Biography
Often likened to a guitar-strumming Walter Kronkite, McEnery earned his reputation chiefly through narrative ballads drawn from headline events, among them the 1941 release “Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight.” Shifting between his native South and New York City, he broke free of local circuits in 1938 after securing an on-air slot at WHN radio in NYC and attracting a much larger following. Building on that breakthrough, he issued the chart-topping Earhart single in 1941 before heading back to Texas, where he worked a string of modest stations along the Texas/Mexico border. Although largely missing from the scene for most of the 1950s—a missed opportunity given the wealth of topical material supplied by the Cold War era—he re-emerged in the 1960s with such pieces as “The Ballad of Francis Gary Powers,” a tribute to the U2 spy-plane pilot, and “The Ballad of Patty Hearst.”