Ozarks Legacies: "Doc" McCready Family
William “Doc” McCready built one life out of science, surgery, wildlife, teaching, and country music. His son Rich took that music to Nashville. Beside them was Ramona, a scientist, Choctaw woman, educator, volunteer, and the center of a family whose story has been unfolding for more than six decades.
At 88, William “Doc” McCready possesses the sort of biography that sounds, at first, as though several different lives have been accidentally combined.
There was the young man from Sand Springs, Oklahoma, who played professional softball. There was the worker who remembers jobs with Sinclair and Pepsi, layoffs during the Eisenhower years, and industrial and defense work connected with tanks and the Titan missile program. There was the biology student who considered becoming a federal biologist, the chemist, the outdoorsman, the herpetologist and falconer, the hunter and fisherman. Eventually there was Dr. William Bert McCready, the periodontal specialist who spent decades reconstructing what disease and injury had damaged in his patients' mouths.
Then there was Doc McCready with a bass guitar in his hands.
That last identity eventually carried him onto stages, into recording studios, and, in 2013, into the Missouri Music Hall of Fame beside the only son with whom he had learned and played music: country singer-songwriter Rich McCready.
Yet the McCready story really begins before either father or son made a record.
It begins with two science students.
Northeastern State College's 1962 commencement program records William Bert McCready and Ramona Ann Williams together among the candidates for Bachelor of Science degrees. Commencement was held Friday, May 25, 1962.
Ramona later remembered the sequence with beautiful simplicity: she met Doc at Northeastern, they graduated one day, and they married the next. In a 2018 Oklahoma State University oral-history interview, she called him “the love of my life” and noted that May 26 had just marked their 56th wedding anniversary. That places their marriage on May 26, 1962.
Ramona's journey to that graduation ceremony had been extraordinary in its own right.
The youngest of eight children, she was about three when her mother developed tuberculosis and her parents eventually divorced. Her siblings were sent to Goodland, then an Indian children's home and school in southeastern Oklahoma, while Ramona initially remained with a grandparent because she was too young. She remembered missing her brothers and sisters so desperately that relatives said she cried for a year. By four, she had joined them. Later came Chilocco Indian Agricultural School, where she arrived at only 12 years old and eventually graduated at 16.
Ramona identified herself as half Choctaw and described her mother as full-blood Choctaw. Her recollections of Goodland and Chilocco were intensely personal and largely positive; she credited teachers there with directing her toward college and instilling the self-sufficiency that shaped the rest of her life. Her experience should not be taken as a universal account of the Indian boarding-school system, but it was unmistakably her own.
At Northeastern, she majored in biology and minored in chemistry and psychology. Her scientific interests included the study of parasites. She was also an athlete: a Choctaw Nation profile records her as Northeastern's Woman Athlete of the Year in 1962. She later pursued postgraduate study at Missouri Southern.
Doc was following science from another direction. Public biographical material records him as a Sand Springs High School graduate and a chemistry-and-biology student at Northeastern. His own recollections add the less orderly parts of the story—the industrial jobs, softball, work during the Cold War years, and the moment when a possible career in federal biology gave way to the medical sciences.
Dentistry became the path...
UMKC records William “Doc” McCready as DDS '66 and M.S. Periodontics '76. He practiced periodontics in Joplin for more than 30 years, performing the periodontal reconstructive work he still discusses today. Yet he was not simply a private practitioner. He helped establish the Dental Hygiene and Assisting Program at Missouri Southern State University, and later taught at Oral Roberts University's School of Dentistry, serving for two years as chairman of its Department of Periodontics.
The scientist never disappeared beneath the white coat. Doc became a herpetologist and a falconer. Hunting and fishing remained lifelong passions. The fields, woods, water, reptiles, birds of prey, and biological systems he had once studied academically became part of how he lived.
Ramona, meanwhile, built a quieter but equally consequential record of service. She worked in Doc's office handling insurance while devoting much of her life to children's causes. In her oral history, she described roughly four decades of involvement with the Missouri Baptist Children's Home, including years on its board of trustees. She and Doc also participated in community service benefiting children and families.
The Choctaw Nation later reported that she had served 18 years as a trustee of the Missouri Baptist Children's Home, was a charter board member of Children's Haven of Southwest Missouri, taught Sunday school, and volunteered extensively in Seneca. In 2014, Chilocco's alumni association inducted her into its Hall of Fame for community service and leadership.
By then, she had been a McCready for more than half a century...
“We don't like change,” Ramona joked in her oral history. “Same husband, same son, same friends.”
That son changed the musical direction of the family...
Rich McCready was born in Seneca in 1970 and grew up around country music. Doc remembers taking up guitar and bass seriously at about 40, learning alongside his son. The chronology in older promotional biographies varies somewhat—some describe Doc's musical activity as beginning earlier—but the central family memory is clear: father and son learned, played, and developed as musicians together.
For Doc, bass became the instrument most closely associated with him. For Rich, music became a profession.
After attending Southwest Baptist University, Rich moved to Nashville in 1992. He signed with Magnatone Records in 1995, and his self-titled debut followed in February 1996. Billboard reported that his first single, “Hangin' On,” was climbing the country chart while he prepared for a run of dates with Tracy Lawrence and Toby Keith.
Then came “Thinkin' Strait,” a knowingly traditional country song built around the musical lineage of George Strait, Merle Haggard, George Jones, and Hank Williams. Billboard's contemporary review called Rich's performance likable, and the single eventually reached No. 53 on the country chart.
For a family from Seneca, Missouri, Nashville was no longer an abstraction.
Yet Rich did not simply leave home behind.
By the early 2000s, father and son had created McCready Recording Studio near Seneca. Sources differ on whether the studio formally began in 2000 or opened in 2004, but they agree on its purpose: to bring serious recording capability back home. The Choctaw Nation described a rural studio sophisticated enough to accommodate musicians working on extended projects, including lodging for performers.
Anyone who has seen Doc's studio understands that it reflects its owner. It is meticulous, personal, and slightly eccentric—the immaculate room that has been affectionately described as something like a “purple submarine.” This is not Nashville's Music Row. That was precisely the point.
Doc produced Rich's 2005 album, while Rich continued writing, recording, and working with other artists. Father and son played together, with Doc frequently behind Rich on bass. UMKC's alumni magazine later reported that Doc considered performing with his son his greatest musical thrill.
Then, on Aug. 31, 2013, father and son stood together in St. Joseph, Missouri.
William “Doc” McCready was inducted into the Missouri Music Hall of Fame in the producer category. Rich McCready entered in the singer-songwriter category. According to the Choctaw Nation's contemporary account, they became the first father and son inducted into the Hall together; Rich, then 43, was also its youngest inductee at that time. Rich called it “a huge honor” and said he was proud to have shared the stage with his father.
A father who had studied chemistry and biology, become a periodontal surgeon, taught future dental professionals, handled falcons, studied reptiles, hunted, fished, played ball, and eventually learned the bass was standing beside the boy with whom he had learned music.
The boy had grown up, gone to Nashville, made records, charted singles, toured, and come home.
Behind both of them was Ramona, the 12-year-old girl who had once arrived at Chilocco intimidated by a campus of a thousand students, who later became a biologist, athlete, wife, mother, grandmother, and children's advocate. Public profiles record that Doc and Ramona's family eventually grew to include five grandchildren.
The Native thread also runs through the generations. Ramona is Choctaw; in her oral history she described Doc as having Cherokee ancestry, and the Choctaw Nation identifies Rich as a tribal member.
Today, the great stages are only one part of the story...
Doc still turns up where music is made simply because people want to make it. Audrey's Wedding Chapel in Fairland, Oklahoma, became one of those places—a community gathering where bluegrass widened over the years into country, Americana, rock, rhythm and blues, jazz, and gospel, usually accompanied by food and the easy fellowship of people who knew one another. Doc was performing there at least as early as 2017, according to an archived performance listing.
Even now, with age imposing limits that youth never considered, music remains part of his routine. His friend and aide Nellie often sings beside him; sometimes Ramona joins in. Doc may have a guitar or bass nearby. The songs do not have to be on Billboard. Nobody has to be selling tickets.
That, ultimately, may be the most revealing thing about the McCready family.
Their story contains awards, professional credentials, chart records, laboratories, operating rooms, college classrooms, Nashville, and a Hall of Fame. Yet its emotional center is much smaller: two science students graduating together and marrying the following day; a father and son learning instruments together; a mother who spent much of her life helping children because other people had once helped her; a recording studio built close to home; and an old musician still showing up when friends gather to play.
Doc has spent most of his life repairing things—sometimes bone and tissue, sometimes a song that needed another pass, sometimes simply whatever life placed in front of him.
Rich took the music farther than his father probably imagined when the two first began playing together.
Then he brought part of it home.
And more than 60 years after William McCready and Ramona Williams appeared together on the same college commencement program, the McCready story still sounds less like a collection of careers than a single theme played in variations:
science, family, service, and music—and the determination to keep learning the next part.
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