Roy Clark has a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, was named Ambassador of Goodwill by his adopted state of Oklahoma, and is in the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. He has been voted Entertainer of the Year by both the Academy of Country Music and the Country Music Association, and has been voted best country guitarist and "picker of the year" for several years running by the readers of Guitar Player and Playboy respectively. He's guested on or hosted numerous television shows in this country and abroad. A concert favorite around the world, Roy was one of the first country performers to perform with a symphony orchestra, the first to tour the Soviet Union, and among the first to headline Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden. He was admitted to the Grand Ole Opry as its 63rd member, on August 22, 1987.  And he was the first well-known entertainer to set up shop in the now-popular tourist attraction of Branson, Missouri.  His autobiography, Roy Clark -- My Life In Spite of Myself, was recently published in paperback by Pocket Books.  None of that would have been possible, though, without a string of hit records lasting from the '60s through the '80s.

          The story began several decades ago, with a barefoot boy in a small Virginia town.  Roy was born in Meherrin, Virginia  on April 15, 1933. His father, Hester Clark,  was a sawmill worker who took on odd jobs when mill work wasn't available. While Roy was young, the family moved to Grafton, West Virginia, where his father worked for the Baltimore and Ohio railroad,  installing and maintaining signal lights. When W.W.II broke out, Roy's father went to work at the Washington (D.C.) Navy yard, making lenses for periscopes, and  moonlighting at a grocery store -- a good thing, Roy remembers, because that job gave them leftover food at a deep discount.