Byron Crawford
Byron Crawford’s colorful career in radio, television, newspaper and
magazine journalism has earned him both a place in the Kentucky Journalism
Hall of Fame and a treasure trove of stories that can keep an audience
laughing with his recollections of unique characters he’s encountered.
His print works have appeared in newspapers and magazines from the New
York Times and USA Today to the London Sunday Telegraph, and his broadcast
stories from network television to Public Radio International. He hosted the
first five seasons of Kentucky Educational Television’s Emmy Award winning
“Kentucky Life” series.
Yet his stories were most at home over nearly three decades on the
Kentucky page of the Louisville Courier-Journal for which Byron covered the
state from border to border and often strayed beyond, in search of the
unusual, the humorous and heart-warming.
He is the author of three books of Kentucky stories and now writes the
back page column, “Byron Crawford’s Kentucky,” for the state’s most widely
circulated magazine, Kentucky Living, which has an estimated 1.2 million
readers throughout the Commonwealth.
His warm, colorful essays have earned him the title, “Kentucky’s
Storyteller,” though nationally syndicated columnist and author Don McNay
prefers to call him “Bard of the Backroads,” and the late Charles Kuralt of
CBS-Television News once declared him, “the best storyteller in Kentucky…if
you count only the ones who tell the truth.” But Byron said he wished Kuralt
had left out that part about the truth.
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"Byron Crawford is the best storyteller
in Kentucky
-- if you count only
the ones who tell the truth.He is the genuine article,
having
developed his ear for good stories
as a boy by attending to the yarn-
spinners who
congregated at the
feed mills and stockyards in his
native Lincoln County.
The young Crawford then practiced
on his childhood buddies there on the banks of
Hanging Fork Creek.
Ever since, he has practiced on a
wider audience." -- Charles Kuralt
CBS News Correspondent
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