Counterintuitive but true: if you were to cross Shug Fisher (George Clinton Fisher, 1907-1984) with Fuzzy Knight, the result would not be Suge Knight.
Fisher was a rustic character actor, comedian, and musician, a member of both the Sons of the Pioneers and the John Ford Stock Company, and a familiar sight on television and in movies into the early 1980s. Born and raised in Oklahoma farms, Fisher was 1/8 Choctaw on his mother’s side. Inspired by traveling medicine shows, he learned to play guitar, mandolin, and fiddle. By his teenage years, he was performing at barn dances and other social events, carrying his instruments to the engagements in a pillow case tied to the saddle of his horse.
From the late 1920s to the early ’40s he played with a variety of musical outfits across the country and on radio. He was a member of Tom Murray’s Hollywood Hillbillies in the early ’30s, learning to play bass fiddle for the gig. Among the radio shows he appeared on subsequently with various outfits were Stuart Hamblen’s Covered Wagon Jubilee (L.A.), WWVA Jamboree (Wheeling), and Boone County Jamboree (Cincinnati), where he befriended Merle Travis.
In 1943 Fisher was fired for the Sons of the Pioneers as a wartime replacement for one of the musicians who went into the service. Through 1946 he was featured in the group in Roy Rogers pictures, and he would rejoin them several times until 1959. At the same time, he developed a career as a character actor on his own, often playing comical characters who stuttered. He is in most of John Ford’s movies between Rio Grande (1950) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964). Throughout that same period he was a regular performer on the TV variety show Ozark Jubilee (later renamed Country Music Jubilee and finally Jubilee USA). As an actor he had guest shots on shows like Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Petticoat Junction, Daniel Boone, The Virginian, The Wild Wild West, and The Beverly Hillbillies.
Gradually more diverse vistas opened up to him. He did a memorable voice-over in the 1955 Tom and Jerry cartoon Pecos Pest. He’s in the horror movie The Giant Gila Monster (1959). For Walt Disney Productions, he appeared in the films The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin (1967), Castaway Cowboy (1974), and The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again (1979). He’s in The Rievers (1969) with Steve McQueen. On television he was able to break out of the western ghetto with guest spots on shows like Love American Style, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and Starsky and Hutch, while still mining familiar territory on How the West Was Won, The Sacketts, and The Dukes of Hazzard. His final role was a 1981 episode of Harper Valley PTA with Barbara Eden.
For more about show business history consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcoming Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.