Jude and Jody did love folks.
Hear that echo? It's a kind of musical reverb.
"We love folks" was how the late Jude Northcutt and the late Jody Taylor signed off "The Jude 'n' Jody Show." It was popular on local OKC television from the mid 1960s until the last time the two friends and business partners played guitar and sang "both kinds of music," country and western, on the show 24 years later.
That old "country and" gag fits the dueling notes playing and replaying in J.D. Northcutt's mind and heart these days: sweet memories, with a little salt of the earth. He's spent most of his 59 years in the shadow of his late father, Jude, who died at 89 in 2021, and Jody, who died at 74 in 2009, who had grown up together around Lexington.
The TV show is long gone. Now the pair's other enterprise, Jude & Jody and Sons Furniture, is fading to black, closing April 30 after 60 years in business at 509 SW 29.
A local investor paid $1,750,000 for the property, the 6,150-square-foot store and 8,840-square-foot warehouse next door, in a deal handled by Ethan Slavin and Tyler Huxley, with Creek Commercial Real Estat,e and Caitlin Mazaheri, with CBRE Group.
"It's another family business riding off into the sunset," J.D. said, with up to 40 employees at its peak, down to just four now. "We're leaving on our terms. We made the decision as a family. We were just going to stay in business until we sold. We'd decided 'Hey, let's put the building on the market and see what happens,' and boom!"
VIDEO:The late Jude Northcutt talks about Jude 'n' Jody
"The Jude 'n' Jody Show" was a spinoff from the Mathis Brothers' "Country Social" on 1960s local Oklahoma City television
Both "The Jude 'n' Jody Show" and Jude & Jody and Sons Furniture were spinoffs from the king of local TV country music variety shows in Oklahoma City, the original Mathis Brothers' "Country Social," which the late Bud and Don Mathis started in the late 1950s to promote their furniture store.
The "new business model for furniture stores," combining discount pricing and high-volume sales, was "a perfect sales pitch for television," historians Bob Blackburn and Elizabeth Bass wrote for The Oklahoman in 2019.
"Country Social" soon featured two Mathis Brothers salesmen, Jude and Jody, while playing host to traveling performers. The opportunity for the pair, who were already known performers around these parts, was more down to earth than the tunes that sent them soaring from tall broadcast towers.
It all started with a country gentleman's agreement
It started with a handshake deal.
"They asked Jude and Jody to be on their show. 'And hey, oh, by the way, we'd like you to work at the furniture store, too,' " J.D. said.
It turned out to be a perfect pitch for Jude and Jody. Eventually, they left to start their own show and furniture store.
"They kind of thought it was time to try their own deal," J.D. said. "They were successful, and people recognized 'Jude & Jody,' and they were kind of the stars of the show."
Hank Thompson and His Brazos Valley Boys helped lift Jude and Jody
Their big break in music came when they were asked to travel and perform with Hank Thompson, who earlier was a star on the local show “Big Red Shindig” as Hank Thompson and His Brazos Valley Boys.
J.D. said his father and Thompson were good friends until the day Thompson died in 2007. Thompson was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1989.
More than friendship connected Jody to national country music stardom: He and Norma Jean Beasler, a country star from Wellston, were married in 1967. They later divorced. But their nuptials altered the course of country music.
Porter Wagoner, Norma Jean and Dolly Parton were part of Jude and Jody's musical mix
"See, Norma Jean was Porter Wagoner's sidekick before Dolly Parton," J.D. said. "Then when Jody and her got married, that's why (Norma Jean) left 'The Porter Wagoner Show.' "
Norma Jean was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 2013, and received a Pathmaker Award in 2018 from the Oklahoma City/County Historical Society.
Jude and Jody cut some records — pressed in Oklahoma City by "Dee-Jay Records, 1400 SW 29," as the label on an old 45 says, which is now a used-car lot, and by themselves as Continental Records, which an old LP shows as 509 SW 29 — the address of their store and warehouse.
J.D. said he's working on getting Jude and Jody some recognition for helping pioneer country music in Oklahoma.
Country-style customer service helped keep Jude & Jody and Sons Furniture in Oklahoma City successful through thick and thin
Musical tastes, and what passes for country music, evolve over time. Local TV music variety shows pushing home furnishings, or anything else, faded to black decades ago. Retail has seen a few revolutions over the years.
How did a family-owned furniture store survive at 509 SW 29 from 1964 to 2024?
Country-style customer service, like in-house financing, "back when a handshake was your word," J.D. said. That helped the late Toby Keith and his wife, Tricia, buy their first furniture from Jude & Jody as newlyweds in the mid-'80s, he said. That and being a friend to customers.
"People would come here, and Dad would always take time to visit with them and reminisce with them, taking that little extra step," J.D. said. "And there's no hidden charges. The price includes delivery, setup, everything. There's no 'You have to sign up for this club' or that club. The only extra charge was tax."
And he said his dad would tell customers, "If you can call the governor and get it approved, we'll waive the tax!"
Nowadays, 'Everybody's buying everything online'
Jude & Jody and Sons Furniture comes to an end at the end of April partly because J.D. said he and his wife, Dana, discouraged their children from carrying it on. Retail has changed too much to carry on the same way, he said. Son Jacob is an accountant in OKC and daughter Shelby LaBrue is a speech pathologist in Austin, Texas.
"Box store retail, it's just changed. Everybody's buying everything online," J.D. said. "How these big companies are making their money, they're not making it in the selling, they're making it in the buying. They're making deals on the buying part of it. Little guys don't have the buying power."
The store, while it had ups and downs, was successful right up to spring 2020 and the pandemic.
"The last big push here, we were fairly decently inventoried — not like the old days, but decent — and then COVID hit, and it was like, oh crap, we've got all these invoices and we're pretty much shut down," he said, until furniture stores were declared "essential."
"OK, so then we were open. We cut our hours, and we called suppliers. Everybody worked with everybody. When everything opened back up, people hadn't spent their tax money yet. That was in March. Then everybody gets the free stimulus money. We get wiped out of inventory, and we couldn't get anything else," he said.
Now, its time for him and the rest of the family to fully enjoy the fruits of Jude and Jody's, and their own, labor.
"We're leaving on our own terms"
J.D. said he still lives by a lesson his father taught him as a teenager.
"When I was 14, business was, I mean, popping good back in those days," he said "So I told my dad I wanted a motorcycle. I said, 'They're down there at Jandebeur's Cycles,' down there on 29th Street. Probably 1978, '77 somewhere in there. A 125cc, you could ride on the road at 14. So we go down there and get it.
"I ride it back up to the store and he takes me in, and we had this time clock. He introduced me to 'Mr. Time Clock.' He said, 'Now that we have that motorcycle, I'll show you how you're going to keep it."
He said that's where he learned: "If you want anything in life that's out there, you've got to go work for it, and if you pay for it yourself, you'll take care of it. All the rest of us siblings, too. When (we) wanted a car at 16, 'Heck, yeah, man you deserve a car! Let's go get it! (And then) All right now this is how you're going to keep it.' Dad would go buy it, and he'd create a little ledger card for us to make payments."
The lesson took. It got Jude Northcutt and the Jody Taylor started. It made "The Jude 'n' Jody Show" a success. It kept the Jude & Jody and Sons Furniture store afloat even during the 1980s oil bust when the family had to draw on savings to keep it open. It got the store through a global pandemic and economic crisis.
And finally, after 60 years, it gave the family, so long associated with music, a rare coda in family-owned box retail. As J.D. put it, "We're leaving on our terms."
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Senior Business Writer Richard Mize has covered housing, construction, commercial real estate and related topics for the newspaper and Oklahoman.com since 1999. Contact him at rmize@oklahoman.com. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Real Estate with Richard Mize. You can support Richard's work, and that of his colleagues, by purchasing a digital subscription to The Oklahoman. Right now, you can get 6 months of subscriber-only access for $1.
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