My mother’s mother, Myrtle “Ma” Cahow Agee, was born in 1897 and as a gorgeous teen aged girl, and an accomplished mule skinner for her father’s drayage operation, was hired by The Index newspaper at Hermitage Missouri as a reporter.
She wrote almost all the obituaries for The Index and a weekly humorous column about Ma and Pa, and later their two children Sy Thomas and Saydee, and by 1960 was the most famous regional author in the Ozarks.
Almost every character in the Beverley Hillbillies borrowed from her work, right down to the town of Bug Tussle, which is visible from the house I grew up in five miles West of Humansville.
The owners of The Index wanted to bring suit, but my grandmother refused to cooperate. She was flattered by the fact they used her life’s work for inspiration.
The producers of the Beverley Hillbillies paid Ma Agee $400 as a pre order for 200 copies of a book that was to be under her name for copyright, in 1963. She in turn paid Nanny Jenkins to illustrate it, and The Index half the sale price of $2 a copy to publish it. She’d been well paid by The Index, but her book sales gave her financial independence until she died.
Plus the Beverley Hillbillies sent my grandfather cartons of Winston cigarettes, hoping that Pa would start smoking Winstons in the Ma and Pa series.
Pa tried them there fancy filter tailor mades, but he jest couldn’t get over his love ‘o that Long Green he raised hizownself.
I’m the literary executor of Ma Agee, who died in 1980.
It’s an incredibly complex question if The Index still holds a valid copyright on Ma, Pa, Sy Thomas and Saydee.
All it took in 1960 to avoid it was to change the names to Jed, Granny, Jethro Bodine, and Ellie Mae Clampett and have them load up the truck and move to Beverley Hills.
Ya’ll come back now, ya hear?