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In the 1940s, radio was the river country music traveled on. And in northeast Texas, one of those rivers ran through Paris.
Radio station KPLT broadcast out of Paris, in Lamar County, perched above the Red River bottomland that separates Texas from Oklahoma. While living in nearby Greenville, the teenage Lefty Frizzell earned spots on KPLT — adding another radio station to the circuit he was building across Texas and Arkansas. He was still a teenager. He was already a professional.
Paris, Texas has the distinction of being the largest city in Lamar County and one of the more culturally distinctive towns in northeast Texas. Its replica Eiffel Tower — topped, as God intended, with a red cowboy hat — makes it instantly recognizable. But in the 1940s, Paris was also a hub for the kind of regional radio broadcasting that sustained country music before the Nashville machine centralized everything.
The Radio Circuit That Built Him
The KPLT broadcasts were part of a larger pattern. Lefty Frizzell spent his teens singing in nightclubs and on radio stations throughout the South — Texas, Arkansas, New Mexico, and beyond. He was developing a style shaped by Jimmie Rodgers, Ernest Tubb, and Ted Daffan. And he was learning that a radio broadcast could do something a live show in a single room could not: it could put his voice into ten thousand homes at once.
It was also in the Paris area that he met Alice Harper. They married in March 1945. Alice would remain his wife for thirty years — through the hit records, the lawsuits, the stardom, and the long struggle with alcohol that marked his final years.
The northeast Texas radio circuit is long gone now. KPLT still operates in Paris. But the version of the station that a teenage honky-tonk singer used to build his career belongs to a different era — when a country boy could get on the air, find an audience, and start to understand what his voice could do.
