By Gayle Gresham –
Historic photos courtesy of Kay Johnson by Gayle Gresham –
Who would guess that Wild Horse, Colorado, is the birthplace to country music fan clubs as we know them today?
Country music fan clubs all trace their roots back to the 1960s and three sisters: Loudilla, Loretta and Kay Johnson. Those three changed the course for country music artists and their fan clubs from their daddy’s wheat farm on the eastern plains of Colorado.
Wild Horse sits along Highway 287 between Limon and Lamar in K.C. Electric Association’s territory. There are a few houses along the blacktop — some lived in, some not — and the only active business today is the U.S. post office, open until 2 o’clock in the afternoon. But that sleepy prairie town played a huge role in country music. It was once the headquarters of the International Loretta Lynn Fan Club and the International Fan Club Organization, which started the IFCO dinner and show in Nashville, Tennessee. That show was the forerunner of Fan Fair, which is now known as the CMA Music Festival and is coming up June 8-11.
The Johnson sisters loved country music and its stars, but Kay Johnson, the youngest and only surviving Johnson sister, bristles a bit if someone calls her a “groupie.”
Kay Johnson looks back over old country music newsletters and photos at her home in Fort Morgan.
“A groupie follows an artist everywhere, follows their bus and goes to every concert,” she says. “But a fan club president doesn’t have time for that. The fan club president is busy getting out the news to the fans on concerts and record releases, encouraging fans to buy records and calling the radio stations to request songs or writing to television shows to have country music stars on their shows.”
Each of the Johnson sisters, who never married, brought their own distinct personality and abilities to their fan club work. Loudilla, the oldest, had business savvy. “The three of us were co-presidents,” Kay says. “But I called Loudilla ‘the head co-president.’ She knew how to lead and how to run things.”
Loretta, almost three years younger than Loudilla, loved people and having fun. “Loretta never met a stranger,” Kay says. And Kay, the tallest sister with brown hair, was known as the “quiet one.” With two dynamic sisters who talked a mile a minute, Kay was happy to let them talk and lead. She was the listener of the trio and the one to step up and do what needed to be done. “I am a helper,” she says, “not a leader.”
The Loretta Lynn Fan Club
In 1960, high school senior Loretta Johnson wrote a fan letter to a new girl singer named Loretta Lynn. “Loretta thought it would be fun to write to a singer who had the same name as her,” Kay says. “She wanted it to look nice, so she used her script typewriter. Well, it was the first fan letter Loretta Lynn ever received. Her husband, Mooney, told her she needed to write back, but Loretta said she couldn’t write to someone with such beautiful handwriting. She didn’t realize it was done on a typewriter.”
Loretta Johnson sent another letter written in longhand when she didn’t get a response. This time Lynn wrote back to her and they started corresponding. According to Kay, the first time they met was at a concert at the Municipal Auditorium in Colorado Springs.
“After the concert, the DJ from the KPIK radio station came down and got us and he took us backstage to meet her and the Wilburn Brothers. She wanted to come out to the farm, but she had a show the next day and couldn’t.”
In her book, Loretta Lynn: Coal Miner’s Daughter, Lynn wrote, “You could have sworn we knew each other all our lives. … They adopted me as a sister in that first meeting.”
The International Fan Club Organization was ran from this farm outside Wild Horse, Colorado.
Loretta Lynn and Mooney did get to visit the farm in Wild Horse. Lynn stayed a few days while Mooney went on. Kay tells of her sister Loretta teaching Lynn how to bake bread and make cinnamon rolls. They also drove around the farm in the truck, riding in the back. They saw some pronghorn antelope, and the girls told Lynn they’d go through the fence and not over it. She didn’t believe them and then had the last laugh when those antelope jumped the fence like deer.
Lynn asked the Johnson girls to start an official fan club for her in 1963. According to Kay, dues were $1.50, which didn’t bring in enough income to cover the expenses at the beginning. Their daddy, Mack Johnson, bought a typewriter and $450 mimeograph machine for them to produce a monthly newsletter. They created journals that were mailed four times a year in addition to the newsletter. Over time, the Loretta Lynn Fan Club grew to have a membership of 4,000 fans, including members from Canada, England, Japan, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia.
Tri-Son News and the International Fan Club Organization
Always looking for ways to promote Lynn, the Johnsons started Tri-Son News under their new corporation, Tri-Son (standing for three Johnsons). They requested press releases from other country artists and put them together with Lynn’s as a news service to radio stations and magazines.
Left: The Ernest Tubb Humanitarian Award. Right: Kay Johnson displays the CMA Fan Fair Award that was presented to the Johnson sisters.
By 1967, the success of the Loretta Lynn Fan Club had other country artists asking the Johnsons advice for their fan clubs. The sisters held a meeting with Dorothy Owens (Buck Owens’ sister), Lynn, and music promoter Little Richie Johnson and then created the International Fan Club Organization. Through IFCO, the Johnsons offered helpful advice in newsletters on fan club details like writing newsletters, handling merchandise and running the finances. But, more importantly, IFCO promoted the idea that fan clubs were like a grassroots political organization with the purpose of promoting and supporting a country artist.
With a membership of 75 fan clubs, the Johnsons held the first IFCO dinner and concert, in conjunction with the Disc Jockey Convention, in 1968. It featured Lynn, Charley Pride, Skeeter Davis and an unknown talent at that time, Barbara Mandrell. The dinner and concert became an annual event with the country artists donating their performances (two songs each), and the money raised was donated to various charities. Loudilla produced the shows and Joe Bob Barnhill was the music producer.
When the Country Music Association started Fan Fair in June 1974, the Johnsons moved the IFCO dinner and show to the Fri- day night before Fan Fair to help support it. Starting in 1994, the show was held in the Ryman Auditorium where memories were invoked of past performances and young artists were thrilled to stand on the hallowed stage.
IFCO grew to a membership of more than 350 fan clubs, and the Johnsons helped organize and participated in other fan-related expos and shows over the years, including the Wembley Festival in London, Fan Jam in Dallas, the Las Vegas Country Music Fan Festival and a fan festival in Los Angeles. As with their IFCO shows, many of the festivals benefitted charities.
Wild Horse to Nashville
Loudilla, Loretta and Kay Johnson based their country music businesses in Wild Horse for 28 years — an amazing feat, considering they didn’t even have a telephone at the house until 1972. “We went to the neighbor’s house half a mile down the road when we needed to make a telephone call,” Kay says with a smile.
The U.S. Post Office is still open in Wild Horse, thanks to the Johnson sisters.
Their businesses also had a big impact on the Wild Horse post office. When the Johnsons started the Loretta Lynn Fan Club, the post office was in the postmaster’s house. The U.S. Postal Service decided to close the Wild Horse post office when the postmaster retired. Of course, this did not set well with the Johnson sisters. They started a letter-writing campaign to save the post office, asking Lynn’s fans and others to write to their congressmen. Not only did they save the post office, but the U.S. Postal Service also moved in a new modular trailer for it.
By the 1980s, the Johnson sisters were as well-known as the country stars they promoted. Lynn wrote a chapter about her fan club and the Johnson sisters in her 1976 book, Coal Miner’s Daughter. The Johnsons even appeared in a “Hee Haw” segment in the cornfield with Lynn in 1987. But their lives took a sad turn in November 1987 when their daddy died in a head-on collision near Kit Carson at the age of 74. Sixty-five days later, the family grieved once again with the death of their oldest brother, Olin, who ran the family wheat farm with his father. Olin and their other brother, Everett (who owned a nearby farm), took care of the farming when Mack traveled with the girls to IFCO shows and Fan Fair.
The girls’ dad, Mack Johnson, carries some of their Fan Fair awards.
Loudilla, Loretta and Kay came to a crossroads after their father’s death. Kay explains: “Daddy had said if anything ever happened to him, to move to Nashville because it is where our work was. So we put the farm ground into CRP [Conservation Reserve Program] and moved to Brentwood in 1991.”
Living in Nashville gave the Johnsons opportunities they didn’t have in Wild Horse. “We met with fan club presidents over lunch and guided them in running their fan clubs.” They also became more involved in organizing fan shows across the country.
In 1995, Lynn disbanded her fan club when her husband was ill and near death. The Johnson sisters and Lynn lost contact with each other, but the Johnsons continued their work with IFCO and Tri-Son.
Accolades and Heartache
Three awards the Johnsons received after the year 2000 sum up their contributions to country music and its fans. In 2002, R.O.P.E. (Reunion of Professional Entertainers) gave the Johnsons the Ernest Tubb Humanitarian Award for their years of raising money for charities through the IFCO shows. The Country Music Association honored them in 2003 with plaques for their contributions to making Fan Fair a success over the years. And, finally, the professionalism and success the Johnsons demonstrated through their work as women in the country music industry was honored in 2004 when they received the SOURCE Award.
Loretta Johnson fought a long battle with multiple myeloma (the same cancer their mother, Audrey Johnson, died from in 1999) and passed away April 13, 2009, at the age of 67. IFCO didn’t hold a show at Fan Fair that year, but country music artists came together for a benefit memorial concert for Loretta Johnson to help with medical bills. Loudilla and Kay continued their work with IFCO and Tri-Son until Loudilla was stricken with pancreatic cancer and died on May 7, 2014. After Loudilla passed away, Kay met with lawyers and disbanded IFCO and Tri-Son and moved to Fort Morgan, Colorado, to be near her brother, Everett, and his family.
Looking back on their adventures and accomplishments, Kay (who fought her own battle with cancer and survived) says, “We all enjoyed what we did. We got to go places we’d never been and met so many different people — country music stars, movie stars and just regular people who were fans. Reminiscing is still a pleasure.”
Writer Gayle Gresham lives in Elbert where she loves to play guitar and sing her own country music songs.