Queen of Country Comedy
Sarah Ophelia Colley, who portrayed the character Minnie Pearl, never intended to make a career of playing the endearing bumpkin she created.Colley, the youngest of five daughters born to a prominent family in Centerville, TN, and a graduate of the fashionable Ward-Belmont finishing school in Nashville, was an aspiring actress whose plans for a serious career in theater had stalled. When she introduced Minnie Pearl to the Opry audience in 1940, Colley believed the character represented a temporary gig. “She was just a stopgap until I could get what I wanted, something I would settle for until my real destiny came to pass,” Colley wrote in her 1980 autobiography.
Before long, however, Minnie assumed a life of her own,
and Colley, however inadvertently, was on her way to
superstardom as a comedian. The homely elements of
Minnie’s costume-checked gingham dress with puffed
sleeves and tight bodice, white cotton stockings,
secondhand Mary Janes and most notably, a dime store
straw hat - bedecked with silk flowers and a $1.98 price
tag dangling from the brim—would become instantly
recognizable to millions of country music fans.
Minnie Peal debuted on the Grand Ole Opry on November 30,
1940 in a three-minute audition buried in the final hour
on the Opry’s four-hour program. Colley did not appear in
costume for this tryout, instead she wore street cloths.
“I still wanted to be Ophelia Colley, future dramatic
actress, doing a comedy character part. I wasn’t ready to
be Minnie Pearl,” she would recall. That late-night
broadcast audition generated some 300 pieces of fan mail
and led to Colley’s regular Opry appearances.
By 1942, Minnie had graduated to the Prince Albert Show, the half-hour NBC network portion of the Opry, where the simple, good-hearted country girl with a flair for gossip, “kissin’ games” and church socials became a fixture and developed a national following. From 1969 to 1991, the character was also a staple of the television series Hee Haw. In 1975, Colley became the first comedian to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Colley, say those who knew her, had little in common with Minnie. “She was the epitome of the old gentrified Nashville,” says Charles K. Wolfe, author of numerous books on folk, country and popular music. “Gracious, soft-spoken, always well dressed, nowhere near the simplistic brash man chaser she portrayed.” Colley and her husband Henry Cannon, a pilot and businessman, lived next door to the Tennessee Governor’s Mansion. They had no children.
In 1990, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She fought the disease and later spoke publicly about her battle. Her openness led to more awareness of the disease and its treatment and prevention. Mrs. Cannon was a generous woman who gave of her time and money to several charities, including the Humane Society, the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, and the Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital, Her name is associated with several hospitals in the Nashville area with the Sarah Cannon Cancer Center. She died March 4, 1996, of complications from a stroke and is buried in Franklin, TN.