18 Facts About Hee Haw

Hee Haw is an American television variety show featuring country music and humor with the fictional rural "Kornfield Kounty" as the backdrop.

Hee Haw is set in Kornfield Kounty, a rural farming community in an unspecified state in the Southern United States.

Hee Haw featured at least two, and sometimes three or four, guest celebrities each week.

Loretta Lynn was the first guest star of Hee Haw and made more guest appearances than any other artist.

Hee Haw co-hosted the show more than any other guest co-host and therefore appears on more of the DVD releases for retail sale than any other guest star.

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Elvis Presley was a fan of Hee Haw and wanted to appear as a guest on the program, but Presley knew his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, would not allow him to do so.

Two of the Hee Haw Honeys dated Presley long before they joined the cast: Linda Thompson in the mid-1970s, whom Presley had a long-term relationship with after his divorce from Priscilla; and Diana Goodman shortly afterwards.

Hee Haw's creators, Frank Peppiatt and John Aylesworth, were both Canadian-born writers who had extensive experience in writing for variety shows.

Hee Haw featured a premiere showcase on commercial television throughout its run for country, bluegrass, gospel, and other styles of American traditional music, featuring hundreds of elite musical performances that were paramount to the success, popularity and legacy of the series for a broad audience of Southern, rural and purely music fans alike.

The success of shows like Hee Haw was the source of a heated dispute in CBS's corporate offices: Vice President of network programming Michael Dann, although he personally disliked the shows, argued in favor of ratings, while his subordinate, Fred Silverman, head of daytime programming, held that certain demographics within total television viewership — in which Hee Haw and the others performed poorly — could draw more advertising dollars.

Undaunted, and noting that one instigating factor for the rural purge—the Prime Time Access Rule—had opened up an opportunity for independent syndicated productions, Hee Haw's producers put together a syndication deal for the show, which continued in roughly the same format for the rest of its run.

At its peak, Hee Haw often competed in syndication against The Lawrence Welk Show, a long-running ABC program which had likewise been cancelled in 1971, in its case in a purge of the networks' older demographic-leaning programs.

Welk and Hee Haw competed against another music-oriented niche program that moved to syndication in 1971, Soul Train.

Hee Haw continued to pop up in reruns throughout the 1990s and later during the following decade in a series of successful DVD releases from Time Life.

Reruns of Hee Haw began airing on RFD-TV in September 2008, where it ran for 12 years, anchoring the network's Sunday night lineup, although beginning in January 2014 an episode airs on Saturday afternoon and the same episode is rerun the following Sunday night; those episodes were cut down to comply with the 44-minute minimum.

Hee Haw left RFD-TV in 2020 and began airing on the Grand Ole Opry-operated Circle network.

Hee Haw continues to remain popular with its long-time fans and younger viewers who have discovered the program through DVD releases or its reruns through the years on TNN, CMT, RFD-TV, and now Circle TV.

Hee Haw Theater opened in Branson, Missouri in 1981 and operated through 1983.