A country music career was born in the blueberry barrens of Machias 63 years ago when little Gene Hooper climbed on a stack of boxes and sang for the rakers. “My mother and dad raked blueberries in the summertime,” Hooper remembered. “I was too young to rake, but during the noon break, they’d pile up the blueberry boxes and make me a little stage. I’d sing for the rakers and they’d give me a nickel apiece. I think some days I made more than they did.”

Now a living legend, this spring Hooper marks his 54th year performing the traditional style of country music he cut his musical teeth on as a boy growing up in the same Kennebec area of Machias where he now lives.

He was voted Maine’s Country Music Media Personality of the Year in 1979 and inducted in the Maine Country Music Hall of Fame in 1980. Hooper, 70, has been to Nashville and back, has successfully battled alcohol and, more recently, cancer. Yet he is not about to hang up his Martin guitar or trademark cowboy boots and hat.

The Gene Hooper Family Show, which he formed two years ago with his daughter Sharlene and wife, Flo, appears regularly with Allan “Mac” McHale and The Old-Time Radio Gang. Their next appearance is 2 p.m. Sunday, March 27, at the Pioneer Show at Cony High School in Augusta.

His daughter Sharlene has kept the family tradition alive with a solo career that includes songwriting, recording, personal appearances and radio. Mrs. Hooper and daughters Sharlene and Joleen recently completed an album of traditional gospel music. Sharlene traveled professionally twice to Nashville, but like her father, Maine always called her back.

Never straying far from his roots

“Being born here, the roots are so deep,” Gene Hooper said, speaking slowly, in a friendly voice filled with warmth. “It draws you like a magnet. You get homesick if you leave it too long.” Sharlene agreed.

Although life in Machias during the Depression was lean, Hooper fondly remembers at age 12 getting his first guitar, a no-brand model, by selling 24 cans of Cloverine salve to his neighbors.

“You can imagine what a job it was,” Hooper said. “There ain’t 24 houses here.”

The guitar was brown when it arrived. Jimmy Rogers’ Martin was blond. Hooper “found some old beige paint” and remedied the problem by painting it beige. He still has the painted guitar, although it’s cracked and unplayable.

He grew up listening to Jimmy Rogers records on his parents’ “old wind-up Victrola,” Hooper said. “Even today I listen to his music and still enjoy that voice.”

He also listened to radio shows like the WLS National Barn Dance from Chicago and the World’s Original Jamboree on WWVA. “There was local talent,” Hooper said, “like the Lone Pine Mountaineer. There was Montana Slim, a great yodeler.”

Hooper even worked a little magic from a backyard hen house with a makeshift radio set consisting of two tin cans connected by 150 yards of wire that he stripped and burned out of a car’s generator.

“I’d set in that hen pen, on an old chopping block with that little guitar,” Hooper said. “and sing in one can and the kids would listen in the other can.”

Taking hard, bumpy ride to fame

Seated on an inverted 10-quart water bucket, Hooper weathered a three-hour ride over narrow, crooked roads to Bangor in a Penobscot Beef Company meat truck the next year, to compete in an amateur talent show on WLBZ radio. He won the contest.

By 1941, Hooper had his own radio show, sponsored by the Percy Miller Welding School of Hampden. With the $90-a-week he earned doing the shows, he bought his first Martin D-28 guitar for $120.

“I’d been digging clams for 25 cents a bushel,” Hooper said. “With that $90, I thought I was rich.”

Radio also brought him to WMNN in Fairmont, W.Va, where he met someone who became a great friend, singer Hawkshaw Hawkins, who died in the same plane crash as Patsy Cline.

Throughout Hooper’s career, his family has been the one unfaltering pillar in his life. And for more than 45 years, that life has included Flo Hooper.

Hooper first met Flo Cote in 1942, while visiting country singer Hal Lone Pine in Auburn. Flo was born into a musical family and had been in show business since age 13.

“We was just kids when we first met,” he said, warmly. “I didn’t see her again until 1947, after I got out of the Army.” They were married in 1948 and, in the years that followed, had four children: Joleen, Sharlene, Wayne and Zita.

But loneliness on the road and alcohol, he said, nearly destroyed him. He returned to his Kennebec home in 1968 to put his life together.

Quitting the bottle “was the hardest thing I ever done,” Hooper said. “But I had the family and A.A.”

Today the Hooper Family’s appearances with McHale continue to introduce the sound of traditional country music to new audiences.

“We’re getting standing ovations every time we play,” Hooper said. “We never got that before. The important thing for me is to be able to sing and entertain. It makes you feel good, knowing they still remember you.”