Roy Queen – Legacy
Roy Queen’s career as a hillbilly singer and broadcaster began in 1929 when he was 16. He hitched a ride on a freight train from Pilot Knob, MO., to St. Louis and auditioned at the KMOX studios in the Mayfair Hotel. He got the job and was soon yodeling and playing his guitar on a daily basis on KMOX. He was an entertainer on KMOX and WIL and later worked as a disc jockey on KXLW and on KWRE in nearby Warrenton, MO.
Early on at KMOX, he had a namesake program, “Roy Queen and His Ozark Mountaineers,” that was fed to some network affiliates. KMOX later moved him to the wildly popular “Uncle Dick Slack’s Barn Dance.”
Like many of the young performers in those days, Queen did many personal appearances in addition to his musical performances at the station. It was during the return trip from one of those appearances that he was gravely injured in an auto accident.
The recovery period for his two broken legs was lengthy, but that didn’t keep him from working. The station set up a remote microphone in Queen’s hospital room while engineers ran the records at the station.