Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 68
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Popular Culture Review
Thus, the melody has remained an instrumental standard, and has been
recorded by dozens of individuals and groups:
“Wildwood Flower” became a favorite piece for fledgling gui
tarists who taught themselves to play it by ear on mail-order
instruments. The song’s garbled words tended to fall away when
it acquired status as a country instrumental standard. Super pick
ers Hank Thompson and Merle Travis had both been weaned
on Carter family records. When they tossed off a version to
gether, it reached number five in the 1955 country charts (Dick
Spottswood, interviewed by Edwards).
Maybelle notes:
The first time I heard this song, I was just a kid. My mother
sang it and her mother sang it. It has been handed down for
years and years. It’s the most popular song, we ever recorded,
and there’s hardly a country group who doesn’t use this song
(quoted in Horstman, 201-202).
Maybelle also sang the song and played autoharp with the Nitty Gritty Dirt band in
1972, and so important is the song that National Public Radio has listed it as one of
the 100 most important songs of the 20th century (Edwards).
And Today
On September 7, 1942, less than a year after the Reuben James was sunk,
the keel for a second “Ole Rube” (DE-153) was laid down, with launching on
February 6, 1943 and commissioning on April 1, 1943. This destroyer remained in
service until October 11, 1947.
Yet a third Reuben James (FFG 57), a guided missile fast frigate, was
built at the Todd Shipyards, San Pedro, California. This Oliver Hazard Perry Class
ship was laid down on November 19, 1983, launched on February 8, 1985, and
commissioned on March 22, 1986.
It is also appropriate to note that this Reuben James is something of a film
star: In the movie “The Hunt for Red October,” a ship identified as “Reuben James'
(although “played” by a Coast Guard cutter) fires at the Red October, and launches
a helicopter that drops a torpedo at the fleeing Soviet submarine. Then, a few
seconds later, in a scene in which the attack submarine Dallas is waiting to launch
a rescue vessel, a radio operator says, “Dallas, this is Reuben James.”
On the down side, a good deal of cinematic license is also present: the
real Reuben James is homeported in Hawaii, so it is unlikely it would be in the