Frank Sinatra performed at the Civic Arena Sunday, Oct. 10, 1976, the day the Pittsburgh Steelers lost 18-16 to the Cleveland Browns. Interviewed by Post-Gazette entertainment columnist George Anderson, he asked, “What happened to my Steelers?” and inquired about quarterback Terry Bradshaw, injured during the game.
At a 1981 Civic Arena concert, Barry Manilow whipped up the audience by revealing a Bradshaw jersey under his puffy-sleeved shirt. Opening for The Who at a September, 1982 Arena concert, David Johansen (the future Buster Poindexter) wore a Bradshaw jersey onstage.
Often forgotten: the four-time Super Bowl champ’s own rollercoaster country music career.
Shreveport, La. was a country hotbed. In 1948, the year Bradshaw was born there, local radio station KWKH launched the “Louisiana Hayride.” During its 12-year lifespan, the Grand Ole Opry-style weekly stage and radio show launched Hank Williams, Sr., Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and other future Country Hall of Famers.
Veteran Hayride bass player-artist manager Tillman Franks met Bradshaw in Dallas in 1975 when both were catching a flight home to Shreveport. After he joked about singing, Franks invited him over to try it.
“I didn’t show up for three weeks,” Bradshaw told the Post-Gazette in 1979. “I was petrified.”
Given his celebrity and despite his untrained singing voice, Franks became his manager.
In Nashville, they met Franks protégé and onetime Hayride performer Jerry Kennedy, longtime head of Mercury Records in Nashville. Kennedy, who produced the greatest hits of Roger Miller, Tom T. Hall and the Statler Brothers, signed Bradshaw immediately. After his first Nashville session that December, he told Newsday, “I was more at ease at the Super Bowl than I was in the studio.”
Mercury released his slick rendition of Hank Williams, Sr.’s ballad “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” in January, 1976. It reached No. 17 on Billboard’s country charts. Pittsburgh country stations played it. So did AM pop stations KQV and KDKA. Legendary KQV host Chuck Brinkman admitted to the Post-Gazette, “We wouldn’t have programmed it if another country artist had cut it … We rarely play country records.”
At his first club performance at North Hollywood’s iconic country music nightclub the Palomino that February, Bradshaw offered a candid view to an LA Times reporter covering the show.
“Aw, they signed me because I’m a jock,” he admitted. “They figure if (I) can sing and play football, we got something.”
Bradshaw and Kennedy recorded enough material in April to release a ballad-heavy, 11-song LP that summer. The second single, “The Last Word in Lonesome is Me” only reached No. 90.
Along with other stage appearances, he guested on the syndicated TV country shows “Hee-Haw” and “Pop Goes the Country,” here, singing “Jambalaya.”
Things began unraveling. Bradshaw, dissatisfied with Franks, fired him. Mercury dropped him after he criticized the label in a Dallas paper. The split wasn’t amicable. The Mercury publicist who denied Bradshaw’s remarks caused the split praised his success, but bluntly dismissed him as “a six-month artist.” Bradshaw biographer Brett Abrams described the Steeler’s performances receiving mixed reviews and noted football and performing had unique, divergent physical-emotional requirements. After a 1977 case of tonsillitis, he quit singing for two years.
Prior to the Steelers’ January, 1979 Super Bowl XIII face-off with the Dallas Cowboys, the PG quoted a national booking agent who speculated Bradshaw (whom he hadn’t yet spoken to) could tour nationally. That possibility vaporized weeks after the Steelers’ victory. Home in Shreveport — Cowboys territory — Bradshaw joined Nashville star Larry Gatlin onstage at a Feb. 9 concert to sing “Jambalaya.” Some audience members booed.
“I was stunned. I was hurt,” he told a Shreveport Journal reporter. “This is the first time I’ve ever been booed outside of football.”
A lifelong gospel fan, he returned to those roots on his 1981 LP “Until You.” This raucous, early 2000’s performance with southern gospel icons Jake Hess and J.D, Sumner reveals a Bradshaw less self-conscious than he was singing country.
In his post-retirement sportscasting career, he occasionally sang with The Isaacs, a bluegrass gospel band and joined daughter Rachel on the Opry stage in a “Bradshaw Bunch” episode. In the end, Bradshaw, No, 12, discovered that music, like football, had its ups and downs.
Onstage in Tulsa last July, he delivers a powerful, mature and thoroughly moving interpretation of friend Toby Keith’s elegiac ballad “Don’t Let the Old Man In.” Keith died earlier this year.