_____________________________________________________________________________ «¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»¥«¤» ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ _ _ __ __ _ ___ \\\\\___| |_| | \ \ / / / \ | __|___\"-._ /////~~~| _ | \ / / _ \ __ ~~~/.-' |_| |_| \/\/ /_/ \_\ |___| www.hank.shows.it http://hank.tux.nu _____________________________________________________________________________ THE HANK WILIAMS APPRECIATION SOCIETY INTERNATIONAL 1978 _____________________________________________________________________________ R.I.P. BILL MACEWEN - OCTOBER 13TH, 1938 - FEBRUARY 1ST, 2013 _____________________________________________________________________________ Copy and paste the following URL into your location box, to read a prayer for Bill MacEwen: http://www.cdcinsurance.ca/images/billmacewenprayer.jpg _____________________________________________________________________________ UPDATE: Feb 2, 2013 From Ed Guy: Sat, 2 Feb 2013 01:44:53 -0400 Our friend Bill MacEwen passed away peacefully at 1 PM today in the Charlottetown hospital of a heart attack. He prayed that his heart would take him before his Parkinson's. Well Bill got his wish today. He was the most knowledgeable person on the planet when it came to Hank Williams Sr. He knew more about Hank than Hank's immediately family . Mary said they didn't have any of the funeral details but felt they were leaning towards Monday. I know we have a big storm due on Monday & am hoping they might pick Tuesday for the funeral since I have been asked to be a poll bearer. Bill was a fine father & Christian person & he was at rest with the Lord in his life. I believe its to be a small family funeral. he will be missed & was also a music historian . Peter Trenholm ===================================================== From Tom Lipscombe: Bill MacEwen was instrumental in founding the Hank Williams Appreciation Society with me in 1978. May he rest in peace. _____________________________________________________________________________ UPDATE ON BILL MACEWEN'S HEALTH: JUNE 21, 2011 Hi Folks, I spoke to Mary MacEwen today. As most of you know Bill was hospitalized again a couple weeks back. He fell & Mary could not get him up & she had to call an ambulance. Mary informed me that she is very doubtful that Bill will be returning home. He is currently in hospital doing better & waiting to be placed in a care facility. Their home is not designed for this type of illness. She said when he is at home he refused to help himself & all he wants to do is watch TV. He refused to do his exercises & all the other activities which are designed to help his illness. In the hospital or care facility most things are at his fingertips & the staff insist that he be involved with activities that help stimulate his mind & limbs. This last time at home he refused to listen to any type of music. As you know its has become extremely difficult for Mary to care for Bill as she has health limitations of her own. Myrna & I will be getting over to visit them soon. All the best Peter Trenholm hankfan@ns.sympatico.ca _____________________________________________________________________________ UPDATE ON BILL MACEWEN'S HEALTH: MARCH 7, 2006 Hi Folks, I was speaking with Bill this morning & he is home & feeling much better. The pheumonia is all cleared up at this time. He was sent to Saint John,NB hospital last week for a the heart dye test & stress test. . He is not a candidate for the balloon heart procedure. His will be scheduled shortly for heart by-pass surgery. He has one arterie 90% blocked and another 80% blocked plus calcium deposits. He will be scheduled for surgery in 4 to 6 weeks time & i will keep you advised as we know more. Please keep Bill on your prayer list. He sounded good on the phone & was quite chipper. For those of you that may want to send a card his address is: Bill MacEwen Cornwall R.R. # 2 New Dominion, P.E.I. C0A 1H0 Thanks Peter Trenholm _____________________________________________________________________________ ATTENTION HANK FANS - I know hundreds of you know of Bill MacEwen's efforts in the area of Hank - As most of you know he has been doing Hank tribute shows something like 25 years and he is one of the co-authors on THE BIOGRAPHY of Hank. I have received some news of the health problems Bill is having and wanted to let you all know about it. In addition to remembering Bill in your prayers please consider sending a get-well card (and they can be sent to): Bill MacEwen, Cornwall RR2, New Dominion, Prince Edward Island, CANADA C0A 1HQ. Addtional information is provided in the following message from Peter Trenholm (a Hank fan and Bill's good friend in Canada). THANKS PETER. ----- Original Message ----- From: Peter Trenholm To: Robert Ackerman Sent: Monday, March 06, 2006 2:42 AM Subject: Bill MacEwen Hi Folks For those of you that may not know Bill MacEwen has been in the hospital for around 3 weeks now in Charlottetown,PEI He went in with pneumonia & while there they told him he had suffered a heart attack. He has had an angina heart condition for several years now. I spoke to his wife Mary last night & he is doing much better now. The pneumonia has cleared & they are trying to fast track him to Saint John, NB to have the dye test & stress test performed. Bill is hoping that they will do the baloon procedure(angioplasty) where they stretch the arteries. Apparently he has almost total blockage. If they suggest bypass surgery he likely would not go for that as the chances of survival for him would be slim. So please everyone keep Bill on your prayer list. His two radio shows have not aired for three weeks & he is not sure at this time if he will continue with them. I will be away until Wednesday & check then however if any of you want to call Mary her phone number is 902-675-2216 She was telling me last night that she has had many many phone calls from friends & listeners. Thanks Peter Trenholm _____________________________________________________________________________ NOTE: OCTOBER 13TH, 2005 IS BILL MACEWEN'S 67TH BIRTHDAY ! _____________________________________________________________________________ Saturday, January 24, 2004 - BILL MACEWEN RECOVERING AFTER SEVERE ILLNESS _____________________________________________________________________________ In tune with the times _____________________________________________________________________________ By Mary MacKay, The Guardian This Sunday night Bill MacEwen will air his 1,000th Country Roots radio program. Like his Gospel Road show, it has listeners all over P.E.I. and other points of the Atlantic region who drop what they’re doing to settle in for some old-time country and gospel tunes. For 997 consecutive shows, Bill MacEwen, host of CFCY’s Country Roots radio program, was at the helm, giving the dedicated audience his all. With only three more shows to reach 1,000 consecutive programs, it seemed the long-time, part-time radio announcer would achieve this magic milestone. 'I was trying so hard to get to 1,000 without a miss because I started back on the 14th of August 1984. I didn’t think much about it until I was getting close and then I thought, ‘gosh it would be nice to hit 1,000 without a miss.’ And then for 998, I’m in the hospital, so you never know,' says MacEwen, who is now on the mend after a harrowing health ordeal of pneumonia, the flu and congestive heart failure. 'It was a close call. Anyway, I’m on the road to recovery, and that’s the main thing,' adds this consummate music lover, who is set to air his 1,000th Country Roots show on Sunday night, Jan. 25, beginning at 6 p.m. right after his Gospel Road program. It may not be the consecutive run he had hoped for, but MacEwen’s love of country music has been a constant in his life since he was born in New Dominion 65 years ago. In addition to amassing a massive collection of country and gospel tunes, his audio hobby led him to his first on-air stint in the mid-1970s. In December 1971, MacEwen and his wife, Mary, were living in Ajax, just outside Toronto, when the radio station there put out an audience-wide appeal for anyone interested in doing a program special on their favourite singer. MacEwen had a hankering for Hank Williams’ music (he later co-authored a biography of Williams in 1994 with George Merritt), so in just three days he recorded his historical knowledge onto 16 pages, gathered an armful of albums and presented it all to the station to run on the New Year’s Day anniversary of the country singer’s death. 'He said, ‘You sit here and I’ll get . . . .’ and I said, ‘I’m not going to do it, you’ll have to do it, I just prepared it,’ ' MacEwen says, remembering the terror of the thought of going on air. The program went on, minus MacEwen, and the radio station asked for more. 'They phoned me up and asked me if there were any other singers I would like to do. They found out I actually had more records than the radio station (itself). 'I have about 125,000 titles (songs). One of the guys from the station came down and he couldn’t believe the amount of records I had,' he says. 'Everything I use is my own. Instead of buying a case of beer or something, I used to always on payday, go up and buy a couple of LPs, and that was my treat for the week.' It was not unusual for him to make a trip to the United States and return with a few hundred albums in the trunk of his car. 'Then I bought old stock from a store that used to sell records. When other stuff came in, they had moved it all to the basement, so I bought over a thousand of the old 78s from them. And they were brand new, they were mint,' he says. MacEwen then took a six-month course at the National Institute of Broadcasting. After practising at home, he got up enough nerve to propose his own weekly program called Country Collection. His part-time radio work soon increased. Between the radio station and his day job he sometimes worked 90 hours a week. Then in 1975, he returned to P.E.I. A few years later, he approached the owners of CFCY about doing a program similar to Country Collection. [Note: Visit Radio Station CFCY @ URL: http://www.cfcy.pe.ca/ ] 'At that time, the station was cutting back on country music. They only had one radio station back then, there was no CHTN, there was no Magic 93,' MacEwen says. J.P. Gaudet, host of the Saturday Night Hoedown, offered him a guest spot on the program, which he did for five years. The local audience began requesting that MacEwen have his own program, so when the station decided to go with an all-country channel, he started Forerunners in August 1984. In 1989, the name changed to County Roots, but it still featured MacEwen’s fine-tuned song format. 'The very first song I played on my program back in 1984 was a song called Honey, Why Don’t You Open the Door. And the reason I played it was that it was an old song that Webb Pierce recorded back in the early ’50s and Ricky Scaggs had brought it back. It was on the top on the charts when I started doing my program so I played the original.' In 1990 he presented Gospel Road, which airs 5-6 p.m. on Sunday nights directly prior to Country Roots. This program began as an eight-week replacement for another existing program. However, at the end there were telephone calls, letters and a petition with more than 300 names on it, requesting that the show remain on the air. Thirteen years and almost 700 shows later, this program is still the lead-in to County Roots. In the recent past, Bureau of Broadcast Measurement surveys showed that Country Roots and Gospel Road had about 10,000 listeners ' more than the other three main Island radio stations combined in their particular time slots. 'I understand why it’s popular, it’s not on account of me, it’s what I’m playing. 'The (number of) seniors who listen to the gospel program is simply amazing because I always make sure I play quite a number of the older hymns that they’re familiar with and that’s what a lot of people like to hear,' MacEwen says. Over the years, he has met many listeners, one of whom was a wonderful woman he encountered while bowling. After she passed away, he attended her funeral, at which time one of her daughters discovered who he was. 'Well she grabbed me and hugged me. She said, ‘Mother wouldn’t allow us to phone when your programs were on the radio. If we phoned by mistake, she’d say, ‘Call me back after seven, I’m listening to Bill MacEwen.’ ' Peter Trenholm of Pugwash has been a faithful listener of both MacEwen programs. In fact, it was MacEwen’s annual radio program dedicated to Hank Williams in the late 1970s on Saturday Night Hoedown that first caught his ear. 'I like the format he does. It’s really my type of music, I like the music from the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and early ’70s, and that’s what he covers,' says Trenholm, who is also a performer of the country gospel that MacEwen sometimes features on his show. 'There are a lot of people out there who really like music of the days gone by, but personally I’ve had calls from people who have heard my music over his station from Newfoundland, Maine, northern New Brunswick, even Quebec and the Magdalene Islands. 'That’s not counting P.E.I. and Nova Scotia. He’s really getting out there, I can tell you.' Trenholm is also sure to tell The Guardian that MacEwen’s show isn’t just casual entertainment, it’s become part of listeners’ lives. 'His two shows are part of people’s every day Sunday life and that’s a fact. He’s always coming up with something that’s unreleased. Quite often he has material that no one has ever heard before by an artist they really enjoy,' he adds. While requests certainly help make his two shows, MacEwen says each has its own arrangement. 'I have a format. On Country Roots it’s different than the Gospel Road. I’ll repeat on Gospel Road, time after time. If you write in and say, ‘I want to hear Shall we Gather at the River’ and somebody writes in two weeks and they want to hear it again, I’ll play it,' he says. 'But on Country Roots, I try not to repeat anything within six months because when you’ve got a total of 120,000 songs or better (to choose from) you’d better not be playing the same things.' Over and above this, MacEwen never goes over the 60 per cent request ratio on Country Roots. 'That way I can introduce songs that they’ve never heard before or ones that they haven’t heard in years and then they may become a favourite,' he says. He also features an artist or theme every week, sticks to traditional country tunes and, for good reason, avoids songs that listeners can hear daily on the radio. 'Sometimes you get chastised for doing certain things,' he says with a smile. 'I remember one time I featured Merle Haggard because I had requests for him. I played probably four out of the five songs that were his greatest hits and I got a letter from a guy in Rustico who said, ‘Bill, what are you trying to do to us? We only have one hour of you a week and we can hear that stuff on the radio anytime,’ which he had a point.' Kevin Lewis, who co-hosts the Saturday night Hoedown with Gaudet, says MacEwen is one of the foremost country music historians and collectors in the world, especially with regard to Hank Williams. 'Every week, he brings material and historical content (to his show) that is thorough, accurate and informative. Bill knows and shares his resource through a true love of the music. And his fans know it. His many listeners are very loyal and don’t like to miss a single show,' he adds. '. . . . What he plays brings back so many great memories for people, and they want to relive those memories. He is a special man with a great love of country music that he is more than happy to share or really go out of his way to share. 'There is only one Bill MacEwen and only one Country Roots. I hope he can do another thousand.' MacEwen’s New Year’s Day Hank Williams’ special that began in 1972 at that Ontario radio station had been set for its usual run, but due to the radio announcer’s own New Year’s Eve health scare and subsequent recovery, it is set for Wednesdsay, Jan. 28, 6-8 p.m., on 630 CFCY. This Sunday night, Jan. 25, for his 1,000th show, MacEwen is aiming to air a clip from his first program in 1984 and some of the most requested songs that he’s had over the past 1,000 programs. He admits to being a little disappointed about missing the consecutive mark but knows it’s not really important in the whole scheme of things. 'The realization, I guess, when you’re faced with it, you say to yourself, ‘Hey, what’s the most important, your health or to reach 1,000?’ and there’s no question, not even a coin toss,' he says. 'I’m still going to reach 1,000 ' a week late, but no big deal.' ____________________________________________________________________________ Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html Doctrine of International Copyright Law ____________________________________________________________________________ Note: Join Robert Ackerman's Hank Fan Mailing list. _____________________________________________________________________________ Email: Hank1@mtaonline.net _____________________________________________________________________________