Former MFR country music show presenter Helen MacPherson writes her story
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Spend any time in Helen MacPherson’s company and the former Moray Firth Radio country music presenter’s favourite words offer the first clue to the success of her 32-year broadcasting career.
Many of her sentences start with a heartfelt “I love …” referring to everything from her first choice country music act Alan Jackson to her pleasure meeting youngsters at MFR, who went on to have lives in TV and radio.
All the years of presenting her radio shows and interviewing a huge number of country stars from the UK and America, everywhere from Nashville to Inverness itself, meant when Helen decided to put together a book about her experiences, there was a huge amount of material to work through.
And that included what turned out to be over 670 pictures that show Helen with stars like Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson to chilling shots of an American hotel where Helen and her husband were caught up in the 2017 Las Vegas Massacre
Helen spent almost every day over two years during lockdown writing the book that would become Just A Country Girl: Inverness To Nashville, all about her time in radio, presenting three different country music shows, one syndicated across Scotland, travelling to Nashville regularly to interview some of its biggest stars, and also life working at a busy radio station.
But it’s far from the glitz and glamour of showbiz that Helen chooses to start the book, opening with the car crash in 1972 that could have killed her and left her blind in one eye and with a long recovery period from her other injuries while pregnant with daughter Nicola.
Helen writes: “I like to think I learned a lot from suffering the car crash, mainly to be confident and positive – you are who you are! Just get on with it!”
That was in 1972. By 1982, Helen certainly seems to have taken her own words to heart.
From a standing start discovering and falling for country music, helping run the town's country and western club while learning all she could about the music, Helen was part of the team at the newly-formed Moray Firth Radio. Having first just offered to lend her extensive country record collection to the new Inverness-based independent station to make sure there would be country music on the playlists, she became a presenter herself!
Helen first really discovered country music after seeing a Charley Pride show. It triggered a new passion, Helen then immersing herself in every book, record and radio programme she could to learn more. When she saw an advert in the paper about a country and western club starting in Inverness, Helen answered it and ended up as president of the new Inverness Country And Western Club. It ran weekly club nights, special events at Eden Court and meant Helen got to know visiting guest artists at the Coach House, now The Snow Goose.
Moving on from the club, Helen then became involved in early meetings for the new radio station that would become Moray Firth Radio, keen that country music should be on their schedule and offering to lend her own collection and any advice on the music presenters might need.
Soon after Moray Firth was launched, Helen became part of the team.
Finding out she was off to the Wembley Country Music Festival, programme organiser at that time, Brian Anderson, challenged Helen to take a tape recorder and bring back some interviews with the stars.
“That’s when it all started for me and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of my 32 years on radio,” Helen reveals early in her book.
As well as taking on presenting and planning her own radio shows, Helen was involved in Radio Action – going out across the area encouraging people to make their own radio interviews to be used on air – and also the busy job of manning reception. She continued with that role for two years after her radio shows were ended. The reception role meant Helen met everyone who came to the station, including, over the years, stars such as Ed Sheeran and Karen Gillan.
The first idea for the book was planted when Helen was working at MFR’s Cash For Kids charity with young colleagues Lyndsay Rose and Allana Stables.
“I’d be on reception, and doing my programme and they’d ask me ‘Did you know this artist?’ – and I’d tell them a story. When Lyndsay left, she wrote on a card ‘Now maybe it’s time to write that book’.”
Helen began planning it by looking through all the pictures she had taken over the years.
“I decided to take out the photos to give me rough ideas about when I did all the interviews,” Helen said.
“Then I thought I would write it as if I was speaking,” Helen said. “And that has worked, I think, because people have said ‘It’s as if I can hear you speaking when I’m reading it’.
“But it was a lot of photos and papers and bad moods and throwing things up in the air!” Helen laughed.
Helen also drew on help from her husband Jim, scanning all the pictures...
“And I asked Len Black from MFR days to do the typesetting for me. I told him there were a lot of photos. "How many?" he asked. At that point Helen didn't know but said: "I don't know but let's just start and see how we get on with them. So when he got to the end he had counted them – 674!" Helen laughed.
"I think Len helped a lot in the presentation. So, he suggested thattThe Las Vagas Massacre bit should go in the middle of the book. 'If you put that at the end it would leave people sad', Len said."
Helen and her husband Jim became caught up in the shooting incident that targeted the audience of a music festival Helen and Jim had stopped off at in Las Vegas while travelling around America on a holiday after Helen had finished her shows for MFR.
She explains: "I didn’t want to go into great details about it, but I decided to write it so people could understand it.”
She and Jim found themselves running in fear with many others to find shelter, once everyone realised people were being injured and killed
Helen’s interviews with country musicians and stars is one of the highlights of the book, particularly her own exchanges with everyone from Charley Pride to Billy Ray Cyrus.
Going to see Charley Pride had got Helen into the music in the first place, building on her dad’s introduction to the songs of Jim Reeves and Hank Snow.
“I met Charley at the Fan Fair event in Nashville once. I went backstage and he was just walking towards me and I said ‘Hi Charley! How are you’ and he said ‘Hey, yes, I remember you Miss “MacPheerson”, you’re from Aberdeen!’ And I said ‘No, you’re nearly right, though!’
“I always think you should just be yourself at an interview. If people don’t want to speak to me that’s fine, I walk away, I’m not bothered.
“But Charley was a real down-home person, a real gentleman and he laughed and would take off my Scottish accent, and mocked it every time he was doing an interview!” Helen laughed.
One of her favourite interview moments in the book is when she got to speak to Billy Ray Cyrus, dad of Miley.
“He didn’t know he was live on radio,” Helen revealed. “There was some confusion with the press girl and at the end of our interview he said ‘I’ve really enjoyed doing this, Helen. Could we do this live some time?’
“And I hadn’t the heart to tell him he had been live for the last 45 minutes!”
The book also gives the chance for Helen to give some excerpts from the interviews and it's interesting to hear what the stars say – and what the Inverness broadcaster asks!
And the depth of research Helen puts in before her interviews is clear from her questions which helps the stars warm to her.
One, with Beth Nielson Chapman – whose songwriting Helen loves – found the star live in the Inverness studio with her. Helen's questions get Beth talking about everything from how she got her chance in Nashville to write a number one hit for Tanya Tucker with Don Schlitz, known as 'the King of Songwriters' to needing a lawyer when someone took control of all her recordings. And there's the wonderful story of being invited to write a song for Willie Nelson – which later went to number one – and that made her career: "... just a dream. After that people would call me up and ask what have you got?".
When Helen introduced Beth to MFR's then station manager Danny Gallagher at the end of the interview, Beth quipped: "This girl knows more about me than I do myself!".
Another interview, this time with George Hamilton IV – who sadly died in 2014 – comes from a two-hour special of chat and music, something Helen liked to do and was the format of her A Kind Of Country show on Thursday nights, focusing on one artist.
She writes: "He was willing to give me his time on many occasions and I would get great feedback from his interviews as listeners enjoyed his chat on the radio."
There's a section in the book devoted to excerpts from this interview, talking about everything from his experience of first arriving in Nashville as a schoolboy, playing behind the Iron Curtain and gaining the name the "International Ambassador Of Country Music", to MCing at the Wembley Festivals of country music. He paid tribute to Helen for her support of country artists and said:"You are a real pioneer lady yourself, and to your listeners". Then his witty parting shot – "May your life be filled with laughter, may you always have good health, may you live to hear your songs sung by George Hamilton XII."
There were plenty of surprises for Helen along the way too. Through her years in radio she won many awards – three times the Scottish Country Music Fellowship awarded her local DJ of the year. And Helen was nominated for a Sony award in 1991 for best specialist music programme. The Country Music Association of America presented her with a broadcasting award in 2007.
“I was going to a concert in Glasgow and they gave a speech backstage and awarded me with the CMA international country broadcaster award for outstanding contribution to country music their press guy was over from America to present it. I was totally overcome!”
But the biggest surprise came for Helen when MFR in 2006 gave Helen a lifetime achievement award and organised for the artist Helen calls “such a good friend”, Daniel O’Donnell, to come – from Tenerife – to present it.
Daniel’s friendship is one of the many highlights Helen picks out in her long career, most of it as a volunteer, funding her own trips and using her precious press pass to access interviews.
Helen says for the first time in 34 years, when she and her husband Jim visited Las Vegas in 2017, the couple had reserved their own tickets.
While enjoying the festival, they found themselves caught up in the Las Vegas Massacre, when a gunman on the 32nd floor of the prominent Mandalay Bay Hotel shot 58 people.
Helen’s account of the episode is one of the most dramatic moments in the book.
Since the book came out, Helen has been enjoying going to events to sell it, reconnecting with fans and people she met when doing Radio Action and helping people to create their own pieces for radio, taking Helen to Wick, Thurso, and on the East Coast, Buckie and Elgin.
And I liked outside broadcasting," she said. "I remember a night at Avoch Gala to crown the gala queen, I loved that. And we did the fashion shows at the Town House and raised funds for charity. And I loved going to the Caithness Festival and meeting a lot of Texan country artists there – the organisation was fantastic for the Highlands, matching any of the big events."
So far, getting out and about to promote her book Helen has been to Dornoch, Tain, Dingwall, Croy, Keith, Daviot and on Saturday was in Inverness to meet people and sell the book – which she hopes will have a launch event in the Black Isle soon too.
Working with Inverness Hospital radio, and also Mission Charities for MFR at Christmas, Helen is unlikely to be taking the time to do a follow-up book, having not long finished the mammoth task of writing Just A Country Girl: Inverness To Nashville.
But it seems she is under pressure to think about another way of celebrating all the people she met and talked to in country music.
"Len Black thought I should think of doing a live podcast – and my grandson Lewis is encouraging me to do a podcast too and says he will help me with it!" Helen said.
You can find out more and buy Helen's book here: helenmacpherson.com
