Our Arklahoma Heritage: A country bumpkin born in Gans made his mark in the word of country music

The year was 1942.

Much of Oklahoma was suffering not only the injustices of the Great Depression but a long and sustaining drought that had turned most of the region into what was termed the "Dust Bowl". 

James Arthur Shofner, who lived in typical poverty in Gans with his wife Ethel Lee and three children, looked up one day in early 1942 and decided the time had come to join thousands of other Okies leaving the state of Oklahoma for greener pastures out west.

The couple had three sons. Kenneth, 16, Virgil,13 and the youngest was Calvin Grant, who is approximately nine and a half years old at the time.

Woody Guthrie

Folk singer Woody Guthrie talked about the despair in Oklahoma during that time in his autobiography:

"They was hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and thousands of families of people living around and under railroad bridges, down on the river bottoms, and in the old cardboard houses, and in old rusty beat-up houses they made up out of tote sacks and old dirty rags and corrugated iron that they got out of the dumps and old tin cans flattened out, and old orange crates."

James, whose nickname was "Otto", looked up one day and decided the only alternative was to head west to Arizona and California. So he loaded his family and their meager possessions in an old beat-up truck and headed towards the Pacific coast without any plans or a secure destination.

After weeks of travel, Otto and his clan settled just outside Oakland, California. Times were hard but not nearly as hard as they had been on the dusty plains of Oklahoma. 

Kenneth, the oldest of the three sons, grew up to be a strapping, adventurous young man who served in the Air Force during World War II. Virgil, the middle son, found work and prospered for a number of years, eventually becoming involved in non-profit organizations.

But the third and final son, young Calvin Grant, had a passion and ear for music. He learned to play the guitar and at the age of 15 he was hired at the Remember Me Cafe in San Francisco. Not finding financial success in the music business he depended on other jobs including truck driving and bronco busting in the ensuing years.

Calvin thought he had gotten his break in the mid 50s when he appeared on the California hayride, but the military came calling and he served two years in the Army before returning to California and resuming his career in music.

In 1961, Calvin was playing in a club in San Francisco when country music great Ernest Tubbs and members of his band came wandering in. After hearing Calvin play in that nightclub session, Tubbs arranged an audition and later hired the 26-year-old guitarist for his band.

Calvin played in the band for a number of years and can be heard on most of Tubbs 1960s recordings.

eventually signed a solo record deal on a local label called Plaid. That record caught the attention of officials at Kapp Records and in 1966 he cracked the Billboard chart with his second single called "The Only Thing I Want". 

From that humble beginning, Calvin became a huge success in country music and acquired a stage name. From the late '60s to the mid-70s Calvin was one of the hottest acts in the country. A number of his songs charted over the decade including the Song of the Year for the Academy of Country Music and the Country Music Association in 1974.

He continued recording with MCA records and released his final album in 1986 on an independent label.

Calvin had such success in the country music it allowed him to become an entrepreneur in the Nashville area. In 1977 Calvin joined country music stars such as Conway Twitty, Jerry Reed, Larry Gatlin, and Richard Sterban of the Oak Ridge Boys, as investor in the Nashville Sounds, a minor league baseball team of the AA Southern League that started playing in 1978.

He was a semi regular for years on the Grand Ol' Opry.

As did many of his fellow country artists, Calvin and his wife Darlene packed up and moved to the burgeoning tourist town of Branson where he had his own show and played in several other shows over the years.  

Calvin passed away in Branson on October 10, 2013, he was survived by his wife, his son Calvin, five grandchildren, and 15 great-grandchildren.

There has been efforts over the years to try and get Calvin inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He always has come up a few votes short to get the honor, but there is no doubt that his career is worthy of a place in that hall.

Search as you will, you will never discover a discography under the name Calvin Grant Shofner. 

But if you look under the stage name that he acquired in the late sixties, you'll find that Cal Smith recorded 17 albums over the years and had three number one singles in "The Lord Knows I'm Drinking", "Country Bumpkin", and the underrated "It's Time to Pay the Fiddler" from 1975. Cal also charted on the US country Billboard chart 38 other times.

From the back roads of Sequoyah County to the height of success in show business, Cal Smith proved that a country bumpkin from Gans, Oklahoma could make it in the big time.