The ballad of Bill and Bobbie Malone begins on Sept. 5, 1976, in a small bar across the river from New Orleans, Louisiana. Bobbie’s friend had invited the recently divorced mural artist to see a bluegrass band fronted by a shy history professor, depressed since his wife left him.
They were both Texans, but had little else in common.
“That all just sounded too funky, so I decided to go,” says Bobbie. “Little did I know it would be love at first sight.”
The friend introduced them after the set, and Bobbie was as forthright as Bill was retiring. She informed Bill that other than owning a Willie Nelson record and having seen Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville, she knew next to nothing about country music. And that wasn’t all.
“The way Bill tells it, I said something like, ‘I’m Bobbie Sontheimer. I’m an artist, I’m Jewish, I’m divorced, I’ve got two kids. Take it or leave it,” she says. “I’m not sure if I said those exact words, but I knew leaving the bar that this was the man I was going to marry.”
The next week, Bill asked for Bobbie’s phone number, and five months later they were engaged. Bill remained as taciturn as Bobbie was enthusiastic about the intended union.
“I’d get all mushy with Bill and he’d say, ‘So far, so good,’” Bobbie says. “We have that phrase engraved on the inside of our wedding bands. The jeweler said, ‘Are you sure this is what you want?’”
Forty-four years later, the couple has firmly established roots in Madison as performers and writers — both independently and together. Bill has risen to prominence as one of the nation’s top experts on country music. That’s why documentary filmmaker Ken Burns used Bill’s seminal genre study, Country Music U.S.A., to create the narrative arc for his 16-hour documentary Country Music, which was broadcast recently on National Public Television. Bill also served as consultant and onscreen narrator for the eight-part series that changed the way some of us think about country music.
The Malones perform as a duo (him on guitar, her on mandolin) once a week at Common Ground, a laid-back coffee shop and community gathering spot in Middleton. And they collaborate on the Wednesday morning broadcast of Back to the Country, a show of old-time country songs on WORT-FM, which Bill has hosted for 24 years. After she retired from the Wisconsin Historical Society, Bobbie began joining what WORT’s music director Sybil Augustine calls “a posse of engineers and assistants” that is on hand for the broadcast of the show.
The life the Malones have created here after a quarter century in Madison has the makings of a country love song.
“We’re an absolutely committed couple, and people tease us for being joined at the hip,” says Bobbie, who at 75, is 10 years younger than Bill. “We both had been married before and knew what we wanted when we met. Our lives have only become more intertwined over time.”
Bobbie even wrote a tune, “Love in Three-Quarters Time,” which she dedicated to the couple’s 42 years of marriage. “I wanted us to dance through the years,” she says.
(left) 1977: Bill and Bobbie wed at Touro Synagogue in New Orleans. Bobbie’s sons, Matthew and Benjamin Sontheimer, wear matching suits for the occasion. (right) Late 1980s: Bobbie and Bill perform for a senior citizens’ group in east Texas.
Born in 1934, Bill Malone grew up on a tenant farm 20 miles west of Tyler, Texas, where his family grew cotton during the Great Depression. The radio was their constant companion, exposing Bill to all types of music. Bill’s mother loved Bing Crosby, while his father enjoyed the Latin music blasted by megawatt stations just across the Mexican border.
“I always loved hillbilly music,” Bill says. “The radio removed us from the isolation of our farm to a world of fantasy, but the music still seemed like real people talking about real problems. The tunes were simple, and it was music you could hum, even if you didn’t know the words.”
Bill enrolled in the University of Texas and played guitar with bands in Austin-area clubs, thanks to his encyclopedic knowledge of “hillbilly” songs. He had earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history when an academic advisor suggested he write his doctoral thesis about hillbilly music. It eventually was published in 1968 as Country Music U.S.A. In 2018, the University of Texas Press, which published the 768-page volume, issued a 50th anniversary edition of the work. After two years of teaching American history at UW-Whitewater, Bill accepted a post as a history professor at Tulane University in New Orleans, in 1972.
Barbara S. “Bobbie” Sontheimer also made her way to New Orleans around this time. She grew up in Los Olmos, an upscale suburb of San Antonio, Texas, and briefly attended the University of California at Berkeley. But eventually she landed at Newcomb College, then the “women’s section” of Tulane. She got married after her sophomore year and had two children before divorcing.
“I spent my time painting murals with a female friend and living with my kids in an apartment that was robbed three times in one month,” Bobbie says of the period before she met Bill.
During their whirlwind courtship, Bill began wooing Bobbie with country music records. Bobbie was, and still is, an avid sewer and needlepointer, but found the dingy bars where Bill’s band played too dark to practice her craft. “We knew we wanted to live our lives together, so I had to find something else to do,” she says.
Bill knew a good duet partner when he saw one, and encouraged Bobbie to experiment with a mandolin he had never learned to play. After several lessons from the band’s bass player, Bobbie became proficient on the instrument. The fledgling musician quickly discovered that her husband didn’t much care to pick out the melody lines on his guitar, but enjoyed coming in with the harmonies, something she wasn’t trained to do, so she mastered the melodies.
The first song Bill taught Bobbie was “Dark as a Dungeon,” a 1947 Merle Travis opus about life as a coal miner with the memorable lines, “Where demons of death often come by surprise/One fall of the slate and you’re buried alive.” She learned it during a post-Thanksgiving car trip from San Antonio to New Orleans.
“That’s our process,” Bobbie says. “We start out learning songs in the car, then take them to the kitchen table before we play them at the coffee shop.
(left) 1994: A beaming Bobbie receives her doctorate at Tulane University. (right) 1984: The couple plays the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
It was Bobbie’s need for steady work that propelled the two Southerners to Wisconsin. Painting murals did little more than pay for the babysitter, and her bachelor’s degree in art history hadn’t prepared her for much else. She went back to school and earned a degree in elementary education. Not long after, she went back to Tulane to earn a doctorate in Southern Jewish history. Unfortunately, there were no jobs teaching Southern Jewish history, so she went back to teaching elementary school.
But Bobbie’s unusual educational combination eventually proved a perfect mix for the Wisconsin Historical Society, which was seeking job candidates with both elementary education backgrounds and doctorates in history. When Bobbie accepted a position, Bill, who had achieved emeritus status by that time at Tulane, followed Bobbie back to Wisconsin.
“I asked Bill what he knew about Madison and he said it was just like Austin, but with winter and bad Mexican food,” Bobbie says. They moved from New Orleans to Madison in May 1995.
Bobbie’s writing career blossomed after they arrived. The University of Alabama Press had already published her doctoral thesis, Rabbi Max Heller: Reformer, Zionist, Southerner, 1860-1929. At the Historical Society she served as director of the Office of School Services, where she was responsible for “kid-ifying” Wisconsin history books for young readers.
After retiring in 2011 “because of Scott Walker,” Bobbie wrote Lois Lenski: Storycatcher for the University of Oklahoma Press about her favorite children’s author and illustrator. Recently, the University of Wisconsin Press published Striding Lines: The Unique Story Quilts of Rumi O’Brien, about a Madison-based Japanese American quilter who combines folk art traditions from both cultures in her work.
Bill has published more than a half-dozen books about country music and Southern culture, including Southern Music/American Music (University Press of Kentucky, 1979) and Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (University of Illinois Press, 2006). He also selected the songs and wrote the liner notes for The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country Music, an eight-disc and book set for which he earned one of his two Grammy Award nominations for Best Historical Album in 1981. The other Grammy nomination was in 1998 for the liner notes to the three-disc set From Where I Stand: The Black Experience in Country Music.
(left) 2019: Documentarian Ken Burns (left) with Del Bryant and Bill at the preview of Country Music in Nashville, Tennessee. (right) The Malones with the team at the WORT-FM studio during the weekly broadcast of Back to the Country.
And now their writing paths have converged as well. The couple recently completed their first book as co-authors, Nashville’s Songwriting Sweethearts: The Boudleaux and Felice Bryant Story, about the married couple who wrote many top country songs, including every number one hit the Everly Brothers ever recorded. The University of Oklahoma Press volume is due out in March.
Although writing about a musical couple may seem a deliberate choice for the Malones’ first outing as co-authors, they happened upon the project by coincidence while working with Burns in his production studio in Walpole, New Hampshire. Burns invited them, along with other trusted experts, for an early showing of the Country Music documentary. Sitting behind them in the screening room was Del Bryant, the son of Boudleaux and Felice. That gave Bobbie an idea.
“I knew that Felice Bryant was originally from Milwaukee, and I thought she would make a great article for the Wisconsin Magazine of History,” Bobbie says. “Plus, I always loved the Everly Brothers, so I turned around in my seat.”
Bobbie gave Del Bryant a compelling pitch, and he agreed to cooperate on an article. When she told Bill about her lucky break, he suggested they write a book. Bobbie’s article, “Felice Scaduto Bryant,” ran in June 2019, telling the story of an unlikely pairing between Felice, the daughter of a Sicilian American barber, and the Georgia native Boudleaux. The article is structured around the unusually prolific couple and their outsized contributions to the country, rock and pop canon. (They wrote “Bye Bye Love,” Wake Up Little Susie” and “Rocky Top.”)
Felice Scaduto was an elevator operator at the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee when one day a courtly Southern gentleman with an unusual name stepped aboard. The pair felt an immediate attraction and five days later they ran off and “were married by God,” Bobbie says. “They were legally married on Sept. 5, 1945, and Bill and I met on Sept. 6, 1976,” Bobbie adds, “I see a connection there.”
As a female author herself, Bobbie was especially attuned to the struggle Felice faced to get equal credit in an industry dominated by males. One passage from the article reads: “I’d work on something, and it would come out on the record, ‘Boudleaux Bryant,’ and I’d say ‘Boudleaux!?’And he’d just say ‘That’s the way it is!’ And I’d say ‘Don’t let them do that!’”
When the Malones worked together to expand the article to a book, the couple soon discovered that they had quite different approaches to the creative process. “I was taught in grad school to read the material, absorb it and then tell the story in my own words,” Bill says, “Bobbie was more into using quotes.”
“Bill likes to write about the whole world, and I like to bring things to life after Bill’s written it,” Bobbie adds. “He calls me the ‘color commentator.’ It’s developed into a whole different part of our relationship. It’s fun to be enthusiastic about the same thing at the same time, at least when we’re not arguing about it.”
But any animosity was short-lived. “Felice wrote a love song for Boudleaux entitled ‘We Could,’” Bobbie says. “I tend to think of Bill and I as the Boudleaux and Felice of historians.”
Their next project is a biography of Grammy-winning singer/songwriter Tim O’Brien, a bluegrass artist and multi-instrumentalist from West Virginia who helped found the band Hot Rize in 1978. Like so many artists the Malones admire, O’Brien stays true to his musical sources and writes music that conveys genuine emotion. That isn’t always the case with much of today’s country music, especially the type that has been coming out of Nashville — and blasting on commercial radio stations — for the past several decades.
That difference is what Bill has been calling attention to on Back to the Country.
A library of books authored by Bill and Bobbie Malone, separately and together, continues to grow.
At a recent broadcast of the show, Bobbie works on a needlepoint project sewing the names of Bill’s favorite songs into squares of cloth cut from his old plaid shirts while Bill lounges in the DJ’s chair, introducing the audience to “Weave Room Blues,” Howard and Dorsey Dixon’s 1932 country lament about South Carolina farmers who have traded their plows for looms:
Working in a weave-room, fighting for my life
Trying to make a living for my kiddies and my wife;
Some are needing clothing, some are needing shoes
But I’m getting nothing but the weave-room blues.
This week’s playlist includes songs about the railroad, drinking, unrequited love and “slippin’ around.”
At two hours into the three-hour show, Bobbie shares a note the receptionist has handed her. “Someone called in a request for a cheating song,” she says. “‘John’s Been Shuckin’ My Corn,’ or something like that. But we’re past that and on to gospel now. It’s time for a little redemption.”
Bill nods and hands the engineer another pile of CDs selected from his vast personal collection, including one from Gene Autry. Bill sees an opportunity for a mini-lecture. “Gene Autry was known as the capitalist cowboy,” he tells the small group gathered with him in the studio. “Someone supposedly once asked British rocker [and Rolling Stones lead guitarist] Keith Richards if he had accomplished everything he wanted to as a guitarist. ‘No,’ Richards said. ‘That’s Gene Autry. He could sit in a room of a hotel that he owned, watching a baseball team that he owned playing a game being broadcast on a television station that he owned. That’s pretty good for a guitarist.’”
Bill follows up his story by spinning a 1931 recording of Autry singing one of his few protest songs,“The Death of Mother Jones,” about the famous 1920s labor organizer. Then Bobbie takes over the microphone, broadcasting the community calendar and upcoming concert information.
Bill is a consummate storyteller, and the former history professor has an unlimited supply of compelling tales. “This is Bill’s world,” Bobbie says. “He’s usually lost in the music, and it’s not unusual to hear him humming or singing some of the older songs. We both like music that’s earthier, more real and not overly refined.”
The Malones have favorite artists they believe rise above the crass commercialism of the current cowboy-hats-and-boots pop culture. Iris DeMent, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and The Flatlanders, Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss and Willie Nelson tend to get lumped into the Americana category. But they fall closer to what the couple calls country than many of the artists touring arenas today. The Malones worry that the stories are being lost.
“Jazz critic Nat Hentoff often told the story about [bebop saxophone legend] Charlie Parker in a New York City bar,” Bill says. “Everyone else was playing jazz on the jukebox, but he’d play hillbilly songs. When asked why, he’d say, ‘Listen to the stories, man. Listen to the stories.’”
“What I love about country music are the words,” says Bobbie, pointing out Bobbie Gentry’s haunting 1967 hit “Ode to Billie Joe.” “What impresses me are artists who can compress the beginning, middle and end of a story into three minutes and still make it musically interesting.”
Together and apart, the couple embraces the music that united them, and keeps them together.
“It’s the music of my life, which is just about as long as the commercial country music industry itself,” says Bill. He was celebrated at a sold-out tribute concert at the Stoughton Opera House in September. “It’s the music of my family and my culture. I am proud to have contributed to preserving, documenting and legitimizing the music.”
Bill takes plenty of opportunities to remind his audiences of the people behind the music. “I think you have to help audiences realize that country artists are intelligent people — not just dumb hicks — who can verbally articulate what the music has done for the people who have come before them,” he adds. “And you have to help audiences realize the music is worth listening to.”
Bobbie adds the phrase “tikkun olam” to the discussion. “That’s Hebrew for ‘repair the world’ and make it a better place for all. That’s what I want my legacy to be, and country music shows us the value and integrity of life.”
When they’re not walking the neighborhood streets for exercise, the Malones are dancing in their den to country music in a romance that doesn’t show any sign of stopping soon.
“I have a powerful love affair with Bill, I love living here and being totally engaged with our lives,” Bobbie says. “We keep learning new things, and it’s so exciting. If I had six months to live, I wouldn’t want to change anything. It’s just been thrilling.”
For Bill, “so far, so good” still suffices. “But I would change the emphasis on that phrase,” he says with a chuckle, “to so far, soooooo good!”
