Roy D. Branum’s "Take Up Thy Cross" and the Murder of Johnny "Gee" - John H. Gallaher.

Some years ago, I was shopping at a Powhatan Goodwill thrift store. I was perusing the vinyl records, often reserved for polka, big band and swing records that are beat up beyond belief. But every now and then you might just come across something special. On this day Roy D. Branum’s country album stood out to me. With its innocent private press styled cover, Branum stands in front of a microphone in plaid golf pants holding a Gibson acoustic guitar.

Front cover of the album Take Up They Cross by Roy D. Branum released ca. 1980.

Upon flipping over the record, I noticed that Branum’s address was a P.O. Box in Powhatan, Virginia. The central Virginia connection was enough to spend $3.99 and bring the record home. Beyond the song titles and credits, the record also had a “In Memory Of” tribute on the back of the record. This record was dedicated to the memory of the bass player in the band, Johnny G. The tribute reads: 

This album respectively dedicated to the memory of my dearest friend. Johnny “Gee” from Tenn. Who dedicated his life to country music: by playing with many of the top stars of country music & spinning country records on his radio show for some 20 years over station WXGI in Richmond, VA. Johnny G. was a wonderful person and really enjoyed making people happy. Johnny G. and I were from the same area, but never met until I came to Richmond, VA in 1975 and it was instant friendship. I’m thankful that I have Johnny G. playing bass guitar on this album. Although Johnny G. isn’t with us now we can still hear his music. Johnny G. was kidnapped, robbed and murdered in Richmond, VA on Sept. 14 1979. For his friends we pray this album will be a blessing and we know we will meet him again when this life is over. We wish to thank WXGI for the use of their equipment and studios for the recording of this album. We also thank Al Lancaster and Leroy Morgan for their fine guitar playing and we treasure their friendship. May God bless all that helped with this album and I pray it will be a blessing to all that hear it.

 

Back cover of the album. 

 

I was immediately struck by the stark bluntness of how Johnny G had died. This wasn’t just a tribute to the death of an old friend; it was a document of a friendship cut short by a terrible tragedy.

I bought the record and went home and placed it on my turntable and was pleasantly warmed by the cozy country gospel sound. Roy D. Branum, who sang and played guitar on the album, and his band played ten gospel classics with twang. 

Branum was born in Tennessee in 1927 and settled in Virginia where he became a member of the May Memorial Baptist Church in Powhatan. He was a member of the Sheet Metal Workers Union Local #100. He died in 2004. 

Albert H. Lancaster, Jr. was the lead guitarist on the album. Born in 1925, he played country shows in Virginia throughout his life. He may be best known for his band The Country Cavaliers who played shows at festivals and bars all throughout the 1960s. They were also the house band on Dominion Barn Dance, a television show on WXEX-TV in the 1960s (the station is now known as WRIC, Channel 8 in the Richmond area). They released one album on Shoestring Records, a Richmond country music label, which probably deserves its own article someday. Lancaster died in 2007.

Image of the Country Cavaliers from The Crew-Burkeville Journal, Sept. 16, 1965. Lancaster is the man with the electric guitar in the image. 

Leroy M. Morgan played rhythm guitar on the album. He was born in 1936 and was Johnny G’s closest friend. He was a Richmond police officer and went on to be a part time announcer and sales manager at WXGI-AM, the Richmond radio station where Johnny Gee worked at as well. Morgan died in 2010. 

Al Lancaster’s lead guitar really shines through on these songs. While enjoying my budget purchase, I began searching for information about Johnny G’s slaying. I learned his murder was committed by Richmond’s notorious Briley Brothers.

I assume readers of the Shockoe Examiner do not need an introduction to the Briley Brothers. They are Richmond, Virginia’s most notorious serial killers. Throughout their spree in 1979, the three siblings, Linwood, James, and Anthony, along with their 16-year-old neighbor Duncan Eric Meekins, committed at least a dozen murders amongst other ruthless rapes and robberies in the greater Richmond area. One of those unlucky victims was John Harvey Gallaher, also known in the local country music world as Johnny G.

Article about the death of John H. Gallaher from the Sept. 18, 1979 issue of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. 

 

John Gallaher was born in 1917 in Hardin Valley, Tennessee, a rural area about 15 miles from Knoxville. There here he gained early experience playing playing country music around Knoxville and on local radio at WNOX along with people like Chet Atkins who was once his roommate. Gallaher was a World War Two veteran. He later spent his thirties traveling the country looking for music work. He eventually settled in Richmond in 1960 where he found his radio spot on WXGI-AM. He became a well-known DJ in the area for his country tunes catalog. A 1975 Richmond Times-Dispatch article about him said he also was playing five nights a week in a band called The Flairs at The Log Cabin Dancehall located at 3600 Jefferson Davis Highway. The band was more than just country, also playing “pops, rock, country to waltzes.”

It was at the Log Cabin where Johnny G’s final hours begin. The country music dance hall was opened by Peter Joseph Pfister, another person who spent his days playing country music on the radio. He was part of the Sunshine Hillbillies on WRNL Radio in the first half of the twentieth century. Pfister died in 1973 but the Log Cabin continued to guarantee a good night out south of the James for years to come.

Image of John Gallaher, aka "Johnny G.", from a profile of Gallaher, written by Norman Rowe published in the May 25, 1973 issue of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. The text of the article reads:

Johnny G. (for Gallagher) plays Chet Atkins’ records suite often during his mid-morning and midafternoon deejay shows on the country-flavored WXGI in Richmond. 

But Johnny G.’s connections with Atkins’ career are more than a matter of record. They go back to being roommates in Knoxville when both were playing on “The Midday Merry-Go-Round” on radio station WNOX. Musically speaking, the pickin’ was good — some of the now country music stars were in that act — but from the standpoint of economics, the pickin’s were slim. Johnny G. recalls.

“My dad had a farm some 15 miles west of Knoxville and Chet’s folks lived about the same distance east of Knoxville in a little town called Luttrell. On Sundays we’d hop into my old car and drive out to one or the other’s home, to get one good meal for the week.”

THE TIME WAS SHORTLY after World War II. Johnny G. was getting into show business with a big, upright bass, for the most part, self-taught. Atkins, according to Johnny G., was “a good guitar player in those days,” sort of drifting around the country anywhere he could get a job. “It was that way with most musicians,” the Richmonder recalls.

“Chet had asthma when we were staying together. And many nights when he couldn’t sleep, I’d wake up to find him practicing on his guitar, playing softly long into the night. Chet used to say, ‘Some day, I want to be one of the best-known guitar players in the world.’”

Chet Atkins, Nashville’s No. 1 citizen who often leaves the Country Music Capital of the World to play his instrument with some of the nation’s leading symphonic orchestras, will be in Richmond Friday and Saturday nights, featured with the Richmond Symphony.

This does not come as a real surprise to Johnny G. “Nothing that he does now surprises me any more. He loves the guitar and he’s dedicated to it.”

JOHNNY G. SUMS it up like this: “Chet’s career really took off; mine hardly got off the ground. Now look, he’s a genius and he worked hard for it. He deserves everything that’s coming to him.”

Before Johnny G. settled down to a regular radio spot in Richmond in 1960, however, he had drifted around, from Knoxville to Memphis, from Memphis to Mobile, to Atlanta, to the Carolinas and then to Washington, where he worked for promoter Connie B. Gay, playing with then unknowns like Virginia-born Roy Clark and Jimmy Dean.

Johnny G. recalls, “Sonny James was playing with the Loden Family band, Mom and Pop Loden, their daughters and Sonny. At that time (in Knoxville), Sonny wasn’t singing much, but playing his fiddle.

“Now, Sonny has a unique approach to country music; he’s often using voices to sound like instruments, with perhaps a real guitar and a bass for the rhythm section.

“There was one thing I remember about Sonny James. Whenever he had a Sunday play date, he’d take time out to go to church. I used to go with them sometimes because there was a girl bass player in their band, and I was dating her. No, it wasn’t Sonny’s sister.”

THERE WERE OTHER then unknowns on the Knoxville scene with Johnny G. “Archie Campbell was there for years; he was doing an old-man act and was billed as Grandpappy. He didn’t start playing Archie Campbell until many years later. Don Gibson got his start there and Virginia-born Mac Wiseman was a frequent visitor.

“Homer and Jethro sort of got started there; Chet and Jethro married sisters.”

Johnny G. recalls that Atkins had a brother, Jim, who was a leading singer with Fred Waring, and he invited Chet to come to New York and later arranged for the guitarist to audition on WLW in Cincinnati for that station’s barn dance show.

Somewhere along the way, Chet Atkins was playing in Richmond for a few months, along with Sunshine Sue and WRVA’s Old Dominion Barn Dance.

Johnny G. dislikes the role of name-dropper “because so many people are willing to swear you’re lying” and it’s rare that he mentions his former associates on his WXGI broadcasts here.

After he was getting tired of “playing all the bars in Washington,” Johnny G. felt the urge to settle down in radio somewhere and he got a tip of a job here in 1960, and except for two “extended vacations,” has been here ever since.

ONCE, WHEN HE was playing with a band in Memphis clubs, he had nothing to do in the daytime, so he decided to go to radio announcers’ school. “And to show how good the school was, I became a teacher at the same school after two weeks. But with playing in so many bands in ever so many stations, I sort of knew something about it. After ‘graduation,’ I got my first radio job as an announcer-deejay at WELO, Tupelo, Miss. That’s where Elvis Presley was from, but I never heard of him while I was there.” Then, there was his job with a station in High Point, N. C. “I got fired there. It seems my deejay rival on another local station joined a group that bought our station. This guy said I was trying to imitate Arthur Godfrey, and he fired me.”

Johnny G. denies the alleged Godfrey imitation, but “I did admire the man very much; he was so relaxed on the air. I feel that if an announcer and deejay can be relaxed on the air, then most of his listeners will be relaxed. Besides, I like being lazy, and being relaxed is the best approach to that status.”

IN RICHMOND, Johnny G. created his “Weather Lady” character in monologue directed at this female creature who makes her weather forecast from observations while hanging from a telephone pole.

While Johnny G. may be popular with many listeners in many areas, he is fairly certain he has no friends and/or listeners at the weather bureau. He maintains he doesn’t understand “how those fellows can be wrong so much of the time and at the same time continue to hold their jobs.”

After hours Johnny G. is slapping his (now electric) bass five nights a week with The Flairs band at the Log Cabin on Petersburg Pike. “It’s not a country band ... we play everything from pops to rock, country to waltzes.”

With the background of a rambling music man, why has Johnny G. remained hereabouts for so long?

“Richmond has been good for me and good to me ... I tried leaving a couple of times, but it didn’t work.”

 

Except on Friday September 14, 1979 when Johnny G and (I assume) The Flairs were performing a classic Friday night show at the Log Cabin. Johnny stepped outside around 11:30pm during a break between sets. It was then he had his run in with the Briley brothers and Meekins. Some police reports suspect that Johnny G noticed his car being broken into and that initially led him into the Briley Brother’s trap.

After the capture of the Brothers in late 1979, Meekins became the chief witness in the trial. He testified that they forced Johnny G into his own car, a Lincoln Continental, and drove straight down Jefferson Davis Highway and to Mayo Island, in the middle of the James River. The brothers left Meekins in the car and took Johnny G into the Standard Paper Manufacturing Company building, which was shut down and abandoned just 3 years earlier. It was here that Johnny G was shot point blank in the back with a shotgun and tossed into the James River. The Brothers returned to Meekins and the car with the $6 found inside Johnny G’s wallet. Two days later Johnny G’s body was found in the James River still near Mayo Island. 

Richmond Times-Dispatch, Dec. 11, 1979.

The Briley Brothers would continue their wrath on Richmond for over a month more before eventually being caught towards the end of October of 1979. Linwood and James Briley were both sentenced to death and executed in 1984 and 1985 respectively. Anthony Briley and Duncan Meekins are still alive and incarcerated.

In the months after Johnny G’s untimely death, Roy D. Branum finished putting together a collection of his songs for the record that began this article. A collection of songs recorded at Johnny G’s radio studio in the late 1970s. A record that would act as the only physical recording of Johnny G’s country career that spanned decades. Ten songs that would hopefully comfort friends and family that missed him.

And to the next person who pulls this record out of a local Goodwill, I hope this article finds you well.

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Obituary of Gallaher from the Sept. 19, 1979 issue of The Knoxville News Sentinel. This obituary from his hometown confirms his actual age, not the 47-year-old figure published twice in the RTD.

Listen to Roy D. Barnum’s "Take Up Thy Cross" LP HERE. 

- Brian Baynes

Brian is the owner of Brian's Books, a small bookstore in the Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond. He has published the popular comics and manga fanzine Bubbles since 2019, and has run Bubbles Con since 2024, a free comics symposium that takes place at the Richmond Public Library. He has lived in Richmond since 2010 and loves diving into the history.