In the city that has produced country music stars such as Jimmie Rodgers and Moe Bandy, perhaps one of the genre’s most prolific chroniclers has passed, leaving a void that will not be soon filled.

    Carl Fitzgerald, 81, was a radio host and local personality whose verse of country musicians both local and of greater renown was myriad. Locals have spent the past two days remembering and honoring Fitzgerald since he passed away on Thursday.

    For more than half a decade he filled the air waves with the histories of country artists, himself a musician several years prior.

    Born on Nov. 5, 1928, in the small town of Chunky, Fitzgerald’s passion for music became apparent early on.

    His wife of 16 years, Thelma, recalls how Fitzgerald purchased an acoustic guitar at a young age, and after learning to play began teaching others in Meridian and the surrounding area.

    “He taught guitar lessons for 50 years,” Thelma Fitzgerald said. “He even went to some of the schools out in the country and taught classes.” 

    Fitzgerald’s passion for music

quickly turned into a profession. While touching the lives of others by teaching music, he began to perform with other country musicians in the area.

“He started back in the late 40s… playing live music,” said Noel Adcock, a friend of Carl who co-hosted several radio shows with him. “There were a couple of bands he played with just around town… Red Stanton and the Alabama Jubilee Boys, and they pretty well traveled the area, playing school houses and things like that.”

Fitzgerald was on electric rhythm guitar at the time, playing in front of furniture stores and or in dance halls with what Adcock calls “hillbilly bands.” Fitzgerald and the hillbilly bands often used a remote recording device to air the public show simultaneously on radio.

The development of Fitzgerald’s craft during that time would help define his identity. The list of his radio experience is a veritable alphabet soup of radio call signs.

Between 1952 and 1953, Fitzgerald started a local radio show on WMOX, playing country music in the early evening.

“He’s one of the old radio veterans in Meridian… He loved Meridian, loved everything about it,” said Mike Glass, who has known Fitzgerald since 1966 and owns WMER 1390, a Christian radio station in Meridian. “He was a different cut as far as radio is concerned.”

He moved from station to station, including WMER, and worked at numerous radio stations in Meridian, including several that no longer exist.

“He’d shift off working at another station for a while, then on to another one,” Adcock said. “Ain’t never stay at the same place for too long.

“Radio people burn out; if they wanna be a real, honcho popular guy, they can’t stay at one place too long.”

With him, Fitzgerald took a tremendous knowledge of country musicians wherever he went, a few of the new artists but particularly the older ones.

“He knew about the old-timers, now,” Adcock said. “A lot of the newer ones he didn’t know so well but there’s so many of them now you can’t keep up with them.”

Fitzgerald is often remembered for his radio show, “Remember When,” a semi-monthly program he started in January 1983 that featured a wide range of guests, from local celebrities to Miss America winners.

“He’d use [“Remember When”] to salute artists, individuals or outstanding people in the community,” Glass said.

Radio wasn’t the only medium Fitzgerald used to speak with the people of Meridian, though.

“He loved a microphone, his telephone and his typewriter,” Glass said. “He was a communicator with the community.”

In fact, Fitzgerald was writing his memoirs up until his final days. Despite suffering blindness due to glaucoma for the past year, he found the strength to continue forging ahead in his documenting his life’s experiences.

Fortunately for the community he knew so well, Thelma Fitzgerald has an unmistakable ambition to publish her late husband’s work.