“Sha Na Na” was a syndicated comedy variety show featuring the 50’s style rock & roll group of the same name. My younger brother and I weren’t into doo-wop music per se, but we watched “Sha Na Na” every night because we liked the comedy sketches and the show’s nightly closing song:
“Goodnight Sweetheart Goodnight”. Sometimes I think my brother and I sat through the whole show just to see that one final number. It was quite touching to see the whole cast singing goodbye to us as if that was their last show.
Sha Na Na was on TV for four years, and it’s really not surprising the show lasted as long as it did. The ’70s were awash with 1950s nostalgia. George Lucas’s “American Graffiti” was a big hit at the box office in 1973, paving the way for movies like Grease and Animal House and TV shows like “Laverne & Shirley”, “Happy Days”, and, of course, Sha Na Na.
The 50’s nostalgia served as a kind of soothing balm for a nation just beginning to heal from the pain of the Vietnam War. The ’50s became the “good ol’ days”, a seemingly carefree time of innocence and peace, and relative prosperity—even though there was just as much war, poverty, and crime as there had been during any other era. It just looked a lot better in that rose-colored rearview mirror we call nostalgia.
It’s funny how people can be nostalgic for a time they’ve never known. There’s an actual term for this kind of nostalgia and it’s called anemoia. This surely must have been what my brother and I were feeling, but didn’t know or care enough to name it.
Begging my mother for a leather jacket just like the one Fonzie wore on Happy Days was a regular thing in our household, just like squeezing big dabs of our father’s Brylcreem into our hair and slicking it back until we achieved that wet and shiny greaser look was a thing right after every Sha Na Na episode. Our poor dad was spending a fortune on Brylcreem, but we didn’t care, as long as we looked like our faux 50s heroes.
Along the way, my brother and I grew fond of real 50’s heroes, like James Dean, Buddy Holly, and Elvis. Biopics about Buddy Holly and Elvis were always on TV during the 70s and I practically watched them all. Among them, my two favorites were The Buddy Holly Story, starring Gary Busey, and 1979’s Elvis starring Kurt Russell.
Roy Wayne Farris a.k.a The Honky Tonk Man
One particular scene in the Elvis movie stood out for me, and the way I remember it, the scene happened at the beginning of the movie. It was a scene in which Elvis aims a gun at his TV and shoots a hole right through it. This was a side of Elvis Presley I had never seen before.
He was dark and foreboding, and a far cry from the Elvis in the Elvis in Hawaii movies. That Elvis walked around with a ukulele. The “Kurt Russel Elvis” walked around with a Colt. 45 pistol.
Watching Elvis shoot out his TV got me thinking about what else this cat was capable of. If he could shoot out his 25-inch RCA TV while Robert Goulet was singing on television one night, what else could he do? This guy was a lot crazier than I or a lot of people had ever imagined.
As a spokesman for Presley’s home and museum, Graceland, in Memphis, Tennessee, once explained to the Associated Press in 2006: “There was nothing Elvis had against Robert Goulet. They were friends. But Elvis just shot out things on a random basis.” Was Elvis capable of smashing a guitar across someone’s back? If else couldn’t do it, there was definitely one man who could: The Honkytonk Man.
To hear Roy Wayne Farris tell it on the YouTube show STORIES WITH BRISCO AND BRADSHAW, The Honkytonk Man (derived from Jonny Horton’s song of the same name) was originally based on Dwayne Schneider, the cocky building superintendent on the TV show One Day at a Time.
With his slimy black hair and pencil-thin mustache and ever-present tool belt, the wisecracking Schneider had a kind of sleazy vibe to him Roy Wayne Farris used as the underpinning of a great heel.
Seeing Farris go from blond-haired heel to black-haired heel inspired some Birmingham, Alabama fans to make an Elvis-type jumpsuit for Farris in the hopes he would take on the Elvis persona. Farris, who was reluctant to adopt an Elvis-like role, eventually gave in when a wise promoter named Robert Fuller saw the jumpsuit, liked it, and added a guitar to the Honkytonk Man repertoire. A few nights later, the Honkytonk Man smashed that same guitar across an opponent’s back.
A Star Is Born
The fans hated him for it and a star was born.
Thing was another wise promoter named Vince McMahon liked the Honkytonk Man getup too. Having lured Farris to the WWF, McMahon told Farris he wanted the Honkytonk Man to be a good guy—a face. As Farris tells it, McMahon saw kids wearing Honkytonk jumpsuits, sunglasses, and little toy guitars.
As these visions of merchandising danced in McMahon’s head, Farris conveyed his reluctance to his new boss. He’d always been a heel. He didn’t know anything about being a face. But, the push to make Honkytonk Man a kind of second-tier Hulk Hogan went forward anyway.
Farris did his best to win the crowds over, but everywhere he went the fans rejected him. Even the heels wrestling Farris were worried about losing their bad-guy heat to Farris. Fans were cheering for the likes of Don Morocco, and Iron Mike Sharp anytime they were beating on the Honkytonk Man. Things couldn’t go on like this. Something had to give.
Eventually, the plug got pulled, and the will of the fans won out. The Honkytonk Man went on to talk about what a great singer and dancer he was, how he was the greatest rock star the world ever did see and etc. Finally, the fans could hate the Honkytonk Man proper.
I don’t know if it was the anemoia I mentioned earlier or my affinity for the darker side of Elvis, but I became an instant fan of the Honkytonk Man when he turned heel. It only seemed natural to me that someone pretending to be a 50’s megastar with no discernible musical talent of his own would be disliked by the crowds. It made sense to Farris too, as he has stated he never intended The Honkytonk Man to be anything but a villain.

A True Wrestling Talent
In the hands of a lesser talent, the Honkytonk Man could have failed even as a villain. This wasn’t just a matter of sounding and looking like Elvis (any Joe Shmo can do that), but going larger than Elvis, pretending you never heard of the guy. Now that’s BIG. And the Honkytonk Man pulled it off and then some.
His promos are some of the most entertaining promos you will ever see. Some might piss you off, and some might make you cringe, but all were hilarious, especially those promos when he tried to play the guitar. He would finger-pick a few unrecognizable notes and then ask if anyone knew the song. When you didn’t it was because you were tone-deaf. You can’t beat that kind of comedy.
It reminded me of comedian Andy Kaufman’s Elvis Presley impersonation, half-funny and half-serious. Although Kaufman could actually sing like Elvis, the way he channeled and transformed him into something completely his own was surreal. That’s exactly what Roy Wayne Farris did with the Honkytonk Man, making him identifiable and unidentifiable at the same time. All of which made for one unpredictable heel.
The Honkytonk Man could beat you any number of ways. He could smash a guitar across your back, conk you with a megaphone (Colonel Jimmy Hart’s megaphone, to be exact), break your neck with his “shake, rattle & roll” (a cleverly named variation of the all-purpose swinging neck breaker), use his “girlfriend”, Peggy Sue, distract you or have his manager “Mouth of the South” Colonel Jimmy Hart interfere in the match. When those methods didn’t work, he’d resort to more conventional bad guy tricks like using the rope for leverage while pinning an opponent or get a 10-count outside of the ring to get disqualified and secure his championship.
The Honkytonk Man was a crafty wrestler. He had to be to be the WWF’s longest-reigning Intercontinental Champion. He held the belt a record-setting 454 days, besting Puerto Rican champ Pedro Morales’ record of 424 days. You don’t get to hold a title that long without resorting to some chicanery. Crafty fighters aren’t always the most exciting to watch (think boxing’s Bernard Hopkins) but they know a lot about longevity.
They are also usually underappreciated because they’re not “knockout artists.” Pro-wrestling’s equivalents of the knockout artist were wrestlers like Goldberg and the Ultimate Warrior, programmed to flatten their opponents in seconds, leaving the fans feeling cheated and underwhelmed.
The Honky Tonk Man's Hall of Fame Career
It was, in fact, Ultimate Warrior who ended Honkytonk Man’s reign in 1988’s Summer Slam, and it took him all of 31 seconds to do so. What a gyp! And what a discredit to the Honkytonk Man’s impressive record. A hard-won victory would have been so much more memorable, but somebody at the WWF was champing at the bit to have some gold around the warrior’s waist they were willing to sacrifice anything, especially quality.
The Honkytonk Man was inducted into the WWE Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2019, the same year as the Ultimate Warrior, but Warrior was not in Roy Wayne Farris’ league. The Honkytonk Man was a talented wrestler who could wrestle with the best of them. His matches with Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat were all great matches.
My best friend Sal and I saw those two wrestling in Madison Square Garden in the summer of 1987, and I want to say (and here’s where my memory gets wobbly) that we saw the Intercontinental Championship change hands, as Honkytonk beat Steamboat for the belt. I remember Sal rooting for Steamboat and me cheering on the Honkytonk Man in a seesaw match that had everyone at the Garden on their feet that night.
Unable to remember how the match ended and thinking Honkytonk Man had relied on trickery to get the win (leverage on the rope during the pin or something similar), I was astounded to watch the match and see Honkytonk Man had beaten Steamboat with a legitimate small package pin. Yes, there was plenty of ringside interference from Jimmy Hart and his megaphone but the pin itself was indeed legitimate. Where would my memory be without YouTube?
Honkytonk Man returned to the ring and thanked the fans for his victory, doing his best Elvis-y “thank you very much”, rubbing salt in the wound when he said: “This belt belongs to you.” Now that’s the way to get some heat.
As much as I liked the Honkytonk Man, I never felt inspired to slick my hair back with Brylcreem or grow long porkchop sideburns. That 50’s phase of my childhood ended with Sha-Na-Na. And yet there still exists in me a yearning for a better time, a better place, like it does in many of us, I imagine. Maybe the yearning is for a time in the 80s when wrestling music wasn’t just there to enter the ring to.
Maybe the yearning is for a time when certain wrestling superstars could somehow embody the music we listen to and remind us of a more innocent time that probably only exists in our minds.
Hi everyone. My name is Ariel Gonzalez, originally from Brooklyn, now living in the Garden State and I have a new podcast called “Wrestling With Heels On.”
On the podcast, I get to reminisce about my favorite wrestling bad guys from yesteryear. Light on stats and heavy on nostalgia, this little trip down villainy lane gives me a chance to visit the dark corridors of my wrestling soul, and it’s also fun to have a podcast.

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