Daisy Mae and Old Brother Charlie were popular country music performers starting back in the early 1940s and lasting well into the 1960s. They were early members of Renfro Valley, a CBS radio favorite, and later performed on radio and television in places like Charlotte and Tampa.
Daisy Mae (Ethel Irene Reddy from St. Louis) and Old Brother Charlie (Charles Erwin Arnett from Chester, West Virginia) met on CBS Radio’s “Renfro Valley Folks” where he was the show’s chief announcer and business manager. After the couple married and moved to Tampa in the late 1940’s, they gained popularity from their morning and evening 15-minute radio shows on WDAE. Their shows also aired over a network of Florida stations, including Orlando’s WHOO. Charlie played honky tonk piano and occasionally delivered a recitation and Daisy Mae sang the songs. They were also well-known from their nationally-distributed records on the Mercury and Columbia labels.  After a couple of years appearing and performing in the Bay area, they moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, but the stay there would be a short one.

In 1953, the duo heard about television’s breakthrough in the Tampa Bay area and returned to headline a live Thursday night local country music show called “The Home Folks” on St. Petersburg’s WSUN-TV Channel 38, the first TV station on Florida’s west coast. The show also featured Sanford’s Bobby Lord, then a University of Tampa student, and hometown performer Slim Whitman. After two successful years, the TV show was over, cancelled in 1955 due to a loss of audience after WFLA-TV and WTVT went on the air earlier that year. Up until then, WSUN-TV had a virtual monopoly on local TV viewing.
Undaunted, the two continued with their daily radio programs which now aired on country daytimer WHBO. Within a year, they became players in the successful Tampa mayoral campaign of Nick C. Nuccio. Due to Charlie having worked once for a U.S. Senator from West Virginia, he was now being endorsed by a group of Tampa businessmen to serve as Nuccio’s administrative assistant. However, the appointment didn’t come through and he had his name withdrawn from consideration.
Shortly afterwards, Charlie literally packed up and left town, leaving Daisy Mae behind to continue the radio show solo. To make ends meet, she took modest jobs, including one passing out religious tracts for a church. Fortunately, L.M. Hughey of The Super Test Oil Company (her long-time sponsor) stepped in to underwrite the shows on WHBO and on his Auburndale station, WTWB. Each program began with the song “There’s A Beautiful Home,” a gospel hymn she selected as her theme song. She continued her radio shows until 1966 when she announced plans to cease performing.