T H E S TAT E | I N S I D E R
The Venerable Roy Clark
Claremore offers a tribute to this lauded musician, singer and honorary Okie.
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s far as country-music impresario Jim Halsey is concerned, the city of Claremore is a perfect place for an exhibition on his famed client and friend, Roy Clark. After all, Clark not only deeply admired Claremore’s favorite son, the celebrated Will Rogers; he was also, in 2005, grand marshall of the town’s annual Will Rogers Days parade. “Roy was a big, big fan of Will Rogers,” explains Halsey, Clark’s longtime manager. “And he got to ride in the parade for Will, so there’s a real connection there. Plus, I don’t know of two more
The late Roy Clark is remembered at the J.M. Davis Arms and Historical Museum in Claremore. File photo
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OKLAHOMA MAGAZINE | SEPTEMBER 2021
loved and respected Americans than Will Rogers and Roy Clark. What two people pair up better? That’s America, buddy.” It’s also Claremore, now that the city’s J.M. Davis Arms and Historical Museum has opened its exhibit, The Story of Roy Clark, a little more than a mile away from where the Will Rogers Memorial Museum has long stood on a hill, overlooking the town. The latter is the permanent repository for Rogers’ artifacts, while the Clark exhibit at the Davis Museum is scheduled to last “about a year,” according to Halsey, who works out of his offices a couple of dozen miles down the road in Tulsa. For decades, Clark was also a T-Town resident, and Halsey notes that efforts are underway to find “a permanent home” for the collection in their shared hometown. In the meantime, he says, “We have all this memorabilia that we need to do something with. So, what better place to do it than in a state-of-theart exhibition space in Oklahoma? This gives Tulsans and people from the Tulsa area an opportunity to renew their acquaintance with Roy through physical objects – posters and albums and guitars and clothing, awards and citations. They can see all the contributions this man made, not only to American music and American entertainment, but specifically to Tulsa and the whole Oklahoma area.” Visitors will indeed find an intriguing array of Roy Clark material in the Davis Museum exhibit, from a pair of overalls and a banjo that he used during his long run on TV’s Hee Haw to custom and antique rifles to a special trading card. That latter item particularly delighted the museum’s ex-
ecutive director Wayne McCombs, a well-known baseball expert who’s written extensively on the subject. “We’ve got the bubblegum card [ from 1961] celebrating the 565-foot home run that Mickey Mantle hit at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C.,” McCombs notes. “Roy saw him hit it. He was in the stands with his dad that day.” By the time Mantle launched that monumental blast, the Clark family – originally from Virginia – had been living in D.C. for more than 15 years, where his father, a onetime farmer, had found work at the Washington Navy Yard. It wasn’t until the early ‘70s that Clark, by then an internationally known entertainer whose career had been guided for years by Halsey, moved to Tulsa, where Halsey was busy building up his Jim Halsey Company. (By the mid’80s, it would be the biggest country-music agency in the world.) Clark remained a Tulsa resident until his 2018 death, lending his name, presence and talent to – among other local endeavors – a nine-year run of annual Roy Clark Celebrity Golf Tournaments and concurrent Star Night concerts, all benefiting Tulsa’s Children’s Medical Center. As impressive and star-studded as those events were, they make up only a small part of Roy Clark’s legacy – which is something that the museum’s executive director McCombs and curator Jason Schubert quickly realized when they began looking into the idea of a Clark exhibit. “It started around Thanksgiving, when Jim gave me a call about it,” remembers McCombs. “He told me that Roy had a lot of hunting rifles and some antique stuff from the Civil War era that we might be interested in displaying. Then,
