Hello, Sadie?

When I was a kid in Baton Rouge, Saturday afternoon meant the old man got control of the TV and, dammit, we were gonna watch The Porter Wagoner Show. Back in the '60s and '70s, the traditional country music of Porter and Pretty Miss Norma Jean -- or later on, Porter and Dolly Parton -- wasn't exactly an adolescent draw, you know?

And I had no need of Black Draught laxative. Or to "snap back with Stanback" headache powder.

I have to admit, though, that watching Dolly -- she of the big hair and bigger . . . never mind -- was educational for a young male.

Well, OK. I was partial to Buck Owens and "Country" Charley Pride. And Dolly did have that big hair and those . . . never mind.

Anyway, there was no cable and I didn't have a TV in my room for much of that time. So I watched. And I absorbed. And then something happens to your DNA, I swear to God.

You get to college and hit your 20s, and then you find yourself hitting the Cotton Club on Highland Road on Saturday nights because the seafood is good, the beer is better and all the good Patsy Cline songs are on the jukebox. Welcome to growing up in the Deep South sometime Back in the Day.

Lots of us in the South back then -- we who cut our teeth on rock and soul -- also had to come to grips with the hillbilly music imprinted upon our genetic makeups. The music we couldn't escape. We had to make room for Dolly, Pretty Miss Norma Jean . . . and ol' Porter and the Wagonmasters.

And come to think of it, Speck Rhodes was kind of funny.

And now -- even though I'm still partial to rock, punk and soul -- sometimes late on a Saturday night, there's nothing quite like firing up the old tube-type AM radio and carefully coaxing WSM in through the static to hear Porter play host on the Grand Ole Opry, where today's Nashville suits exile the people who built country music.

In a world of Rascal Flats and Faith Hills, the Opry gets to be the Island of Misfit Legends.

But there's something the suits don't realize.

In a world where phoniness reigns, suddenly folks like Porter, Dolly and Pretty Miss Norma Jean are cool. Because they're real.

And now they have something to say. As Newsweek tells us:

Slouching slightly in an easy chair as he watches ESPN, Porter Wagoner suggests a kindly grandfather. His voice has thickened with age, his pace slowed by an abdominal aneurysm that nearly killed him last year. But those lady-killer pale blue eyes sparkle as he leans forward, conspiratorially. "I used to run around a lot with women; I enjoyed that," he says. "I'm not really serious with anyone right now. I got some grandkids, and I'm kinda into them." At the moment he's watching NASCAR, relaxing a little before commanding the Grand Ole Opry stage to celebrate his 50th anniversary as a member of country music's most elite hall of fame. "You can always tell if a guy knows where his roots are," he says. "I like the real thing."

At 79, Wagoner knows a little something about keeping it real. With 60-odd albums under his belt, he's just released another, "Wagonmaster," and later this month he'll open for the hottest act in rock: the White Stripes—at Madison Square Garden, no less. Wagoner isn't the only roots-based, hard-country musician approaching 80 who has refused to step out of the spotlight. Merle Haggard, George Jones, Charlie Louvin, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson—they're all on the road again. Actually, they never really left, performing and recording as if they're on some magical musical Viagra. Wagoner isn't even the oldest guy out there. Last month Louvin and Ralph Stanley, both 80, separately appeared at Bonnaroo, the four-day rock festival in Tennessee. Their stamina is all the more impressive given that Nashville rolled up the welcome mat with the slick ascent of Alan Jackson, Garth Brooks and a roster of telegenic younger artists in the late 1980s. Almost all the kings and queens of country now record on independent labels from Los Angeles to—gasp!—New York. And yet the oldsters are thriving just as contemporary pop country seems to be losing its way.

Tune in, and it becomes clear why contemporary-pop-country sales are down more than 30 percent over last year, its fans either downloading illegally or jumping ship altogether. "Everybody knows what real country music is," says George Jones, 75, who has had 167 songs in the top 100 since 1955. "And it's definitely not what's happening today." On the radio you'll hear "American Idol" pretty girl Carrie Underwood, Big & Rich's tedious covers of both Donna Summer and AC/DC, the insufferably whiny Rascal Flatts and even Bon Jovi, a hair-metal band from Jersey. The hallmarks of country's current crop are crisp production, pop phrasing and cheesy lyrics. "It sounds like '80s rock ballads with fiddles," says actor Billy Bob Thornton, who has played drums with Wagoner. But classic country is caught in a Catch-22: the radio stations that play it often won't touch the older singers' new stuff, and the contemporary stations won't play their new music because the singers are, well, too old. "They're looking for a younger demographic with disposable income," says Wade Jessen, Billboard's Nashville director of charts. "It can be awfully disheartening."

And, if you see these guys performing live, it can be plain ignorant. The pierced and tattooed audience at Louisville's ear X-tacy record store is not the kind of crowd you'd expect for an 80-year-old in New Balance sneakers. But Charlie Louvin is invigorated by the turnout, one of 100 shows he'll do this year. When Louvin (half of the brimstone-breathing Louvin Brothers, who rose to fame in the 1950s) tears into classics like the murderous "Knoxville Girl" and "The Kneeling Drunkards Plea," you get why Grandpa might appeal to the whippersnappers. The music is stripped down to bass, guitar, drums and Dobro. Louvin's voice isn't what it was when he sang with his brother, Ira, but there is a pureness to the sound. "Stuff like Charlie Louvin's is old, and it's the real deal," says John Timmons, ear X-tacy's owner. "It's new to kids."

I WONDER whether they'd like The Porter Wagoner Show, in all its cheesy 1960s glory, these kids in search of Real.

Probably.