after helping a neighbor track down two missing fishing rods. The neighbor called him “Hawkshaw” after the title character in a comic strip, “Hawkshaw the Detective.”
Hawkins got his start in music after he traded five trapped rabbits for a homemade guitar. He taught himself to play and soon was performing on local radio stations — WCMI in Ashland, WSAZ in Huntington and WCHS in Charleston. Joining the Army during World War II, he served in France and saw combat in the bloody Battle of the Bulge
After the war, he became a regular performer from 1945 to 1954 on the “Wheeling Jamboree,” broadcast from WWVA. Beginning in 1954, he was a regular on TV’s “Ozark Jubilee” in Springfield, Missouri, where he met and married singer Jean Shepherd. He later joined the “Grand Ole Opry” in Nashville.
In 1946 he signed a recording contract with King Records in Cincinnati and hit the charts with five top-10 records. He then recorded for RCA Victor and Columbia. In 1962, he returned to King and recorded his biggest hit, ‘‘Lonesome 7-7203,’’ but did not live to see it reach the top of the charts.
On March 3, 1963, Hawkins, Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas and Randy Hughes died when their small private plane crashed as they flew back to Nashville from a benefit concert in Kansas City. Hawkins was to have flown commercial, but when he found out a friend needed to get home for an emergency, he gave his ticket to him instead.
In 2009, Hawkins was inducted into both the Huntington Wall of Fame and the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame.
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