The Cars of Sing-Out South: Jerry Baker's Blue Mustang

During the years we were in Sing-Out, there was no hotter car on the market than the Ford Mustang. It had taken the country by storm when it was first introduced in late 1964 and sales continued to be hot throughout the mid-to-late '60s.

Jerry Baker of Sing-Out South had a car that looked a lot like the blue-colored one above and I remember riding in with him to all kinds of SOS shows and practices and even out to his home in Kingston Springs.

Mustangs of this era are still highly prized. Here, courtesy of YouTube, is what one owner has lovingly done to redo his classic 1966 blue Mustang coupe....

Looking at the inside of Mustang really takes me back. It also reminds me of Jerry bringing it down to Atlanta a couple of times in the summer of 1969, after I had left the SOS cast.

Once, I think, was on Fourth of July weekend when he and my cousin Gene Nolan, along with Henry Swider and Bob Sharp came down to visit me while I attended a broadcast school, Career Academy. Believe it not, while the rest of us of kicked around Atlanta for the day (gawking at the new-fangled lobby & elevators of the Hyatt Regency, going to the Varsity Restaurant and watching the Alanta Fourth of July parade), we also took Bob Sharp out to the Atlanta International Speedway, where he attended a rock festival.

That festival wound up having a lot of the same groups and bands that performed later that summer at Woodstock. Now if any of you knew Bob in those days (pretty straight-laced with short hair), the idea of him attending a long-haired rock concert might seem a little far-fetched, but he did it.

Bob Sharp celebrates his birthday in December 1968 as Rick Jolly looks on. Does Bob look like someone about to attend a rock concert?

My other memory of Jerry's blue Mustang and Atlanta came one other weekend that same summer of 1969, when he came down and we went to Stone Mountain and the Atlanta airport, where we saw LeAnna Whitehead's older sister come back to the U.S. from being overseas. Later that summer, I had my first airplane trip leaving Atlanta to come back to Nashville. I was almost 18. My how times change. My children and grand children took their first plane trips before they could walk.

I also attended my first major league baseball game with Jerry on that trip. We watched the Giants and Braves play at old Fulton County Stadium. We just missed seeing Hall-of-Famer Willie Mays hit a grand slam off Hall-of-Famer Phil Niekro. We missed it because Niekro, a knuckleball pitcher, wild pitched in a run with the bases loaded before Mays hit the next pitch over the center field wall!

That's Jerry Baker right in the middle of the photo above (wearing a tie). He and the other SOS cast members (along with Mama J, Bob Johnston's mom) are manning a booth at the Junior Achievement Fair. The Fair was held (and SOS performed) each year at the Municipal Auditorium. Based on some of the posters and materials on display, I would say this photo was taken in late 1968 or early 1969 after we attended the second World Sing-Out Festival the previous summer.

In addition to being on stage in the cast, Jerry, for a time, was also in charge of ordering, handling and selling all our PACE magazines, record albums, books and other items. I can remember helping him transport the many boxes of materials we had to sell. That Mustang really wasn't all that big a car to transport that stuff, but we managed to find a way to do it(many times with the help of the Barry family's big blue Chevy Impala station wagon).

More on that in our next installment of the the Cars of Sing-Out South.

If you have a favorite car or an SOS memory to share, leave it by just clicking on the link below.