Haynes was born near
Knoxville, Tennessee, on July 27, 1920. He met Kenneth Burns during a
WNOX-AM audition in 1936 when they were both 16 years old. Haynes strummed the guitar and Burns played the
mandolin. Known as Junior and Dude (pronounced "dood'-ee"), the duo was rechristened Homer and Jethro when WNOX Program Director
Lowell Blanchard forgot their nicknames during a 1936
broadcast. In 1939 they became regulars on the
Renfro Valley Barn Dance radio program. Haynes was drafted into the
US Army and served in the medical corps in the Pacific. He reunited in Knoxville in 1945 with Burns, who had served in Europe. In 1947, the duo moved to
Cincinnati,
Ohio and were working at
WLW-AM on the station's
Midwestern Hayride. They signed with
King Records, where they worked as a house band and recorded singles on their own, and two years later signed with
RCA Records. The pair was fired along with several other stars by new management at WLW in 1948 and, after a brief tour, they moved to
Springfield, Missouri and performed on
KWTO-AM with
Chet Atkins,
the Carter Family and
Slim Wilson. In 1949 they moved to Chicago and appeared on
National Barn Dance on
WLS-AM; and later appeared on television programs including
Ozark Jubilee,
The Beverly Hillbillies, The Johnny Cash Show,
The Jimmy Dean Show, and
The Tonight Show. The pair recorded more than 50 albums during their career and won a
Grammy for the best comedy performance in 1959 for "The Battle of Kookamonga", a parody of
Johnny Horton's "
Battle of New Orleans". Haynes died on August 7, 1971, of a
heart attack in
Hammond, Indiana. He had lived the last decade of his life just across the state line in
Lansing, Illinois. He and Burns were inducted into the
Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001 as Homer and Jethro. == References ==