Appalachian Figures
Nelson Robinette “Robb” Webb grew up in a Letcher County household where school calendars and mountain stories mixed around the table. Decades later, his voice opened Sunday nights for millions of viewers as the familiar sound that introduced 60 Minutes and the CBS Evening News. From a home birth in Whitesburg in 1939 to a studio booth in New York City, Webb carried eastern Kentucky with him even as he became one of the most recognizable narrators in American television.
At the same time, he stayed tied to the literary and artistic life of the mountains. With his younger brother, poet and radio man Jim Webb, he helped start the literary journal Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel and quietly supported organizations like Appalshop that tried to put Appalachian stories on the air and in print.
Today, most people know the sound of his voice long before they know his name. For an Appalachian historian, though, Robb Webb is a reminder that the path from a coalfield county seat to the national soundscape sometimes runs through small college radio rooms, community theaters, and mountain writing circles as much as through New York studios.
A Whitesburg childhood
Robb Webb was born on January 29, 1939, at Whitesburg in Letcher County. His parents were Watson C. Webb and Esther June Salling Webb, part of a family network that reached across Mayking and the surrounding communities.
Local reporting and family memorials agree that his early years were firmly rooted in Letcher County. The Mountain Eagle describes him as a “Letcher County native” whose upbringing began in a home on the hill above town, and his obituary lists longtime local family names among his grandparents and relatives.
Whitesburg in those years was a classic Appalachian county seat, caught between the coal industry and the courthouse, the hollers and a small downtown. Later lists of notable locals place Webb alongside figures like environmental writer Harry Caudill, banjo player Lee Sexton, and other regional names who stepped from Letcher County onto larger stages.
Even as he built a career far away, the Dignity Memorial obituary written in his family’s voice insists that he “retained a love for the Kentucky mountains,” a love that would show up later in his support for Appalachian writers and arts groups.
Learning to work a microphone
Before he ever recorded a single line for 60 Minutes, Webb spent years learning how to shape sound. Family and industry obituaries sketch a path that runs through school, the Army, radio studios, and theaters long before his New York work.
In the 1960s he studied radio and television production for three years at Ohio State University, picking up the technical and performance skills that would become his livelihood. While serving in the United States Army in Asmara, Ethiopia (now Eritrea), he managed a combined television and radio station for Armed Forces Radio and Television, running what was essentially a small broadcast operation on the other side of the world.
When he returned to the United States he moved into civilian broadcasting as a radio disc jockey in San Antonio, Texas. At the same time he acted with the Alley Theatre in Houston and worked behind the camera as a photographer, including as principal photographer for the Alley and for Hemisfair 1968, that year’s world’s fair.
Taken together, these early decades show a pattern that fits a lot of Appalachian outmigration stories. Webb left eastern Kentucky to find work and training elsewhere, but he never really left media and performance. Whether he was programming playlists, acting in a repertory company, or photographing a world’s fair, he was learning how to hold an audience.
Broadway lights and New York life
By the 1970s Webb had reached Broadway. He appeared in the original production of Sly Fox, a comedy by Larry Gelbart based on Ben Jonson’s Volpone. The Internet Broadway Database lists him as both the first policeman onstage and an understudy for the character Captain Crouch during the show’s run at the Broadhurst Theatre from 1976 to 1978.
In a hometown feature a few decades later, Webb recalled that Sly Fox was his “one and only Broadway play,” and that he spent much of the run as an understudy, onstage frequently but rarely in the spotlight. That experience which many working actors would recognize as typical was a bridge into the New York performance world he would call home for the rest of his life.
The Dignity obituary remembers him as a “New Yorker to his bones,” living with his wife Pat DeRousie Webb in renovated homes in the Catskills and on the Upper West Side, where he became known among family and friends as an accomplished cook and generous host.
Even in that deeply urban setting, his eastern Kentucky background kept showing through. The Journal of Kentucky Studies, in a long essay on Jim Webb’s work and the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative, notes in an endnote that Robb had become the announcer for CBS’s 60 Minutes and the CBS Evening News, a reminder that the voice coming out of the television on Sunday nights belonged to someone raised in the same mountain world that shaped Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel.
Finding the sound of 60 Minutes
Most viewers met Webb’s voice, not his face. The family obituary and CBS News agree that his work for the network ramped up in the mid to late 1990s. Beginning in that period his “warm baritone” opened the CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes each week, introducing correspondents and stories in a tone that managed to sound both reassuring and serious.
CBS’s remembrance of him after his death in 2021 begins with an observation many viewers would share: “The name Robb Webb might not be familiar to 60 Minutes viewers, but his voice almost certainly is.” In the same piece, producers describe that voice as distinguished and authoritative and credit him as the longtime voice of both 60 Minutes and the CBS Evening News.
The Dignity obituary preserves one of the few direct descriptions of how Webb himself thought about his work. “I can approach [voice over copy] as a solid newsman or as a dangerous newsman,” he told someone, summing up the range of his delivery. That contrast between steady and slightly ominous helps explain why his voice fit both serious news programs and tongue in cheek projects.
A short behind the scenes 60 Minutes Overtime video lets viewers watch him at work, stepping up to the microphone to record multiple versions of the familiar Sunday night introductions. In that clip, his reading is the primary historical document: a primary source for his cadence, timing, and the small inflections that made his work so immediately recognizable.
Regional press followed his success closely. WYMT in Hazard called him a “Whitesburg native and voice of 60 Minutes for more than two decades” when it reported his death in early February 2021, while The Mountain Eagle had already run a feature on “Letcher County’s 60 Minutes man” during a 2015 visit home.
Beyond news: cult television and commercials
Although 60 Minutes and the CBS Evening News paid most of his bills, Webb’s work spread across all kinds of projects. Family and industry accounts describe a portfolio that included serious sports films, late night comedy, and national ad campaigns.
For many viewers outside the news audience, he is best known as the narrator of Fishing with John, the six episode 1991 series in which musician John Lurie takes different friends on highly stylized fishing trips. The show’s own promotional materials and later criticism emphasize Webb’s part in its deadpan, surreal tone. IMDb and other references single out his “overly dramatic narration” as one of the series’ running jokes, and Lurie reportedly called him “the Michael Jordan of narration.”
The Dignity obituary and CBS’s remembrance also credit him with thousands of commercial spots. One of the most widely cited examples is DirecTV’s “Get Rid of Cable” campaign, a set of tongue in cheek ads that rely on his serious delivery to sell increasingly absurd scenarios.
Trade press obituaries in outlets like Adweek and Media Confidential underline how central he was to the sound of CBS in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. They describe him as a “longtime voice” for the network and quote colleagues who remembered how his tone could stop people “in their tracks” the way the 60 Minutes stopwatch does.
Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel and Wiley’s Last Resort
If Webb’s broadcast work took him far from Whitesburg, his literary and community commitments kept circling back to the mountains. The family obituary credits him, along with his brother Jim, as a co founder of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary journal that later became the official publication of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative.
That little magazine project grew out of the same Appalachian writers movement that produced Jim’s poems, plays, and radio work for Appalshop’s WMMT. A 2016 Journal of Kentucky Studies essay on Jim Webb treats Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel as one of the key venues through which Appalachian writers challenged company and outsider narratives about the region, noting in its endnotes that Robb had by that point become the voice of 60 Minutes and the CBS Evening News.
Today Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel is still published under SAWC’s umbrella and, as later descriptions put it, continues an original mission “to foster community and activism” among Appalachian writers. It is a rare example of a regional little magazine with decades of continuity, rooted in both rural and urban Appalachian communities.
Webb also played a quieter role in one of his brother’s most recognizable projects: Wiley’s Last Resort, a nature and arts retreat on Pine Mountain. On the resort’s own website, Jim Webb tells the story of how the property changed hands in the mid 1990s. After a fire and a bank repossession, he writes that “my good friend Ernie and my brother Robb helped and I was able to buy it.”
The property, perched on Pine Mountain near Whitesburg, became home to festivals, art shows, and a steady stream of hikers and campers. Through that help, Robb Webb’s New York earnings quite literally flowed back into a Letcher County mountain top.
Family, final years, and loss to COVID 19
By the time of his death, Webb had spent decades based in New York City while remaining tied to Kentucky. The Dignity obituary and Broadway databases list his marriage to Pat DeRousie Webb and note that he was a father and grandfather as well as a working actor and narrator.
On February 3, 2021, just five days after his eighty second birthday, he died in New York from complications related to COVID 19. The family obituary, CBS News, WYMT, and other outlets all identify the pandemic as the cause, part of the wave of losses that touched Appalachian communities whether loved ones were still in the mountains or living far away.
Regional coverage emphasized both halves of his story. WYMT’s short notice and The Mountain Eagle’s obituary framed him as a Whitesburg native whose voice traveled around the world. CBS’s remembrance and later encyclopedia entries recorded his birthplace as Whitesburg and his nationality as American, placing Letcher County in the fine print of national media history.
Why Robb Webb matters to Appalachian history
Robb Webb did not write policy, lead strikes, or publish manifestos. His importance to Appalachian history lies instead in the way he quietly linked a small mountain town to the sound of national news and popular culture.
First, his life story fits a familiar Appalachian pattern in which outmigration and regional commitment coexist. He left Whitesburg to study, serve in the Army, work in radio, and act in big city theaters, but he kept sending his energy and resources back into the mountains through Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Appalshop, and Wiley’s Last Resort.
Second, his career reminds us that Appalachia has helped shape the infrastructures of American media, not just its on screen caricatures. When viewers tuned in to 60 Minutes or the CBS Evening News for decades, an eastern Kentucky voice told them what they were about to see. Academic and trade sources alike underline that his baritone became part of the program’s brand, as recognizable as the stopwatch graphics.
Third, the primary sources we have his recorded voice, the family written obituary, regional news coverage, and the institutional memory of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative give us a rare chance to see both sides of a life. We can listen to the way he hits a word like “tonight” in a 60 Minutes promo, then turn to an endnote in a Kentucky literary journal that quietly notes, almost in passing, that Jim Webb’s brother is that same announcer.
For Appalachian historians, Robb Webb is proof that the people who leave are often still part of the story. His voice traveled from a Whitesburg childhood to the national airwaves, but it never stopped carrying the sound of home.
Sources & Further Reading
Dignity Memorial, “Robb Webb Obituary,” Riverside Memorial Chapel, New York, 2021. Detailed family narrative of his life, including his birth in Whitesburg, military service, early radio and theater work, CBS career, and role in co founding Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel. Dignity Memorial
CBS News, “Robb Webb voices 60 Minutes Overtime” (video segment). Behind the scenes clip of Webb recording 60 Minutes intros, an essential primary source for his working style and delivery. CBS News
CBS News, 60 Minutes and CBS Evening News broadcasts and promos from the mid 1990s through the 2010s. The programs themselves preserve Webb’s announcer work week by week for more than two decades. CBS News
Wiley’s Last Resort, “The Story of the Property Known Around the Hole Wide Whirled,” history page written by Jim Webb, describing how “my good friend Ernie and my brother Robb helped and I was able to buy it.” First person testimony about Robb’s role in saving and developing the Pine Mountain property.
Legacy.com / Letcher Funeral Home, “Jim Webb Obituary,” 2018. Obituary for his brother that documents the Webb family’s Letcher County roots, Jim’s role in Appalshop and WMMT, and their shared literary work through Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel.
The Mountain Eagle, “Letcher native was voice of CBS’s 60 Minutes,” February 10, 2021. Hometown obituary for Nelson Robinette “Robb” Webb with local photographs and expanded family detail, including his parents and grandparents.
The Mountain Eagle, “Letcher County’s 60 Minutes man,” August 5, 2015. Feature on Webb’s visit back to Whitesburg that recalls his Broadway work in Sly Fox and documents how locals understood his national success.
WYMT (Hazard, Kentucky), Brooke Marshall, “Whitesburg voice artist dies at 82,” February 5, 2021. Short regional news item confirming that Webb, a Whitesburg native and longtime 60 Minutes announcer, died in New York City of COVID 19 complications.
Journal of Kentucky Studies, Scott Goebel, “Jim Webb: A Poet’s Path of Resistance, or The Bigger the Windmill, the Better,” 2016. Essay on Jim Webb and the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative whose endnotes identify Robb Webb as the longtime announcer for CBS’s 60 Minutes and the CBS Evening News and describe the co founding of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel. inside.nku.edu+2inside.nku.edu+2
CBS News, “Remembering Robb Webb, longtime voice of 60 Minutes,” February 5, 2021. Official network remembrance that summarizes his career and emphasizes how familiar his voice was to viewers. CBS News
Adweek, “The Voice of 60 Minutes, Robb Webb Dies from Complications Related to Covid 19,” 2021. Trade press obituary that situates Webb in the wider advertising and voiceover industry.
Media Confidential, “R.I.P.: Robb Webb, Voice Artist, 60 Minutes Announcer,” 2021. Radio and television industry blog post with commentary from CBS producers on the character of Webb’s voice. Media Confidential