Ringing a cowbell, playing a fiddle, and braying his famous “mule call,” Country Boy Eddy (aka Eddy Burns) was more reliable than a barnyard rooster as his daily 5 a.m. television show woke up households across the Southeast. For some WBRC Channel 6 viewers, the day couldn’t begin without coffee and the purest country music ever heard. For others, it was the perfect way to end an all-nighter.

Sunrise was never the same after “The Country Boy Eddy Show” was canceled in 1994. Burns was as proficient doing advertisements and delivering one-liners as he was strumming a guitar while reading funeral announcements. He advertised everything from mobile homes to Eagle Seven Rat Bait (“If you love your rats, neighbors, don’t give ‘em this stuff, ’cause it kills the ol’ rat dead!”). He continually poked fun at his regular cast of sidekicks with a devious grin. While interviewing a chimney sweep who had arrived at the television station to plug his expertise at “reaming out chimneys,” Country Boy turned to one of his ever-revolving cohosts and asked, “Bobby T, you ever been reamed out?”

In the mid-1960s, a blond hairdresser named Wynette Pugh, barely out of her teens, shyly walked into WBRC studios and asked Burns for an audition. “She looked over at me after she finished that song and asked, ‘Do you think I’m good enough to be on your show?’” Burns laughed and said, “Yeah, you can be on anytime you want to.” Pugh became a regular, eventually moving to Nashville and changing her name to Tammy Wynette.

The British Broadcasting Corporation recently paid Burns a visit at Fox 6 studios to interview him for a BBC special on Wynette. The program is scheduled to air in January 2003. “They wanted to see the studio we performed in. They wanted to do a little story about it,” said Burns, who added that he had never been to Britain, nor had he ever seen any BBC programming.

These days, Burns still makes occasional commercials and performs at churches, nursing homes, restaurants, and mobile home centers. “One guy up in Cullman pays me $500 to come sit on the porch with my guitar and greet people when they come in to buy a mobile home. I say, ‘Come on in folks!’ and give ‘em a mule call and a cowbell ring. We sell the heck out of ‘em!”