This has been a rough year for losing my nonagenarian friends. First Scotty Broyles, then Marilyn Tuttle, then steel guitarist and guitar builder Dale Granstrom, and now I have learned that Betsy Gay passed away a few days ago. I guess 2025 is the year that all my ninety-something pals are crossing over to the other side.
Betsy had a fascinating history. She was one of the original Little Rascals in the Our Gang series back in the 1930s. Then in the 1940s she began a career in Western music, first as a child yodeler with Spade Cooley during World War II, then as a constant presence on the West Coast scene on countless barn dance shows, radio shows, and television.
I interviewed Betsy for the Merle Travis book before COVID, and I was not only astounded to find out that she was still alive, I was flabbergasted when I went to go visit her up in Saugus and found she was living in the same trailer park that Merle and his wife Betty had lived in back in the 1970s, only a few trailers away! (Betsy knew Merle very well, but she didn’t know that fact, as they didn’t live in that park at the same time!)
Betsy told me stories about seeing Merle when he first moved to Los Angeles in 1943 and 1944, playing his style of thumb-picking guitar in front of people like Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers and impressing everybody with his talents. The entire time I’m thinking to myself—how can this be, I’m hearing first-hand memories from seventy-five years ago from this remarkable woman. It was an incredible interview, and I really loved Betsy.
Special thanks go to Betsy’s daughter Cathy for facilitating the visit, and for letting me scan Betsy’s photos and some special cartoons and drawings Merle made for her back in the 1940s. Condolences to Betsy’s family, she was a great one!
