MORGANTOWN — If you’ve noticed an abundance of guitar pickers congregating in front of Hastings Funeral Home over the past couple of days, don’t pay it any mind.
Same for the occasional female you may have spied trodding that same sidewalk, while wearing a well-flowered bonnet — complete with the price tag still attached, and hanging from the brim.
They’re just paying their respects to Granny.
That’s Norma “Granny” Blosser, who blended her love of classic 1950s country music and down-home comedy (delivered with a “Yes, I know it’s corny” twinkle) to entertain people of all ages.
Granny, 87, died last week in her Morgantown home. Her funeral is 11 a.m. Friday at Hastings.
For generations, Granny lent her strong voice and sense of humor — the bonnet with the price tag was a nod to country comedienne Minnie Pearl — to fairs, festivals and nursing facilities far and wide.
She might open her show with Pearl’s signature “How-dy!” and pepper in a few jokes about “fellers,” but the rest, her friend and musical collaborator Bill Janoske said, was just her.
“Well, yeah, she was Granny for sure,” said the genial Janoske, a retired science teacher who plays guitar in the house band at the Sagebrush Roundup.
From its stage at Bunner Ridge in neighboring Marion County, the Sagebrush Roundup has been north-central West Virginia’s answer to the Grand Ole Opry since 1938.
Performers from Grandpa Jones to The Kentucky Headhunters have played the Roundup over the years. Granny made it her home base.
Granny, Janoske said, was generous with the spotlight. If you could sing a lick (or if you even couldn’t), you just might be hauled up on stage for a duet or background vocals.
If you could at least strum G, C and D on the guitar, and she knew it, you were enlisted (that is, “volunteered” by Granny) to play backup.
“She wanted to introduce people to the music,” Janoske said. “Young people, especially.”
Granny had a catalogue of self-penned novelty tunes in her repertoire. “The Interstate Is Coming Through My Outhouse,” was a particular fan-favorite.
Covers of heart-tugging ballads and pre-rockabilly foot-stompers also made her famous.
She grew up singing, and everyone in her family knew how to keep on key.
Her mother, Ethel Hagedorn, once performed for Eleanor Roosevelt at Arthurdale, the Homestead community championed by the First Lady in the 1930s.
Granny was never shy about singing, but she was still approaching middle age when she finally made her stage debut as her signature character.
It was at the Deckers Creek Valley Days festival. One of the organizers asked if she wouldn’t mind going on, dressed “as an old woman,” to tell stories and sing songs.
Thus, in 1967, the Summer of Love, and the year of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, Granny Blosser was born. The Minnie Pearl riffs came later.
“First time I ever saw her perform, I thought she was a star,” Janoske said. “I still do.”
A star who simply liked doing what she did, each time she donned the bonnet with the dangling price tag and hit a chord on her acoustic guitar.
“I have tried to make people happy all my life,” she said in a 1998 profile in The Dominion Post.
“Everybody that sees me says, ‘There’s Granny.’”
Twitter @DominionPostWV
JBissett@DominionPost.com
