Timeless Tommy Hunter focuses on fans

on The Tommy Hunter Show and on Country Hoedown nine years prior to that - to figure it out.

He plays two sold-out concerts at St. Albert's Arden Theatre today.

The 59-year-old crooner's recent albums, Timeless Classics Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, pretty much tell the tale. Nothing new within earshot, nor does he want there to be.

"There's no sense in me trying to get some hot writer to try to pursue a top-10 hit, put out a group of songs nobody's ever heard and try to push them on a radio station," Hunter says during a recent phone interview. "The radio station looks at it and sees Tommy Hunter, and says, `Oh, yeah, I know who he is; my grandmother is a big fan,' so they take the record home to grandma.

"So once you know the facts of reality, then you can do a much better job in marketing and getting the songs out. So we decided to make an album and CD for our fans."

Hunter is definitely from the old school. Entertainers are often formed by what they listened to when they were kids; in Hunter's case, it happened to be guys like Roy Acuff, Hank Williams and Wilf Carter wafting in on some obscure radio station from the U.S.

You see, in Hunter's day, country was "underground," so when he got his own TV show, his goal was to bring it to the masses. First, though, he had to work on country music's image.

"Before I first started doing a television show, most TV shows that I had seen that were kind of a country type - and there were very few of them, because we're still talking black and white televisions - they were all sort of done in a barn. Everybody had bales of hay and they all dressed up in dungarees, and they all had that accent. I hate that image. First of all, it was a put-down to the music, and a further put-down to me and a put-down to rural people making a living.

"So when I got my TV show, one of the things I said to the CBC was `I'm not sure all the things I want, but I'll tell you what I don't want: I don't want a barn.'

"Remember, when I was starting, country music did not have the acceptance it has today. Now, every community has a 24-hour country station and they're always the No. 1 station. But the only country music that I could hear was on some station in Tennessee or Ohio and they were always on very late at night. I felt, frankly, that the only way I could make this last was to market it to a much wider audience. Labelling it with a barn was not going to allow the TV show to grow.

"So in many ways, what I did on television, they're now doing today. They're marketing it to a wide audience."

You can't really blame Hunter for the big-business, cookie-cutter factory of sound-alike hat acts that the modern country music industry has become. As he's already pointed out, Hunter is once again on the outside looking in; CISN FM doesn't play many Hank Williams or Hank Snow classics these days.

Hunter does, though.

He promises that today's concerts are "exactly the same format as the television show.

"I like to refer to it as a nostalgic trip down memory lane" he laughs. "It's a very intimate look at Tommy Hunter."