Musings Of A Muleskinner--Deke Dickerson's Blog

Runes of The San Fernando Valley

2011-12-07T12:00:00.001-08:00

RUNE STONES, STRIP MALLS, AND OUR MOMENT IN TIME

I’m fascinated by the history of civilizations, and the signs and symbols they leave behind. Just turn on the History Channel and watch endless hours of programming deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics, Norse runes, Paleolithic cave paintings, and other mysterious forms of communication that humans left as proof of their existence.

With all the attention given such ancient artifacts, given a sense of perspective one can’t help but realize that these amazing glimpses into previous epochs were no big deal to the people who lived in those times. Cave paintings? Undoubtedly the graffiti of some bored everyman stuck in a cave during a cold spell. Rune stones? The ones that have surfaced tell of general events of the day, the scratched-stone equivalent of a local newspaper. Egyptian artifacts? The Egyptians meant for their dead to stay buried, not looted by thieves and dissected by scientists. The point is, none of these people thought that they were leaving something behind that would be intensely studied by future generations, keen on unlocking the secrets of their society.

With that in mind, I began wondering to myself about the present. We as Americans have been raised at birth to think of ourselves as the center of the universe, but other than a few marble monuments and presidents carved into the side of a mountain, what symbols and signs would we leave for future generations to decipher who we were?

The answer, I came to realize, is that in the last two hundred years or so, most of what we’ve left behind are things made of paper, plastic, wood, and other mediums that will not survive into the future the same way that rune stones and cave paintings have. For instance, McDonald’s restaurants are undoubtedly the most revealing look into American eating habits of the present day, but would any evidence of McDonald’s survive two thousand years? I suppose if you count the Styrofoam containers they used to put McDonald’s hamburgers in back in the 1980's, you’re probably right. The legacy of the McDonald’s brand, however, is a different story. The buildings, advertising, and products themselves are made of stucco, particle board, paper, cardboard, and other things that wouldn’t survive a couple of bad winters, much less a millennium. I’m guessing a thousand years from now some kid will dig up a Happy Meal toy of the Hamburglar in his back yard, and it will be sent to a university for study of its meaning (this assumption based on the hopeful premise that McDonald’s will have disappeared from the planet in a thousand years).

Now that much of our society and human interaction has gone online and digital, the distinction (and the shelf-life) is even greater. Just try reading some of your old floppy disks from 12 years ago, if you can get your monolithic PC to work at all. Undoubtedly much of the written word in the next hundred years will be lost with one nasty solar flare on the electrical grid, gone in one digital blip.

With all that in mind, I began thinking about my surroundings. What was there in my civilization that signified what my culture was about? What symbols were there that I could recognize as signs of my society?

Laugh if you must, but in the midst of this soul-searching, a journey for my own sense of place in history, I believe I have discovered the runes of the San Fernando Valley.

The San Fernando Valley is the sort of place that baffles city planners and is spoken of with disgust by the East Coast effete. It is the great American suburb run amok, expansion that happened so quickly and turbulently that now we are left with an area that would be America’s fourth largest city, if it were to secede from greater Los Angeles. In the Valley’s great area of population, there is no central gathering place, no downtown, no real sense of self—just a hundred little villages from the earlier part of the Twentieth Century that all grew into each other to form one dazzlingly large single-cell organism, like a fungi of unbridled capitalism and humankind.

Across the hill in the greater Los Angeles basin, Hollywood hipsters have the luxury of walking out the front door to find piss-soaked winos in their doorway, or the window broken out in their car, stereo removed. In exchange, they are allowed to live within earshot of the thumping loud dance club down the street. This particular logic might appeal to the displaced East Coaster, but I always felt at home in the middle of Super-suburbia, knowing that if I wanted to go see a show or attend a movie premiere, I just had to drive 15 minutes over the hill. After all the Big City excitement, I could drive back to my quiet little street in the Valley, and if I accidentally forgot to lock my car doors, everything would still be there in the morning. For me, Midwestern transplant that I was, the Valley just made sense, city planners be damned.

The San Fernando Valley was, up until the middle of the last century, a fertile valley for farming and livestock. Huge ranches and orchards took up giant chunks of acreage, with small pockets of civilization popping up around its perimeter (Ventura Boulevard, for example).

The Valley stayed mostly farmland, due to an annoying habit of massively flooding every ten years. Developers waited, drooling uncontrollably, until the city planners devised a solution—to contain the Los Angeles River within a concrete waterslide diverted directly to the Sepulveda Flood Basin in the middle of Valley. The “channelization” project, as implemented by the Federal Army Corps of Engineers, started in 1938 and was finished in 1960.

Once the river had been contained—now a humorous trickle down the middle of a series of cavernous concrete flood channels—the law of supply and demand took over. After World War Two ended, the San Fernando Valley expanded at an incredible rate, bursting from the South end of the Valley to the North, over the years taking over the ranches and Orange groves and putting hundreds of ranch-style homes in their place. Everyone had jobs, everyone had money, and these people needed places to live.

At first glance, it is hard to imagine a place in the United States less suited to societal study than the San Fernando Valley. After all, the Valley is less than a hundred years old, and it’s unremarkable in terms of historical events, architecture, and population makeup. What is there, if anything, that resembles a rune stone, a cave painting, or hieroglyphics?

It took me years to absorb my surroundings in the Valley. The untrained eye would simply dismiss the entirety of the region as generic housing for the masses. In many cases it was, but then I started noticing the symbols. Silly as it may seem, upon closer inspection, these were what I had been looking for—the secret symbols of the San Fernando Valley.

I started seeing them everywhere once I finally noticed them. The most common one was a square or rectangle with branches on each side, framed by a larger square or rectangle. There were variations, dozens and dozens of variations on the same theme.

Once I noticed them, I started photographing them. In the course of two or three years, with a frenzy of real estate “flipping” and remodeling, many of these symbols disappeared, replaced with generic Home Depot windows, made in China by the millions.

I realized, as I watched these things disappear, that the San Fernando Valley symbols were never going to make it to another millennium. These symbols were going to be remodeled into oblivion. I thought about how many rune stones had been repurposed into making buildings or stone walls, and how they used to have so many mummies in Egypt that you could actually buy ground-up mummies to use as paper pulp, brown dye, and a medicinal supplement (true). The whole trick with a society and their symbols is that when that society was active, these things were commonplace. The symbols gain meaning when the society disappears, and there are only a few examples left of their symbols to study.

I began to search to see if the San Fernando Valley’s symbols had any real meaning. After doing a fair amount of research, I couldn’t find any exact corollaries with the Valley symbols. A complete perusal of Symbols.com and SymbolDictionary.com found several close matches, one of which pointed to an ancient chemical symbol for Vitriol, another that revealed an ancient Mariner symbol for a Buddhist temple, and another that indicated the design of an ancient Swedish board game. None of these seemed like the San Fernando Valley homebuilder’s intent.

It’s possible that the design was borrowed from a generic architect’s vision of a Buddhist temple symbol, but in true L.A. fashion the symbols are on houses with an Oriental theme, as well as houses with a Colonial flair, and on houses that look like a 1950’s flying saucer. If there was supposed to be an Asian motif behind the symbol in the first place, these builders apparently didn’t seem to care.

I tend to think that the designs are meant to be Asian, or in that great California way, meant to make you feel an Asian feeling. On the other hand, the only time I've seen something eerily similar was on a trip to England, on a random house outside London.

So, if anything, what do they mean? Perhaps they don’t mean anything. It very well could be that the homebuilders of the 1950’s and 1960’s just needed quickie decorative elements on the outside of the houses they were throwing up in slapdash fashion. Maybe, but the amount of variation and creativity displayed in the many designs suggests there is more to it than that.

I prefer to think that in some “Mad Men” architect’s office fifty years ago, there was an operative of the Illuminati whose mission it was to impart a campaign of secret symbols throughout the Valley. Several hundred years from now, some author will write a ‘Da Vinci Code’-type novel based on the secret symbols of the San Fernando Valley, finally deciphering what these ubiquitous, yet mysterious, symbols were trying to tell us all along.

In the meantime, as I walk these streets (who am I kidding—as I drive these streets), I see them. Hundreds of them, like silent sentinels, guarding their tract houses like ancient lamb’s blood on the door. Whatever they are supposed to mean, these runes of the San Fernando Valley are disappearing with every passing day. I hope to bring attention to them, before they are all gone.

When I saw how quickly the symbols of the Valley were disappearing, I decided that in my own small way, I would help to preserve them. When my garage window became so ravaged by time and sun that it needed replacing, I decided to fill it in with something else--a brand new secret symbol of the San Fernando Valley.

What’s in your Valley? What objects do you walk by every day? I hope that wherever you live, you find something that represents a symbol of your society, no matter how unexplainable and potentially silly they may be. Open your eyes and let the possibilities exist.

Deke Dickerson, Northridge, CA

Below: More examples of the mysterious San Fernando Valley symbols. Do you have more to share? Email the author here.

The Maddox Brothers and Rose, country music royalty

2011-10-17T22:54:00.000-07:00

The Maddox Brothers and Rose, immediately after they migrated from Alabama to California in 1933 (Kenneth, aka "Don Juan" Maddox, on the right, age 11 years in this photo). At this time they joined hundreds of other depression-era families who lived in abandoned drainage pipes in what was called "Pipe City" in Oakland, CA.

From left to right: Fred, Don, and Cal Maddox, live on stage mid-1950's. Previously unpublished photograph.

Below: Don Maddox and myself, Medford, Oregon, 2009.

Did you ever see a "Twin Six" guitar?

2011-10-17T22:41:00.000-07:00

From the book "Appalachian Portraits" by Shelby Lynn Adams

2011-10-17T22:07:00.000-07:00

Yes, these photos are real.

Don't forget to attend "HILLBILLYFEST" this Saturday night at Joe's in Burbank, CA.

WILLIE DIXON--Blues Songwriter and Bass Player Extraordinaire

2011-06-05T11:42:00.000-07:00

“I BUNCHED ‘EM”—My favorite authentic bluesman story

Willie Dixon was the first real bluesman I ever saw live. I was thirteen years old, infatuated with the guitar, and living life as an uncoordinated, gangly teenager in the country outside Columbia, Missouri.

By the time I was thirteen, I was doing my own radio show on public station KOPN in Columbia, where a great man named Bill Wax mentored me on music (don’t be too impressed about having my own show, it was public radio, after all, and I followed “The Puppet Lady,” who was a woman who, indeed, performed puppet shows…on the RADIO).

Bill Wax, at the time Music Director for KOPN, was one of many obsessed music freaks (and I mean this as the highest compliment) that I have had the pleasure of knowing in my lifetime. Listening to his own show on KOPN, I vividly remember the first time I ever heard Louis Jordan—on a two-hour special dedicated to Jordan’s music. Thinking about this now, it boggles the mind—who dedicates a two hour timeslot to Louis Jordan in the wilderness days of the early 1980s? The answer: A lunatic like Bill Wax.

Bill turned me on to blues music. I had a negative image of blues at the time, because I hated (and still hate) eternal jams of soulless, wanking blues music created by white people. You know, the type of blues music that actually sells millions of albums. I thought that blues music was something that hairy hippies did to torture people.

My first guitar teacher was one of those guys, a Carlos Santana-look-alike that grimaced and made faces as he played solo after endless solo, apparently feeling some sort of soulful catharsis that did not provoke the same emotions in me. In fact, his blues soloing made me dream about killing him, so that I would never have to hear his guitar playing ever again. When he told me that I had to quit listening to Buddy Holly if I ever wanted to get any better on the guitar, I promptly quit taking guitar lessons (and I still love Buddy Holly).

Bill Wax convinced me, a jaded 13-year old snot-nosed rockabilly kid, that real black blues music was “the shit,” to use his term. He turned me on to lowdown guys like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Elmore James, as well as uptown guys like Louis Jordan and Bobby “Blue” Bland. I still remember hearing Howlin’ Wolf sing for the first time. It scared the hell out of me, it sounded violent and wicked and like a scream set to music. That was the moment when I knew that Howlin’ Wolf, despite record sales and monetary compensation that would indicate otherwise, was one million times greater than Eric Clapton or his ilk ever could be or would be.

I remember being in the KOPN broadcast studio in early 1983, when Bill Wax told me that Willie Dixon was coming to town, and that I needed to figure out a way to go see him play. I didn’t know who Willie Dixon was at the time, but I was given the two-dollar history that day at the studio, and I’ve spent the last thirty years learning about the rest of Willie Dixon’s story.

Willie Dixon is best known as blues music’s greatest songwriter. His pen is responsible for such classics as “Spoonful,” “Little Red Rooster,” “Hoochie Koochie Man,” “Wang Dang Doodle,” and even Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” (which Willie had to sue to get paid for—in the end Led Zeppelin settled out of court in Willie’s favor).

Willie Dixon was also one of the greatest acoustic slap-bass players of all time. He played bass for all the people that recorded at Chess Studios—not just the blues guys that you would expect, but also rock and roll artists, including the classic recordings of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. His bass playing skills went back to the 1940s and early 1950s when he was a member of the Big Three Trio, and his scary slap-bass solo on “Hard Notch Boogie Beat” is a tour-de-force that modern slap-bass players use as the benchmark of slap bass acrobatics.

Willie also produced records at Chess, something that went unaccredited back in the day. Many of the classic recordings made at Chess sounded the way they did because of Willie’s arranging skills, or his advice on how things should be done. The Chess Brothers paid Willie, but nothing like what he should have been paid for the influence he had on these million-selling records. In the end, Willie Dixon had the last laugh—long after the Chess empire had gone bankrupt, Willie Dixon’s estate bought the former Chess studios at 2120 South Michigan Avenue in Chicago, and turned the place into a museum run by Willie’s family.

When I found out about Willie Dixon coming to town, I begged my dad to take me to the Blue Note to see the show. The legal age to get into the club was twenty-one. There was no way I could go. I begged and begged and cajoled and pleaded. Somehow or another, through Bill Wax and a few other people in town that liked me, my dad talked the owners of the Blue Note (Phil Costello and Richard King) into letting me into the club to see the show, as a sort of “cultural education” project. I remember hearing my dad talking on the phone, promising Costello that he would personally watch me and make sure I didn’t drink.

The Blue Note is still there, in my hometown, and it is still the premier live music venue in one of the biggest college towns in the Midwest (the University of Missouri has its primary campus in Columbia). Today the Blue Note occupies a huge converted movie theater in downtown Columbia, where a thousand people can come to see national headlining acts. Back in the early 1980s, however, the club occupied a spot in a seedy strip along the Business Loop, in a sweat-and-beer-infused cinderblock room that held 250 people on a really good night.

The Blue Note was part of a long established “chittlin’ circuit” that slowly evolved into a “college circuit” as time went by. The circuit roughly went from Chicago to St. Louis to Columbia to Kansas City to Lincoln and/or Omaha, down to Tulsa, Oklahoma City and then Texas. This particular circuit must have started back in the days when the highway system was first evolving, and then it turned into a “follow the money” situation where a lot of live acts played that route because of the lucrative college gigs in each of these towns. When I was first going to shows in the 1980s, it was interesting to see old blues guys obviously playing the same towns on what was their old “chittlin’ circuit,” in the same week that a new upstart band like R.E.M. or The Replacements was playing at the same club.

Most people would qualify the original Blue Note as a ‘dive,’ but to a 13-year old kid with stars in his eyes, it was a magical palace of wonderment. My dad parked his car in the large gravel parking lot, and we went inside and sat at a wobbly table on duct-tape covered vinyl seats. After hearing the “grownups” at the radio station talk about the Blue Note for the better part of a year, I couldn’t believe I was actually inside the place, getting ready to hear live music! By god, I was excited.

The opening act was a local blues act called The Bel-Airs, who, like the Blue Note nightclub, are still around today. Led by two brothers, Dave and Dick Pruitt, the Bel-Airs were white guys, but they weren’t hippie blues wankers. I would eventually see the Bel-Airs hundreds of times, but this was my first time seeing them live in person. They were great, covering vintage blues songs, mixing it up with a few rockabilly classics like Warren Smith’s “Uranium Rock” and even a little soul with Joe Tex’ “Show Me.” I was floored at what I was seeing.

When it came time for the main event, I quickly learned a thing or two about legendary bluesmen. First of all, most of them are so burnt at how they were ripped off back in the day, that they play incredibly short sets. To accomplish this and still get paid by the club owner, they bring a band that performs a warm-up set, which in blues parlance is “killing time.” Willie’s band (and I apologize if any of them are reading this) was so completely unmemorable that I have no memory of what they played. All I remember is that I wanted to see Willie Dixon, and they were keeping me from seeing Willie Dixon, and it was way past my usual 8^th-grade bedtime.

I was lucky enough to see many of the great bluesmen (and blues women) at the Blue Note club growing up in Columbia. I saw John Lee Hooker, James Cotton, Pinetop Perkins, Etta James, Koko Taylor, Matt “Guitar” Murphy, Buddy Guy, Johnny Copeland, and many more during this era. Most of them followed the same formula—a half-baked “warm-up” set by the backing band, followed by the bluesman doing a short set of classics with one or two songs from the inevitable “new album,” and then a strong-armed, grifter-esque hustle to buy their incredibly overpriced merchandise after the show.

My one personal interaction with John Lee Hooker involved him refusing to sign a poster I’d removed from the wall for the Blue Note gig. He refused because I hadn’t bought anything from his merchandise stall. When I opened my wallet and showed him that this little punk-ass white kid literally had no money in his wallet, John Lee Hooker growled at me like an caged lion, angrily grabbed my poster and ‘wrote’ a slash mark across it, as if he were a pissed-off drug dealer in a hurry to get to his second job as a pimp. If I recall correctly, John Lee Hooker was selling cassette tapes at his show for twenty dollars—TWENTY DOLLARS—in an era where they usually retailed for five. I think my defaced poster (which I still own) and the story I’ve been telling for thirty years was a much better bargain in the long run. I’ll never forget getting the crap scared out of me by John Lee Hooker, that’s for sure!

When Willie Dixon finally took the stage that night, I was floored. I was dumbfounded. Here was the guy who wrote all those songs, the guy who played bass on all those records, a real honest-to-god hall-of-fame legend, ten feet in front of me. He was old! He was black! He was incredibly overweight! He was slapping the upright bass! It was everything that a 13-year old nerdy music-obsessed kid could hope for. When he spoke on the microphone, the whole club got whisper-silent. That was when I understood respect. Willie Dixon commanded and received ultimate respect.

That night was the first time I went to a nightclub and saw live music. In retrospect, seeing Willie Dixon as an introduction to live music was an incredibly lucky break. From that moment on, I couldn’t get enough. I discovered that even though I was 13 years old, I was six feet tall and the front door guy didn’t check ID’s. After a while, everybody at the Blue Note knew me anyway, and most of the time I was waved in without having to pay. I was incredibly blessed and fortunate to grow up seeing blues, country music, rock and roll, punk rock, soul, jazz, and just about any other form of music you could imagine. I can’t imagine how different my life would have turned out without the musical education afforded me by the Blue Note.

As my own musical career began, Phil Costello and Richard King gave my youthful bands experience when no one else would (kudos must also go to Johnny Hodges, the guy who ran a club in town called “Shattered”). Thirty-some years later, Richard King still owns the Blue Note, and still supports my career, booking me when I come back through Columbia.

I will always be grateful for the support I received during those early days—I’m not sure that many of the other jaded club owners across the country realize that they’re fostering the next generation of musicians when they’re dealing with teenage snot-nosed punks trying to play their clubs with their amateurish young bands.

What’s that, you say? The Willie Dixon story promised at the beginning of this rambling trip down Memory Lane? Yes, let’s wrap up this tale with a Willie Dixon anecdote that still ranks as my favorite bluesman story of all time.

Dick Pruitt of the Bel-Airs told me this story about Willie decades after the fact. The Bel-Airs were doing a run of shows as the opening act for Willie, and on the same tour after I saw them and Willie play at the Blue Note, they played at a club in Lincoln, Nebraska.

The club in Lincoln had put the Bel-Airs and Willie Dixon and his band in a dive motel. For a blues legend like Willie Dixon, it was an insult, but undoubtedly it was like thousands of other substandard hotel rooms he had stayed in during his long career.

Dick remembers that their band hotel room was full of flies. Not just a couple flies buzzing around, but an outright fly infestation. He couldn’t stand hanging out in the room, so he was walking around outside, and decided to pay Willie a visit. Willie let Dick into his room, and they were talking about the tour, and how the shows were going.

Dick Pruitt then noticed that Willie’s room was free of the flies that had infested their room several doors down. When asked how come Willie’s room didn’t have the flies buzzing around like theirs did, Willie Dixon had a perfectly reasonable reply:

“I bunched ‘em,” replied Willie, in his trademark, throaty, deep bluesman voice.

Unsure of what this meant, Dick looked around the room. In the far corner of Willie Dixon’s motel room was a large pile of human crap, covered with flies.

That, to me, will always be what the blues are all about.

Deke Dickerson

Below: A newspaper article from the Columbia Daily Tribune following Willie's appearance at the Blue Note, May 2, 1983.

JOHNNY MEEKS’ FORGOTTEN TRIPLE-NECK GUITAR

2011-05-14T21:47:00.000-07:00

A GUITAR MYSTERY SOLVED—Gene Vincent’s legendary guitarist Johnny Meeks and his triple-neck solidbody electric guitar

“Why, you’re the first to ever ask me about that damn triple-neck guitar,” said the gentle South Carolina accent on the other end of the phone.

The voice belonged to Johnny Meeks, a guitar player whose name is instantly recognizable to fans of legendary rockabilly star Gene Vincent. Johnny Meeks was Vincent’s second guitar player--brought to the Blue Caps band in 1957 after their first guitarist, the also-legendary Cliff Gallup, quit due to the rigors of touring.

Cliff Gallup brought a country-jazz sensibility to Vincent’s music, but Johnny Meeks brought a tough rock and roll twang that gave life to such classics as “Lotta Lovin’,” “Dance To The Bop,” “Baby Blue,” and many more. Despite the fact that Johnny Meeks’ tenure with Gene Vincent’s band lasted less than two years, his guitar approach gave Gene Vincent a solid second half of his original career, and Meeks’ trebly tone set the stage for instrumental and surf music that came in the following years.

Below: The 1950's in Technicolor: Johnny Meeks, in the back center, behind Gene Vincent, foreground.

Those who enjoy the science of “Guitar Geekery” know that Johnny was most famous for playing a blonde 1957 Fender Stratocaster (dubbed the “Mary Kaye Strat” by collectors from a publicity picture showing the famous female jazz player holding a similarly appointed Stratocaster). The truth was that Mary Kaye held the guitar in the promotional photograph for five minutes and then went back to playing her D’Angelico archtop.

Johnny Meeks, on the other hand, took his blonde Strat on the road, hitting gymnasiums in Milwaukee and clubs in Dallas and wherever else you can think of, shows sandwiched in between trips to the Capitol Tower in Hollywood for recording sessions. In retrospect, a more accurate name for the blonde Stratocasters made in 1957 and 1958 would be the “Johnny Meeks Strat.”

Below: Johnny Meeks (left) and the Blue Caps record at the Capitol Tower, Hollywood. Note entire band is plugged into one amplifier!

To see these two-dimensional characters come to life, see Johnny Meeks wail on his blonde Strat here, from the 1957 movie "Hot Rod Gang."

True scholars of Johnny Meeks’ tenure with Gene Vincent also know that he briefly played a Gretsch 6120 before getting the Strat. This Gretsch can be seen on Gene’s Ed Sullivan Show appearance here. It’s interesting to note that Johnny played on the treble pickup on the Gretsch and got some pretty impressive Fender-like tones out of the 6120. It is fair to say a great deal of the magic came from the man’s hands.

Below, a picture of Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps recording at the Capitol Tower, Hollywood, California. Johnny Meeks is seen on the right playing a Gretsch 6120.

What piqued this Guitar Geek’s interest, however, were two photos circulating on the Internet showing Johnny Meeks holding a black and white triple-necked electric guitar. No one seemed to know exactly what it was. Some ventured a guess that it was made by Doc Kauffmann, the California-via-Kansas inventor responsible for the Kauffmann hand vibrato, and the first mass-produced guitars that Leo Fender had a hand in (1940’s “Vibro” and “K&F” guitars were Doc and Leo-produced instruments). Doc Kauffmann also made a series of “Kremo-Kustom” guitars, which looked quite similar to the Johnny Meeks triple-neck guitar. Doc made Kremo-Kustom double-necks and triple-necks, and used a black and white color scheme. My first thought was that Meeks' triple-neck almost certainly had to be a Doc Kauffmann Kremo-Kustom instrument.

Below: A Doc Kauffmann Kremo-Kustom triple-neck guitar.

Johnny Meeks is still with us. He is not an easy guy to find, but not because of stardom or any ill will towards his fans. The truth is that he lives in a small town in South Carolina, doesn’t have a computer, doesn’t have a cell phone, and he likes it that way. Meeks spent years in Los Angeles hammering away at the clubs, doing stints in various touring bands (Meeks played with The Champs of “Tequila” fame, played in the house band at the Palomino Club, and toured for a while with Merle Haggard). These days he’s back in South Carolina, semi-retired, and doing little gigs here and there to stay busy.

Hear Johnny’s cool instrumental “Red Eye” by The Champs here).

Below: a photo of Johnny Meeks, right, with The Champs.

After getting his phone number from Blue Caps drummer Dickie Harrell, I gave Meeks a call and found him getting ready to go to a show at the local swap meet. I told him how we’d played together a few times nearly twenty years previous, but he had no memory of the shows.

Below: A photo of Johnny Meeks, center, on stage with the Dave & Deke Combo at the Palomino Club, circa 1991-1992. The author is at left.

When the small talk subsided, I asked him about the triple-neck guitar.

“A boy in Greenville, South Carolina made that guitar. His name was ‘Pee Wee’ Melton, and he could pick, boy he could pick. He made that guitar for himself, and I asked him if he would sell it to me, and he did.

“It was right after that I got hired by Gene (Vincent). A lot of people joked that Gene wanted the guitar, not me! That might have been the case, I don’t know, but it was an attention-getting guitar, for sure.

“I used the guitar when I first went on the road with Gene. Not long after that, Gene bought the guitar from me, and started using it himself. Not to play, ‘cause Gene couldn’t really play, but he used it as a stage prop, and it got lots of attention.

“I had two stints with Gene, with about a month or two in between after I left the first time. When I came back to play with him again, the guitar was gone. I never did find out from Gene what happened to it. It’s got to be out there somewhere, right? I mean, you don’t just lose a triple-neck guitar!”

Below: A poor quality picture pulled from the internet, the only other known photo of Meeks with the tripleneck guitar.

Meeks recalls that the three necks included a standard 6-string guitar, a 4-string mandolin, and a 12-string that he tuned both to standard 12-string tuning and the “Stratosphere” tuning, where the paired strings were tuned in minor and major thirds, allowing for a “twin guitar” effect.

Not much is known about the maker, ‘Pee Wee’ Melton, but there is a brief bio on the ‘Find-A-Grave’ website. Apparently Melton had a stint in Nashville as a session guitarist, and wrote such songs as “High Tech Redneck.” See Pee Wee’s memorial page here.

Gene Vincent kept touring, kept playing, and kept making records, until he died of a bleeding ulcer in 1971 at the age of 36. After Johnny Meeks left his band, he never regained the momentum his career had with “Be-Bop-A-Lula” and “Lotta Lovin’.”

Johnny Meeks, one of the last men standing from the wild days of the 1950’s, jokes about his 57 years of playing experience: “Around here, they say well, you played with Gene Vincent, you played with the Champs, you played with Merle Haggard…how come you can’t keep a job?”

Two faded snapshots, one man’s memory, and a forgotten guitar—these are all that remain of ‘Pee Wee’ Melton’s triple-neck instrument. The mystery may be solved for the time being, but the guitar is still out there somewhere. Only if the winding rivers known as Fate and Lady Luck intertwine will we ever know more.

Written by Deke Dickerson

LEFTY FRIZZELL--"He Died From Heartbreak"

2011-05-11T23:53:00.000-07:00

LEFTY FRIZZELL—Liner notes to the Bear Family CD "STEPPIN' OUT"

Lefty Frizzell was the greatest honky-tonk singer of all time—if you ask the most educated and highly opinionated fans of country music, that is. Blessed with a voice that came naturally to him—a voice that held so much soul and carried such infinite layers of emotional expression, that grown men were oft-moved to tears—Lefty was also cursed with bad habits and a downward career path that left him dead in 1975 at the tragically young age of 47.

This compilation of tracks, part of the ‘Gonna Shake This Shack’ series, seeks to compile all the up-tempo numbers—hillbilly boogie, rockabilly, borderline rock and roll and hard late 1950s country—for a package that will undoubtedly appeal to crowd of rockabilly fans and those seeking to have a lone Lefty Frizzell disc in their collection.

Let it be known, however, that a disc that contains only the uptempo Lefty Frizzell numbers is much like a painting that uses only two of the primary colors. Lefty’s incredible depth of emotion lent itself best to plaintive ballads and waltzes, and although the uptempo numbers are also great, if you really want to experience the full breadth of Lefty’s talent this author urges you to seek out the most essential of Bear Family box sets, ‘Life’s Like Poetry.’ (BCD 15550)

William Orville ‘Lefty’ Frizzell was born March 31, 1928 in the oil and farm town of Corsicana, Texas, about 50 miles southeast of Dallas. As a young child, his family moved to El Dorado, Arkansas, where they remained until Lefty was a teenager. Although the family would always call him ‘Sonny,’ since he was the first boy in the family, the nickname ‘Lefty’ was acquired during a school fight with another boy. The nickname—which came because Lefty led with his left hand in the fight—stuck with him throughout his life, even though Lefty played his guitar right-handed.

As a child, Lefty loved music and began playing guitar at a young age, even securing a spot on a children’s radio show on the local station KELD at the age of 12. When the Frizzell family moved back to Texas, Lefty won a talent contest in Dallas, which bolstered the youngster to continue in music, which he did, alternating between working in the Texas oilfields and performing at honky-tonks on the weekends.

In 1945, Lefty wed Alice Harper, when both of them were 16 years old and too young to get married without parental permission. Soon afterward their first child, Lois, was born, and in 1946 Lefty and his new family moved to New Mexico in search of a better life, first to Capitan and then to Roswell, a then-booming Army town close to the West Texas border.

Lefty pursued singing and writing songs in Roswell, while Alice worked at a downtown café. A local musician had a Wilcox-Gay disc recorder, and Lefty begged to get some of his songs recorded on the primitive device, such was his desire to become a professional singer.

Times were tough and the family nearly starved to death, circumstances made worse by Lefty’s tendency to get in trouble with the law. Eight days after the legendary Roswell ‘U.F.O.’ crash happened in Roswell in July 1947, Lefty was arrested and served six months in the Roswell jail for what he called “fightin’ and carryin’ on” in a later interview. In reality, the charges were statutory rape, a married 19-year old man caught with a 14-year old girl. The time Lefty spent in jail just about killed him, wondering if Alice would take their new baby Lois and leave.

Whether ‘U.F.O.’ crashes or captured alien beings played into the equation, Lefty wrote the first of many future hit songs in the Roswell jail in September 1947, I Love You A Thousand Ways. The song was a plaintive apology to his wife Alice for his misdeeds.

Upon release in early 1948, Lefty and family moved back to Texas, where eventually he would set up a residency at the Ace of Clubs in Big Spring, a club gig that would last more than a year. Lefty’s original songs were popular with the local crowds, and on many occasions people recommended that Lefty should try making records.

Eventually Lefty heard about a talent scout in Dallas by the name of Jim Beck, and he set out on the 300-mile trip from Big Spring to Dallas in April 1950, to audition for Beck, the pleasure of which cost Lefty and his band one hundred of their hard-earned dollars.

Dallas, Texas in the late 1940’s was quickly establishing itself as a country music hub. There was a large ‘Opry’-type show there, the ‘Big ‘D’ Jamboree,’ which drew thousands each week to the Sportatorium in downtown Dallas. The show was broadcast on the radio to most of the southern United States.

Jim Beck was a magnet for talent in the area, where he not only ran the only real professional recording studio in Dallas at the time, but also through his work as a talent scout and A&R man for such labels as Columbia, King, Bullet, and Imperial.

Columbia Records in particular drew a lot of talent from the Dallas area, signing hillbilly acts like Frankie Miller and Charlie Adams, and rockabilly acts like Sid King and the Five Strings, among others. Included in that talent pool, and the greatest discovery for Beck and Columbia Records, was a fresh-faced kid named Lefty Frizzell.

While Beck was mildly interested in Frizzell’s ballads, it wasn’t until Lefty sang him a new song he had been working on, If You’ve Got The Money (I’ve Got The Time) that Beck’s ears really perked up. There are many versions of the story, and fifty years later it is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff in deciphering these many accounts, but what counts is that by July 1950 Lefty was recording his first session at Jim Beck’s studio as a newly signed Columbia Recording artist.

This compilation begins with a track that makes buying this CD essential—an unreleased track from 1950 that didn’t make it on the original Bear Family box set due to licensing problems at the time. Steppin’ Out is a wonderful slice of honky tonk—co-written by Hank Williams and Jimmy Fields—that is heard on compact disc for the first time here—a rare 45 reissue of the song was released in the 1980s, but is finally here on CD for the Lefty fanatics.

Lefty’s first few sessions in 1950 and 1951 resulted in several of the biggest hits of his career—If You’ve Got The Money (I’ve Got The Time), I Love You A Thousand Ways, My Baby’s Just Like Money, I Want To Be With You Always, Always Late (With Your Kisses), Mom And Dad’s Waltz, and Don’t Stay Away (Till Love Grows Cold). These early successes would be the biggest hits Lefty would ever have (save for the #1 hit Saginaw, Michigan in 1964), and although he would have charted records sporadically even into the 1970s, these songs would be forever known as his greatest hits.

From these early sessions, with their primal musical backing (featuring the mysterious Madge Sutee, a piano-pounding female in the Del Wood tradition), we have included here the up-tempo numbers Shine, Shave, Shower (It’s Saturday), When Payday Comes Around, You Want Everything But Me, Give Me More, More (Of Your Kisses), If You Can Spare The Time (I Won’t Miss The Money), I Won’t Be Good For Nothin’, and I’m An Old, Old Man (Tryin’ To Live While I Can). None of these were big hits, but all of these are excellent examples of 1950s Texas honky-tonk. To modern ears the barrelhouse piano and loose arrangements may make the Jim Beck recordings of this era sound quite primitive and dated, but this is exactly the way bands of this era sounded in the dusty Texas icehouses and taverns.

Lefty’s first flush of success brought large sums of money, even after Jim Beck’s “songwriting” cut and Jim Bulleit’s “publishing” cut (sadly, this was a defining theme in Lefty’s career—he trusted the people around him, all of whom cut themselves in to large chunks of his money, usually for some easy money up front as an advance). Lefty, like Hank Williams and Elvis Presley, was another poor country boy with no training on how to deal with success and the money that came with it.

These early years brought Cadillacs, fancy Western Suits, a tour bus, an airplane, and all the accoutrements of hillbilly flash that a hot young star could want. Soon Lefty had a flashy new Gibson SJ-200 guitar, the top of the line instrument that the Gibson company made. To add icing to the cake, not long after buying the guitar he took it to Paul Bigsby in California to have a new custom neck put on, and a custom pick guard with Lefty’s name inlaid on it. This guitar would be the iconic representation of Lefty’s image for many years to come, and though he sometimes toured with other guitars, Lefty kept the guitar until the day he died. After Lefty died, it was displayed in the Country Music Hall Of Fame for decades (the instrument was finally sold last year, and the buyer was none other than Merle Haggard).

In 1951 Lefty was invited to be a cast member of the WSM ‘Grand Old Opry’ in Nashville, where he shared a dressing room and co-star billing with another bright light of the era—Hank Williams. Though the two had jived between each other about who was the bigger star, there was more a friendly rivalry than anything else.

In the liner notes that Charles Wolfe wrote for the ‘Life’s Like Poetry’ box set, Disc Jockey Hugh Cherry remembered a conversation between Lefty and Hank that took place in 1951 at Eddie Dubois’ Key Club in Printers Alley in Nashville: “We (Hugh and Hank) were sitting there and Lefty came in by himself, a little greased, and sat down with us. Hank decided to feign displeasure with Lefty, and he started out by saying, ‘Here boy, why don’t you just stay down in Texas, this is my territory up here.’ This was about the time that Lefty had all the chart songs, and Lefty got that big smile on his face, and said, ‘Hank, the whole damn country is the back yard of both of us; can’t you realize there’s enough room for all of us?’ Hank kind of smiled and said, ‘Well, I was just kidding. Actually, it’s good to have a little competition. Makes me realize I got to work harder than ever. And boy, you’re the best competition I ever had.’ That pleased Frizzell very much, because there really was a great admiration which existed between the two.”

Lefty’s tenure on the Opry was short-lived. Most people in the business of Country Music know that Opry membership is a double-edged sword—while the exposure and popularity of the show is unparalleled, the money that the Opry pays its performers is often a mere fraction of what a ‘hot’ artist can make on a Saturday night. As a result, Lefty’s manager of the time (Jack Starnes, one half of Starday Records in Texas) began booking Lefty on a hectic string of performances all across the United States, forfeiting Opry membership. In retrospect, it may have been a prudent financial decision at the time, but ultimately hurt Lefty’s popularity in the long run.

It didn’t take long—barely a year or two—before the flush of success and fame and money became too much for Lefty to handle. He was always a drinker, but now the temptations of roaring all night were often too strong to resist. In the same way that people today love to tell George ‘No-Show’ Jones stories, in the early 1950s ‘Lefty Frizzell stories’ were a commonplace discussion amongst country music fans. It was a reputation, albeit well deserved, that Lefty would carry until his death.

A common practice in the early days of country music involved a star hiring a ‘front man,’ or another singer and M.C. who would warm up the audience before the star came out. Lefty was no exception, but Lefty’s front men were expected not only to warm up the audience, but also to handle the often too-drunk-to-perform and belligerent ‘star’ backstage. Freddie Hart, who later became a big star in his own right, began his career as one of Lefty’s front men. Hart has nothing but positive things to say about his former boss, and credits Lefty with discovering him and getting him his first recording contract—but tells of many nights where he would have to perform the entire show to a crowd of disappointed and angry patrons, with Lefty backstage unable to perform.

The years 1951 through 1955 were turbulent ones for Lefty. The management relationship with Jack Starnes soured, resulting in a lawsuit against Lefty, settled out of court, that took away most of the royalties of the earlier recordings, as well as his excellent touring band. Lefty soon found management and musicians through J.D. Miller in Crowley, Louisiana, including the excellent front man Lou Millet, but the relationship was again short-lived. By 1953 Lefty and his family had relocated to California, where Lefty found a new manager—Steve Stebbins— and joined the cast of the ‘Town Hall Party’ television show.

The biggest problem amongst all this turmoil in Lefty’s life through these years was the lack of hits. The new sensation that had four songs in the top ten in 1951 barely dented the charts in the mid-1950s. Many great performances were released during this time, but none of them had the chart magic to click with the buying public. You Can Count On Me and Run ‘Em Off, from 1953, and Mama, from 1954, are found on this collection, superb tunes but ignored at the time of their release.

If one had to mark a place in Lefty’s career that delineated the early years from the later years, it would have to be the year 1956 and the change of recording from Dallas to Nashville. Lefty had continued to record in Dallas at Jim Beck’s studio, mostly at the behest of Columbia A&R man Don Law. What few people know today is that Law was preparing to make Dallas the center of Columbia’s country music recording, and Decca Records’ Paul Cohen was about to do the same, decisions that would have placed Dallas as the “Country Music Capital of the world,” instead of Nashville.

What transpired is a little-known event but one that shook the landscape of country music recording—Jim Beck died in May 1956 after cleaning his tape recorders with carbon tetrachloride, an effective but deadly solution that requires adequate ventilation and short exposure times. Beck ignored these dangers and inhaled too much of the cleaning solution and died a week later, taking with him the future of country music recording in Dallas, Texas.

With Jim Beck out of the picture, Lefty began recording in Nashville at Owen Bradley’s recording studio just a few weeks after Beck’s death. What that meant in the big picture was a radical change in the sound of Lefty’s records, not only with a different, more ‘polished’ recording fidelity, but also with a completely different set of musicians. The end result, taken as a whole in Lefty’s oeuvre, is an obvious difference in the sound of the earlier Dallas recordings and the post-1956 Nashville recordings.

Just Can’t Live That Fast Anymore, recorded at the first session in Nashville, was one of Lefty’s best up-tempo records of the 1950s. This first session featured three of Hank Williams’ former band members—Sammy Pruett on guitar, Don Helms on steel guitar, and Jerry Rivers on fiddle—but if there was attempt to unite Lefty with Hank’s band on his return to Nashville, it was short-lived. Over the next fifteen years, Lefty would record mostly with the Nashville ‘A-Team’ session musicians, specifically with Grady Martin on lead guitar acting as de facto arranger and producer on most of his sessions.

Lefty was just too country to ever really record rock and roll or rockabilly, but like most of his contemporaries, Lefty saw Elvis Presley taking away a lot of the country music revenue, and Lefty flirted with the ‘Big Beat’ like nearly every other country artist of the day. While he would probably write off these records as novelties, and certainly not his best work, the fact remains that many of the tunes Lefty recorded from 1956-1959 have become favorites among the rockabilly cult.

Cuts included on this CD such as From An Angel To A Devil, No One To Talk To (But The Blues), Time Out For The Blues, My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It, Cigarettes and Coffee Blues, and You’re Humbugging Me exhibit all the qualities of great rockabilly, and with the band featuring Grady Martin on lead guitar, Bob Moore or Roy ‘Junior’ Huskey on bass, and Buddy Harman on drums, these records have the sound and feel of other records recorded at Bradley’s studio from around the same time.

A California session in March 1957 found Lefty recording with the ‘Town Hall Party’ band (featuring Joe Maphis on guitar), singing a duet with Johnny Bond on Sick, Sober, And Sorry, also included here. There were a pair of California sessions and a Nashville session in 1958 that had Lefty reprising his earlier hits with a more polished late-1950s sound (all for an updated ‘Greatest Hits’-type package released as ‘The One And Only Lefty Frizzell’). The versions of If You’ve Got The Money (I’ve Got The Time) and Always Late (With Your Kisses) found here date from these sessions, by no means Lefty’s finest hour but an interesting mix of 1950s pop-rock and country-western.

Around this same time in the mid-to-late-1950s, Lefty joined many of his contemporaries in the country music world by recording radio shows for the popular Armed Forces program ‘Country Music Time,’ broadcast by recorded transcriptions to soldiers across the USA and the world. These radio shows are a fascinating glimpse into what country music shows sounded like at that time, because the vast majority of these ‘Country Music Time’ transcriptions were recorded live in the studio with the singer and his or her touring band.

The Lefty Frizzell transcriptions feature great performances that are often quite different from his recordings (for instance, Lefty’s live version of Cigarettes And Coffee Blues heard here is much truer to Marty Robbins’ original demo version that Marty pitched to Lefty than the rockabilly-powered version released as a Columbia single), as well as instrumentals and performances by guest artists (Freddie Hart is included on several of these transcriptions, and here we have included Lefty’s brother David singing the popular Carl Mann hit Mona Lisa). From these transcriptions we have also included Desert Blues, Somebody’s Pushin’, Sunday Down In Tennessee, and You Win Again.

The last five tracks on this compilation date from the late 1950s and early 1960s and are more stone country than anything else, but they have that certain something that we feel will appeal to fans of the ‘Gonna Shake This Shack’ series. Farther Than My Eyes Can See is a great Freddie Hart composition, cut at the same session in July 1959 as My Blues Will Pass, both featuring the unmistakable sound of Grady Martin on guitar. So What! Let It Rain dates from 1960, and Heaven’s Plan dates from 1961, both being the closest Lefty ever came to a pop-rock crossover sound. The latest track on the CD is She’s Gone, Gone, Gone from 1965, a song which surprisingly has become a breakout hit in the last few years among the rockabilly and retro country crowd.

Although Lefty would make hundreds more recordings from 1960 until his death in 1975, the thirty-five tracks found on this CD best represent the hillbilly boogie and rockabilly side of Lefty Frizzell.

Lefty would ultimately have two of his biggest hits in 1959—The Long Black Veil—and 1964—Saginaw, Michigan, the latter being the biggest chart hit of his career. There was another front man and duet partner—Abe Mulkey—who would continue to perform with Lefty until his death. There would be thousands more shows, more short stops on the long way down, and a few more flirtations with the country music charts, before Lefty finally gave up the ghost and died July 19, 1975. He was only 47 years old, but in photos taken before his death, he looks like an elderly man, aged beyond his years.

Lefty’s singing style has left a longer-lasting impression than any of his 1950s contemporaries, mostly through the influence of Merle Haggard, who has admittedly taken the Frizzell slurred-syllable singing style as a cornerstone of his entire career, influencing more modern stars such as Randy Travis in the process.

In an interview with the author for a recent box set, Merle Haggard had this to say about Lefty’s death: “Lefty got his feelings hurt, and the thieves robbed him of his inspiration, and they robbed him of his money, too…and they took his songs. He should have been able to say, ‘I’m Lefty Frizzell.’ He was only 47 years old, he should have been sittin’ in that place Eddy Arnold had. But, because he was a poor boy, a little boy from Texas without any representation, man, they took him to the cleaners. Everybody did.”

Merle continues: “Lefty was a bright guy, but he was a very forgiving nature, very pleasant person, and I think he held it all inside. And I think it bothered him so much, that he had that stroke. He became very weak, in the last days, I talked to a lot of people around him. And he just kind of slowed down, and cuddled up and died, from heartbreak. Alice, his wife wasn’t satisfied with him, the music world had turned their back on him, he got beat out of all the money, he had outgrown the glory, and he didn’t have no reason to be alive…he knew that he had peaked out. And I think when you reach that point in your life, where you know that you’re not going to do anything else that will be worth a damn, I think you sort of start to shut down. Somethin’ will get you…and he was a blood clot waitin’ to happen, you know.”

This collection seeks to squarely focus on the good times, the honky-tonk high-water mark—Lefty Frizzell’s glory period of the 1950s and early 1960s. The boots still had a fine sheen to them, and the clothes were crisp and newly tailored. Enjoy the styling of the finest singer country music has ever known—a man from Corsicana, Texas, by the name of Lefty Frizzell.

Deke Dickerson

Thanks to Merle Haggard

FARON YOUNG--Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young

2011-05-11T23:33:00.000-07:00

FARON YOUNG --liner notes to the Bear Family CD “GONNA SHAKE THIS SHACK TONIGHT”

When Country Music Hall of Fame singer Faron Young was asked about the rockabilly and rock & roll sides he cut in the 1950s, his answer was simple: “I was not cut out to sing that kind of music,” he told David Booth, “but when you drop $400,000 a year, you’ll try anything you can. I’d have tried to paint myself black! When I hear any of that stuff today, I turn fourteen flips in the air, I hate it!”

What makes such a statement ironic is that while the teenage-themed pop-a-billy sides he waxed in the late 1950s were forced upon him and bear the authenticity of such, the fact remains that Faron Young’s hillbilly boogie songs of the early and mid 1950s were as influential to the new crop of rockabillies as anything else, with their braggadocio lyrical content and aggressive boogie-woogie guitar-based sound.

Songs like Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young, I’m Gonna Live Some Before I Die, and If You Ain’t Lovin (You Ain’t Livin’) preached a lifestyle that was immediately adapted by the first wave of rock and rollers as their own. Almost as importantly, Faron Young lived the kind of life he sang about, a life that would define “rock star behavior”—women, pills, booze, and lewdness of the highest order—which would become a mainstay of the four-letter word called Rock.

This disc encapsulates but a brief time in Faron Young’s long career, but is a perfect one to show how influential Faron was to the new music known as the Big Beat, and is the perfect compilation for those who prefer the uptempo hillbilly, rockabilly and rock & roll side of Faron Young.

Below: Faron and Patsy, in the good times.

For a better examination of Faron’s ten years on Capitol Records, check out the excellent Bear Family box set (BCD 15493) Faron Young—The Early Years 1952-1962, which takes you all the way from his early Hank Williams sound-alike recordings, to his lush countrypolitan hits of the early 1960s, and everything in between. Faron also kept recording for Mercury well into the 1970s, recording such notable hits as Wine Me Up and It’s Four in the Morning.

One thing that can be said of Faron’s 30-plus-year recording career is that he always kept up with current trends in music—which goes a long way to explain the recordings on this compilation, which spans nearly every trend in country music from the early 50s until the early 60s.

Faron was born on February 25, 1932 in Shreveport, Louisiana, a town that would weigh heavily on the ascent of his musical career. While he seems to have been raised in a typical depression-era household, he also appears to have been a typical middle-class American child of the post-war boom in every other way. He not only completed high school, but also attended college until the show business bug bit him. Country music seemed unimportant to his early life, preferring the pop music of the day such as Patti Page to the rough and rowdy hillbilly music that would eventually become his bread and butter.

What got Faron Young into music was his lifelong need for attention. He began entering amateur contests at a young age, singing pop songs and picking coins off the stage for pay, but appears to have been steered into the country music world when a man offered him five dollars to sing Jambalaya, instead of the twenty-five cents he was used to receiving for a typical pop request.

Faron’s quick rise to fame in the country music world can be explained quite simply—he was a good looking young man in the right place (Shreveport, home to the Louisiana Hayride) at the right time (the peak of Hank Williams popularity), with an unquenchable thirst to be somebody. As a detective might characterize it, Faron had means, motive and opportunity—of which he took full advantage.

As legend has it, Faron had a small bit of experience playing the clubs around Shreveport, but had great aspirations even from the start. His first break came when he auditioned songs for local star Webb Pierce. Rather than buying the compositions, Pierce instead liked Faron’s singing voice and began paying Faron to warm up his shows and sing for him when he got too drunk or tired (This is a time-honored tradition in the country music world. The position is called “front man” and is as ubiquitous in the country music world as a rapper’s “posse” is in the realm of hip-hop).

Faron stayed with Pierce for about a year as his front man, long enough for Pierce to get him on the Louisiana Hayride show, and to get Faron his first recording contract, with the tiny Pacemaker-Gotham label of Philadelphia (the same label that Pierce’s initial releases were on).

The first release with Faron’s own vocals was oddly credited to Tillman Franks, who played bass for Pierce and Faron. We’ve included both sides here, both great examples of primitive hillbilly boogie, Hi-Tone Poppa and Hot Rod Shotgun Boogie No. 2, which were originally released at Gotham 412.

Faron’s three releases on the Pacemaker-Gotham label didn’t sell at all outside of the local area, but again luck seemed to be on Faron’s side. Capitol Records A&R man Ken Nelson (a legendary figure responsible for signing the Louvin Brothers, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Gene Vincent and others to the label) heard a live broadcast by Pierce and Faron as he was driving to Dallas. Knowing that Pierce was signed to Decca, but sensing that the young singer might be available, Nelson turned his car around and drove back to Shreveport, where he offered Faron a Capitol recording contract on the spot. Faron Young would record with Capitol for the next ten years.

Faron liked to say that he had a hit with his first record on Capitol, but the truth is that it took three singles before he had his first bona fide hit, Goin’ Steady.

Goin’ Steady was much plagarism at it was creation. Recorded just months before Hank Williams died, and hitting its peak on the charts as the nation mourned his passing, the record could have been an unreleased Hank performance, such was Faron’s vocal imitation. As Faron himself admitted, “Everybody’s an imitator when they start, and believe me I had no style at all when I started.”

The Hank Williams parallel was based on real-life experience, too. Faron holds the dubious distinction of introducing Hank to Billie Jean Jones, on a trip to the Grand Ol’ Opry in the summer of 1952 (where Faron was invited to join the cast as a semi-regular guest). Billie Jean came to Nashville as Faron’s date and wound up marrying Hank Williams. Billie Jean would marry Johnny Horton after Hank’s death and became known in the country music world as “The Black Widow” after Horton’s tragic death in 1960. Asked if he had any bitter feelings about losing Billie Jean to Hank, Faron would state “I sure am glad ol’ Hank took her away from me because she’d have cost me a damn million dollars by now.”

Goin’ Steady was breaking on the charts just as Faron got inducted into the Army, in November of 1952. He went from making $500 a night to making $87.50 a month, however, although it seemed like a career killer at first, eventually Faron discovered it was another great opportunity for him.

With his status as a well-known singer, Faron was given the cushiest life a “soldier” could get. With a fan who was a Third Army General, Faron was allowed to continue appearing on the Opry, he was able to play small clubs near his Army base (in Fort McPherson, Georgia), he could still record new sessions for Capitol, and perhaps best of all, he was given the special assignment of recording transcriptions that were sent out to 2000 radio stations a week. It was great publicity he couldn’t buy as a civilian, but as a soldier he was getting more exposure than ever. Then, as now, a singing soldier dressed in fatigues was a powerful image and the country music fans ate it up.

Timed almost perfectly with his release from the Army, Faron’s next big hit was the one to define the rest of his 1950s style—If You Ain’t Lovin’ (You Ain’t Livin’). Written by Bakersfield songsmith (and fellow Capitol recording artist) Tommy Collins, the mixture of hillbilly boogie musical backing, lyrics about honky-tonk wild living, and Faron’s plaintive vocals were a magical mixture.

Faron would continue this trend with a series of fantastic sides, all of which are included here—Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young, I’ve Got Five Dollars (And It’s Saturday Night), It’s A Great Life If You Don’t Weaken (And Who Wants To Be Strong), and I’m Gonna Live Some Before I Die, all of which were nearly identical in lyrical content and musical performance. Faron was clearly mining a winning formula, with fantastic results.

The strongest criticism that may be leveled of Faron Young’s musical career is that he was willing to do anything, follow any direction, to be successful in the music business. When hillbilly boogie was the fashion, he cut great records like the ones mentioned above. When pop music appeared to be the new trend, he made horrific records like The Shrine Of St. Cecilia, which thankfully bombed or we wouldn’t speak of Faron in such glowing terms today!

All of which goes a long way to explain why Faron was dragged kicking and screaming into the world of rock & roll. Ken Nelson, the A&R man for Capitol who had signed Faron, showed Faron how well singers like Elvis Presley and Capitol’s new star Gene Vincent were selling in comparison to the country roster. Faron’s fortunes had been dwindling since rock & roll had reared its head, and in his words, he would rather sing rock & roll than be poor.

Faron’s rockabilly sides, most notably Honey Stop! And I Can’t Dance, are records that while enjoyable, are easily dismissed. The instrumental backing on these and his other forays into rockabilly and rock & roll are simply superb—the Nashville A-Team at their rocking best. However, Faron’s vocals sound exactly like what they are—a country singer being forced to step into Presley territory and not liking it one bit.

At least these sides can still be enjoyed for their musicianship and great sound quality (courtesy of producer Owen Bradley). They are certainly not bad, especially compared with some of the real honest-to-goodness clunkers that Faron cut through the years, but you can just tell the man’s heart was not in it.

By the late 1950s, Faron seemed to be back on track. Perhaps rekindled by the chart success of Ray Price, Faron began recording hard honky-tonk numbers like Alone With You and That’s the Way I Feel. Such records kept an almost rockabilly-esque delivery, but which featured a return to the twin fiddles and steel guitar sound.

Much of the excellent material Faron recorded around this time came from the members of his road band, which included future superstars Roger Miller on drums and Johnny Paycheck (then known as Donny Young) on bass.

Faron also brought along a host of new and inexperienced “front men,” many of whom would later become stars. From the Wilburn Brothers to Jimmy & Johnny to Gordon Terry and others, Faron had a knack for picking out young, super talents, and many of these afore-mentioned stars got their first break touring as Faron’s front men.

Another one of Faron’s unknown discoveries was a young Texas songwriter by the name of Willie Nelson. Willie was another knockabout who spent time touring with Faron, Ray Price, and others, all the while composing songs that he would pitch to those who would listen, and toiling in near obscurity as a writer for Pamper Music in Nashville.

Faron was most certainly listening when he heard a new Willie composition from a Pamper Music demo, entitled Hello Walls. His firm belief in the song (even as the studio musicians poked fun at it during the recording session, and as Willie tried to sell the song outright to Faron for a few hundred dollars) paid off when Hello Walls became the biggest hit, and defining song of his career.

One part Ray Price shuffle, one part classic Willie introspection, and one part pop music, Hello Walls could be considered the definitive example of where Nashville was headed in the early 1960s. Lush orchestration and smooth backing vocals took the place of steel guitars and twin fiddles. The rural edges were sanded off and smoothed down for mass consumption. Faron was there, and ready to cash in on it, and again he milked this new style for all it was worth, recording several other Willie Nelson compositions in an attempt to cash in on a follow-up. He even re-recorded his first hit Goin’ Steady with the new uptown country style, included here.

As it happened, Faron would not have another massive hit until Wine Me Up charted in the late 1960s. He switched to the Mercury label in 1962 and spent most of the 60s searching for a new direction, before eventually returning to the honky-tonk style that he had started with years before.

Faron Young is most certainly one of the great singers of Country Music. His place in the Hall of Fame cements that fact. He left behind a vast library of unforgettable music, however in the end, it cannot be said that Faron was an innovator. His desire to be on top of the charts made him a follower, not a leader, but this does not diminish the power of the impactful discography he left us.

Unfortunately, Faron’s need to be in the spotlight ultimately led to his demise. When he was no longer drawing the crowds, when the phone stopped ringing, and when the records quit charting, Faron made the decision to take his own life, on December 10, 1996. It was a very sad end to one of the greats of Country Music.

Deke Dickerson, with thanks to Colin Escott

JOHNNY HORTON--Honky Tonk Man of Mystery

2011-05-08T22:47:00.000-07:00

The strange and wonderful story of Johnny Horton, the "Honky Tonk Man." (From the Bear Family CD, 'Johnny Horton--Gonna Shake This Shack Tonight.')

Johnny Horton remains as beloved today as he was during his heyday of the late 1950s. Almost 50 years after his death, Horton’s brand of down-home honky-tonk storytelling has become a familiar thread in America’s musical quilt.

The bizarre aspect of Johnny Horton’s fame and longevity is just how different his rise to fame was compared to other country music legends of that era, or even the stars of today. It is safe to say that Johnny Horton is the only country music legend who was born in Los Angeles, never touched alcohol, was completely bald and wore an ill-fitting hairpiece, and had a strange obsession with spiritualism and dying violently. Moreover, Johnny Horton had spent ten years clawing and scratching, making dozens of records in as many different styles, before he finally hit upon the style that made him so remembered today. As quickly as he became famous, a cruel twist of fate took him in a violent car wreck, just as his career finally reached the grand successes he had dreamed of for so long.

Despite Horton’s unusual personal story, what we’re left with fifty years later is the voice—a voice so calm and reassuring, it’s hard to connect the Johnny Horton we know with the troubled Johnny Horton who walked the earth. One thing cannot be denied, however, the voice of Johnny Horton appealed to millions of people, and continues to appeal decades after his death. This compilation puts together a playlist of some of Johnny’s best uptempo hillbilly, honky-tonk and rockabilly music. It is not a greatest hits compilation, if you’re looking for Battle Of New Orleans there are many collections of Horton’s biggest chart records readily available. If you’re looking for some of the best hillbilly boogie and proto-rockabilly Johnny Horton material of the 1950s, prepare to ‘Shake This Shack Tonight.’

John LeGale Horton was born on April 30, 1925 in East Los Angeles, California, to parents John Sr. (aka ‘Lolly’) and Ella Horton. The Hortons life was typical of many Depression-era families in the West. The family followed work—any kind of work—anywhere they could find it. Johnny Horton’s first ten years were spent ricocheting from California to Texas, with John Sr. working as a laborer on various fruit picking and public works projects wherever he could find a job. About the only place that the Hortons stayed put for more than a year at a time was Tyler, Texas, and Johnny would later claim Tyler as his hometown, even though he had only spent a few formative years there as a child.

Johnny’s young adult life was spent on various endeavors with his brother Frank. The pair worked in the mailroom at Selznick movie studios in Los Angeles, and moved to Seattle to study geology at a university. The latter only lasted a short time, and after picking fruit in California, Johnny went to Alaska for a season’s work in construction. Upon his return from Alaska, Johnny entered a talent show at the Reo Palm Isle in Longview, Texas, and won an ashtray on a pedestal for his performance.

This last somewhat dubious achievement is apparently what set young Johnny Horton on the path to be a professional singer. Members of his family were surprised at his choice, most of his closest friends and family didn’t even know he sang. What Horton did possess was a character trait found in most successful musicians—an overwhelming desire to avoid a regular day job.

When Horton landed back in Southern California, he bought himself some Western clothes and began entering talent contests on a regular basis. It was at one of these talent shows that Horton caught the attention of Fabor Robinson, a local character who would eventually be responsible for a dozen record labels and many hit records. At this point in 1950, however, Robinson was just getting into the business and was looking for aspiring singers to record for the Cormac label, a tiny garage label financed by Corydon Blodgett and Les McWain (the ‘Cor’ and the ‘Mac’ in Cormac).

Los Angeles area singer and television host Sammy Masters remembers driving Johnny Horton to the small studio in Santa Ana in the Orange County region of Southern California, where they each cut their debut record on the same day. The conditions couldn’t have been more primitive, with just a couple microphones set up for the singer and band to record live to a mono tape recorder. Both men had their careers launched that day, but both Sammy Masters Cormac disc and Johnny Horton’s debut disappeared without a trace after the first stack of 78s sold off the stage.

The Cormac label folded as soon as it started, and Fabor Robinson obtained the rights to Horton’s masters with the express purpose of re-releasing them on his newly formed Abbott label, a labeled formed with the bankrolling of drug store owner Sid Abbott, and distributed by Bill McCall’s 4-Star empire in Pasadena.

Throughout 1951 and 1952 Horton recorded 16 sides for Abbott, which were originally released as singles that must have flopped dramatically, based on their rarity today. The recordings themselves would wind up being released several different times after Horton’s hits started coming, overdubbed at least twice by different labels to ‘dress up’ the primitive recordings. Some of the overdubbed versions are dreadful, yet some of them are more enjoyable than the earlier undubbed versions. On this compilation, we have included the original undubbed versions of Shadows Of The Old Bayou, On The Banks Of The Beautiful Nile, and Smokey Joe’s Barbecue, and the overdubbed versions of Talk, Gobbler, Talk, It’s A Long Rocky Road, and In My Home In Shelby County. In addition, we’ve included the excellent unreleased cover of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Shotgun Boogie from this Abbott period.

Horton’s last four sides for Abbott in 1952 were duets with an obscure singer on the Abbott roster named William ‘Hill-Billy’ Barton. Barton was best known as a songwriter, and in fact wrote the hit song A Dear John Letter, which he sold to Bakersfield stalwarts Fuzzy Owen and Louis Talley before it became a monster hit for Ferlin Husky and Jean Shepard. The two sides we’ve included here, Bawlin’ Baby and Rhythm In My Baby’s Walk, are excellent examples of the type of proto-rockabilly that would come to typify the Johnny Horton honky-tonk sound over the next few years.

Fabor Robinson worked out a deal to get Horton on the ‘Louisiana Hayride,’ and the newly married Horton moved to Shreveport, where he began appearing on the weekly show in the summer of 1952. Robinson also secured Horton his first major recording contract, with the new country & western branch of Mercury Records based in Nashville.

Below: Johnny Horton, live on stage at the Louisiana Hayride.

Horton recorded a passel of discs for Mercury over the next three years, some of which were extraordinary, and some of which were downright abysmal. Thankfully we’ve spared you the histrionics of such dogs as A Child’s Side Of Life on this collection and concentrated on such solid hillbilly boppers as the excellent First Train Headin’ South, a truly fine record never fully given its due.

Horton found his first taste of success on the ‘Louisiana Hayride,’ and his star ascended on the weekly radio broadcast despite the fact that his Mercury Records sold poorly. In retrospect, it is hard to ascertain why such excellent records as The Train With A Rhumba Beat, Tennessee Jive, The Devil Made A Masterpiece, You You You, Broken Hearted Gypsy, Move Down The Line, No True Love, Ridin’ The Sunshine Special, Hey Sweet Thing, S.S. Lureline, Two Red Lips And Warm Red Wine, Ha Ha and Moonface, Big Wheels Rollin’, and You Don’t Move Me Baby Anymore didn’t become hits, but we’ve included them all here in an attempt to rectify this injustice.

One possible explanation for Johnny’s lack of success for Mercury is the lack of an individual style on any of the recordings. Though the above-mentioned Mercury titles are appreciated by fans today, the fact is that musically they were all over the map, and the duds we’ve left off this compilation were even more so.

The three years that Horton spent traveling the South and making records for Mercury were spent under Fabor Robinson’s tight management, with little financial reward and no hits to show for it. The strain ended Horton’s first marriage, but Johnny Horton pulled a hat trick for bald men everywhere when he snagged Hank Williams’ bombshell widow Billie Jean shortly after Hank’s death at the end of 1952. By September 1953 Johnny and Billie Jean were married and Horton had ended his relationship with Fabor Robinson. Horton continued his label relationship with Mercury until the contract ran out in 1955, with some fine records under his belt, but no hits to show for it.

Below: A later picture sleeve from Billie Jean Horton's ill-fated recording career.

This juncture might have been the end of Johnny Horton’s singing career. No one would fault Horton for quitting at this point, he had certainly given show business a fair try, and the chances that a bald thirty-year old never-was could hit the big time were slim to none. Thankfully Horton found the strength to ask local Shreveport impresario Tillman Franks to manage him, knocking on Franks’ door one evening out of the blue. Horton had no where else to turn at this point—Tillman replied that he didn’t really care for the way that Johnny sang, and Horton replied he would sing any way that Tillman wanted. It was the start of Johnny Horton’s second act, and a fruitful relationship between Franks and Horton that would last until both crashed in the car that ended Horton’s life.

Below: Johnny, center, with manager Tillman Franks on bass and Tommy Tomlinson on guitar.

The details of how Johnny Horton began recording for Columbia Records are ridiculous, but they make for a great show business story. Tillman Franks managed to get a bottom-of-the-barrel deal with Columbia Records in Nashville by giving up half of the publishing on each session to Gene Autry’s publishing company Golden West, and half the publishing to Webb Pierce’s and Jim Denny’s Cedarwood publishing firm. Both parties had taken publishing on Horton in exchange for recommending him to the label. If that injustice weren’t enough, the royalty rate promised to Horton was so low that he probably would have made more money as a mechanic. Still, it was a recording contract, and the records would be made at the strictly big-time Owen Bradley Studios in Nashville, Tennessee. Johnny Horton’s only other alternative was a day job, so he took the offer, as inglorious as it was.

Johnny and Tillman had two Aces up their sleeve before they arrived at the studio in Nashville to record their first session. The first Ace was a song called Honky Tonk Man, written by a hopeful named Howard Hausey aka ‘Howard Crockett,’ who pitched the song to Johnny backstage at the ‘Louisiana Hayride.’ Johnny and Tillman loved the song and knew it had hit potential, and in fact it was the first song that they recorded for Columbia.

The second Ace that Johnny and Tillman brought to the studio was a musician who would give their sparse trio a hit sound. By studying session sheets it can be revealed that Elvis Presley was recording his first RCA session in Nashville on January 11, 1956. Presley recorded until 7 pm that evening, at which point Tillman Franks brought Elvis’ bass player Bill Black over to Owen Bradley’s studio for a session beginning at 8 pm, where Black’s slap bass prowess can be heard on Honky Tonk Man and the others recorded that evening. Tillman and Johnny knew Bill Black from Elvis’ many appearances at the Hayride, and it seems that they had made a deal to spirit Bill Black away for the evening to help out Johnny’s first Columbia session.

As with all moments of greatness, what transpired in the studio that day was a combination of many things that equaled a sum greater than its individual parts. Tillman and Johnny had the drive and the hunger, Johnny had the voice, Howard Hausey had supplied the song, Bill Black’s slapping bass added an element of sound that Tillman could not, and the glue that held it all together was the highly-stylized and steady lead guitar of session man (and de facto producer) Grady Martin.

Grady Martin was Nashville’s top session guitarist for decades. While there were undoubtedly other guitarists that could out-flash Grady, or venture off into jazz or blues, the fact was that Grady Martin could listen to a singer demo a song and come up with the individual licks that would turn that song into a hit. Other guitarists in Nashville could come close, but none had that hit-making ability that Grady innately possessed.

Below: Grady Martin, holding his 1952 Bigsby doubleneck guitar, as heard on the Johnny Horton recordings. The amp is a Magnatone, in case you're wondering.

It’s hard to imagine Johnny Horton’s magical Columbia records like Honky Tonk Man, I’m Coming Home, One Woman Man or any of the others without that signature guitar sound Grady Martin supplied. Almost immediately, Grady realized that Johnny Horton’s voice and a lead guitar treatment with a heavy emphasis on the bass strings was a winning combination. No noodling or needless improvisation was required—musically, Grady and Johnny Horton gelled like beans and cornbread, and Honky Tonk Man became the smash hit that Johnny and Tillman had been praying for.

Honky Tonk Man started a string of songs over the next two years that have stood the test of time for country and rockabilly fans. Johnny Horton’s style on songs like Take Me Like I Am, She Knows Why, You’re My Baby, and I’ll Do It Everytime, all included here, is as unique and distinctive as his friend Johnny Cash’s was. Johnny Horton’s style wasn’t rock and roll, but it was darn close at times, with songs like Honky Tonk Hardwood Floor featuring Grady Martin playing lead guitar lines that sounded like rock and roll to country ears.

Johnny Horton’s honky-tonk streamlined productions in 1956 and 1957 left a body of work forever worshipped by rockabilly and country fans, but the reality was that by 1958 Horton was broke again, and the well ran dry for his latest string of hitless Columbia singles. For some quick cash, Horton cut an album for the fledgling SESAC publishing and recording firm in Nashville with his road band, including Tommy Tomlinson on guitar (a fine guitarist in his own right, he was forced to play rhythm guitar on the Columbia sides and learn Grady Martin’s leads for Johnny’s personal appearances). We have included Seven Come Eleven and Out In New Mexico from the SESAC recordings on this disc.

Johnny and Billie Jean had a way of going through money even before it was made, and the lean times after the initial flush of Honky Tonk Man found Johnny, Billie Jean and Tillman engaging in a number of petty scams and cons to stay above water. Such hijinks as selling tickets to a fake benefit for crippled children and gambling rent money on overnight pinball marathons were almost everyday occurrences during this time.

The Honky Tonk Man formula had been a hit-making sound, but by 1958 the newest trend was for folk music, and songs with historical subjects and lyrical content. It might be difficult for rockabillies to stomach the thought, but The Kingston Trio’s Tom Dooley was one of the most popular songs in America in the late 1950s. Johnny was still cutting fun honky-tonk, like Mister Moonlight from 1958 included here, but the hit streak appeared to be at a standstill until Tillman and Johnny found another goldmine by mining the folk music boom.

It is still somewhat of a mystery how Johnny and Tillman struck on their next hit formula, but they came up with a song called When It’s Springtime In Alaska, It’s Forty Below, which proved popular at shows and pointed the direction of the folk trend for them.

When It’s Springtime proved to be an even bigger hit than Honky Tonk Man, and in vaunted show business tradition, Johnny and Tillman set out to milk the historical song formula for all it was worth. When Porter Wagoner’s steel guitarist Don Warden pitched a song that he owned publishing on to Johnny and Tillman backstage somewhere on tour, Johnny was mildly interested and Tillman was unimpressed. The song was an obscure number by an even more obscure folk singer from Arkansas named Jimmy Driftwood—The Battle Of New Orleans.

Not long after Warden pitched the song, Tillman heard the song on a late night radio show and then dreamt about Johnny recording it. Johnny became passionate about the song, and brought Jimmy Driftwood to appear on the ‘Louisiana Hayride’ and spend a weekend rewriting the lyrics to fit within the realm of a radio-friendly pop song.

The result was Johnny Horton’s signature song, and his biggest career hit. The drum introduction and stomping tempo was Grady Martin’s idea, and undoubtedly contributed to the songs crossover appeal to the singalong Tom Dooley crowd. The Battle Of New Orleans was an outright smash, finishing 1959 as the year’s second most popular song, propelling Johnny Horton to household name status.

The record buying public couldn’t get enough Johnny Horton history-themed discs after New Orleans. More hits followed throughout 1959 and 1960, including North To Alaska, Johnny Reb, and Sink The Bismarck. These memorable songs were padded on albums with such stinkers as Young Abe Lincoln and O’Leary’s Cow. None of these historical songs are included on this compilation, but it’s important to know that the biggest successes of Johnny Horton’s career came with these historical ‘folk’ numbers.

Throughout Johnny Horton’s career, he harbored a fascination with spiritualism and the supernatural, and in particular he began having premonitions that a drunk driver would kill him in a violent car accident. Johnny Horton and his close fishing pal Johnny Cash shared this belief in the great unknown, and there are legendary stories of the pair hypnotizing each other or trying to reach Hank Williams’ spirit at a séance.

Below: Johnnys Horton and Cash in Arkansas, after fishing, before hypnotizing, wearing two-tone shoes.

These comical stories are tempered by the fact that Horton was so sure he would die in a car accident that he began practicing driving his car into a ditch, preparing for the inevitable, hoping to cheat death.

Below: One of the most bizarre photos in entertainment history. Johnny Horton serenades 116-year old Walter Williams, the last surviving campaigner of the Civil War. His daughter, Willie Mae Bowles is holding the hearing aid.

The eerie legend of Johnny Horton’s death is supported by a number of undeniable facts. Johnny Horton was married to Hank Williams’ widow Billie Jean at the time of his death; both Johnny Horton and Hank Williams would perform the last performances of their careers at the Skyline Club in Austin, Texas. Some of Johnny’s old band members claimed that they and Johnny Horton were driving through Milano, Texas, at the beginning of 1953 when Hank Williams’ death was announced on the radio. Nearly eight years later Horton’s tragic car accident occurred on the same stretch of highway near Milano.

Johnny upset his wife and his relatives with his talk of an early death, spiritualism, and premonitions. Undoubtedly, most of them merely thought he was crazy, or just occupying his brain with morbid thoughts. All of this conjecture would prove moot when the car carrying Johnny, Tillman Franks, and Tommy Tomlinson entered a bridge overpass in the early morning of November 5, 1960. A drunk driver named James E. Davis careened off the sides of the bridge overpass, and sliced apart the car carrying the musicians. James E. Davis escaped with a broken rib, but Tommy Tomlinson lost a leg, Tillman Franks suffered head lacerations, and the great honky-tonk singing star Johnny Horton lay dead on a lonesome stretch of Texas highway.

Below: Johnny Horton's grave, just

outside of Shreveport, Louisiana.

Ironically, as with Buddy Holly, Patsy Cline, and Jim Reeves, Johnny Horton’s fame and fortune multiplied exponentially after his tragic death. North To Alaska, which had only been released a short time before the accident, went to the top of the charts, and rushed-to-market Johnny Horton cash-in albums sold like hotcakes. Though he would not be around to enjoy it, Johnny Horton had become what he always wanted—a timeless, beloved, and legendary country star.

After Horton’s death, the vaults were raided, and unreleased songs would continue to be released for years to come. A stash of home recorded demos turned up, and several of these were overdubbed by the Nashville A-Team and released on album.

Although Johnny Horton’s personal life was filled with huge successes, hard times, and a tragic early death, fifty years later we are left with the voice—that magical voice that has calmed and soothed and entertained millions over the years. Magic like that can’t be manufactured—something that today’s flash in the pan singers should take note of.

We hope you have enjoyed this compilation of Johnny Horton’s best hillbilly boogie and proto-rockabilly material. If this is your introduction to the music of Johnny Horton, we would like to recommend the two excellent Johnny Horton box sets on Bear Family (‘The Early Years’ BFX 15289 and ‘The Columbia Years’ BFX 15470), an exhaustive but completely rewarding look at Johnny Horton’s career from start to finish. You can trust this author when he states that one Johnny Horton compilation simply isn’t enough.

Deke Dickerson

"That's ROGER MILLER--he's CRAZY!"

2011-05-06T12:58:00.000-07:00

Liner notes for the collection A Man Like Me: The Early Years of Roger Miller on Bear Family Records

As a youngster, this author was introduced to country music through his grandmother, who was a real, honest-to-goodness gray-haired granny widow living up in the hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She had one of those big old console stereos, ordered from Sears, and one of her favorite record albums was a compilation of older country hits. I would sit and listen intently for hours, but one song by one artist in particular truly perplexed my fragile young psyche. The song was "You Don't Want My Love (In the Summertime)" and whenever the singer would start scatting the solo, sounding completely incoherent, going into a falsetto punctuated by sounds resembling Donald Duck, I just didn't know what to think.

"That's Roger Miller," my granny explained with a chuckle. "He's CRAZY!"

See and hear a live version of "In The Summertime" with awesome scatting HERE.

Roger Miller was the most unlikely of country music super stars. Although he led the sort of extreme wild-man existence that no grandmother could ever comprehend, he somehow was able to charm the pants off the entire nation with his immense wit and original song style. Miller could have made it on any one of his talents-songwriter, comedian, singer, entertainer, actor-but his hyperactive creativity couldn't be tempered until he had excelled in all of his pursuits. By the mid-1960s Miller was hot as a pistol, with an NBC television special, his own regular TV show, a mantel full of Grammy awards, and a string of huge hits including "Chug-a-Lug," "Dang Me," "Engine Engine #9," and of course his career-defining hit "King of the Road."

It took less than ten years for Miller to come from nowhere and arrive at the top of the hill. As with others who have achieved monumental success, the story of how he got there was an interesting one. Until now, not much attention has been paid to Roger Miller's early recordings. This collection attempts to rectify the situation, gathering together all of his early sides from his very first session in 1957 up to the time he signed with RCA-Victor in 1960.

Though Miller could lay claim to being a Texan, having been born in Fort Worth on January 2, 1936, his father, Jean Miller, died when he was only a year old, and his mother Laudene had to farm her three boys out to Jean's family. Roger went to Erick, Oklahoma, to live with his Uncle Elmer and Aunt Armelia Miller, and today Erick proudly proclaims itself the home of Roger Miller, even hosting a Roger Miller museum downtown!

Miller remembered his upbringing in small-town Oklahoma as "so dull you could watch the colors run." Between working in the fields, walking three miles to school, and feeling lonely and cut off from his mother's love, life was hard for him. Nonetheless, he exhibited a bright mind from an early age, making up songs on his long walk to school. His loneliness and isolation helped fuel his creative drive. "We were dirt poor," he once told an interviewer. "What I'd do is sit around and get warm by crawling inside myself and make up stuff. . . . I was one of those kids that never had much to say and when I did it was wrong. I always wanted attention, always was reaching and grabbing for attention."

Release eventually came in the form of his cousin Melva's husband, Sheb Wooley (yes, the same Sheb Wooley who later had a huge hit with "Purple People Eater" in 1958 and a string of hits under the pseudonym Ben Colder in the 1960s). Wooley was fifteen years older than Miller and was a powerful mentor to the young miscreant, encouraging him to take up music as a creative outlet. Wooley was the first one in the family to make a dent in the music business, making records for Bullet in 1945 and MGM beginning in 1950. He moved to California in the mid-'50s, and in addition to making records he also worked as an actor in countless low-budget westerns and television shows. It must have seemed terribly exciting to the young Miller, stuck in the Dust Bowl of the Oklahoma prairie.

(Side note: Sheb Wooley is also acknowledged as the man who did the "Wilhelm Scream," the iconic dying "Aaaaaggghhh" heard in countless movies. Read about this interesting history of the sound clip HERE)

Miller spent countless hours listening to the radio, from the Grand Ole Opry to the Light Crust Doughboys, daydreaming about Wooley's exciting life out in California. Soaking up influences from what he heard, he eventually declared Bob Wills and Hank Williams to be his favorite artists. When Wooley came back to Oklahoma to visit, he helped Miller by showing him chords on the guitar, and he bought him his first fiddle. Eventually wanderlust got the best of Miller, and he began traveling as far as he could run away, getting odd jobs during the day and listening to music at the honky-tonks by night. His desire to become part of the professional music world led him to steal a guitar in Texas, which he reckoned was the only way he would ever be able to own one.

After he was caught (or turned himself in, depending on which story you believe), the judge gave him the option of jail or joining the army. Though he was only seventeen at the time, he chose the latter and was immediately shipped off to the conflict in Korea. According to Miller, "My education was Korea, clash of '52." By the time he arrived at Fort McPherson in Atlanta, Georgia, to finish his stint in the army, his talents as a musician had become known and he joined his first band, the Circle A Wranglers, on fiddle. The Circle A Wranglers were an armed services outfit that already had one famous alumnus--Faron Young--who later would be one of Miller's first professional employers.

Bolstered by this experience, Miller headed straight for Nashville after his release from the army. The first thing he did when he hit town was to walk right into Chet Atkins's office and announce that he was a songwriter. Atkins handed him his guitar and asked him to play something, at which point Miller became completely overwhelmed that he was in Chet Atkins's office playing Chet Atkins's very guitar. According to Miller, "I was so nervous, people thought I was wavin'!" Although he flubbed the audition, Atkins told him to work on his songs and come back to see him when he had it together.

Undaunted, Miller got a job as a bellhop at the Andrew Jackson Hotel in downtown Nashville. He was so eager to sing his songs to anyone who would listen that he became known as the Singing Bellhop, a tag that would stick with him for years. "It had more dignity than washing dishes," he would say later. The job put him in the thick of the bustling downtown music activity, and indeed his Singing Bellhop shtick served to get him noticed. He caught his first break when Minnie Pearl offered him a job as fiddle player in her touring road band.

After that ended, his next opportunity came when he met George Jones at a late-night session on WSM. Miller played Jones some of his songs, and Jones was sufficiently impressed to recommend him to Don Pierce and Pappy Daily of Starday Records, the label that Jones was recording for at the time. Miller auditioned for Pierce and Daily at the Andrew Jackson Hotel, and they agreed to record him at their studio, Gold Star, in Houston. Miller rode from Nashville to Texas with Jones, and on the way they wrote songs together, including "Tall, Tall Trees," which Jones recorded soon thereafter, and "Happy Child," which was recorded by future sausage magnate Jimmy Dean (it was the first of Miller's compositions to be committed to wax).

Gold Star Studios in Houston (no relation to the Los Angeles-based Gold Star, but rather a Texas independent still in business today as Sugar Hill Studios) was at the time an extremely primitive recording studio situated in a corrugated tin barn. Lined with egg cartons and equipped with the most basic of monaural equipment, it was nonetheless a hit-making institution. George Jones had recorded all of his earliest hits there, including "Why Baby Why" and "Window Up Above." It had also been host to countless rockabilly and country obscurities. Unfortunately, Roger Miller's debut single would fall into the latter category.

"Poor Little John" b/w "My Pillow" was released as Mercury-Starday 71212 in fall 1957. "Poor Little John" was a great Cajun-meets-rockabilly uptempo number, and "My Pillow" (sometimes listed only as "Pillow") was a superb country weeper; both were written by Miller. The same session produced "You're Forgetting Me" and "Can't Stop Loving You," two more Miller originals that were released as Starday 356, but copies are so rare that this author didn't believe it existed until recently, when a legitimate one surfaced. Both singles were re-released in the mid-'60s to cash in on Miller's success, but original copies of both are exceedingly rare.

The Starday discs went nowhere, and though Miller continued to pen tunes for George Jones and several other Starday artists, he became discouraged with the music business. When his first wife, Barbara, announced that she was pregnant, Miller decided to get a day job to support his new family and moved to Amarillo to join the fire department. While this move today sounds like the plot of a sitcom (Roger Miller as a fireman?), he worked at the fire department during the day and continued playing music in the honky-tonks around Amarillo by night. With predictably comical results, he was soon relieved of his fireman duties around the same time that he was introduced to Ray Price at a local show.

The two kept in contact, and a few months later Miller was hired to replace Van Howard as Price's front man (a relatively thankless job that involved warming up the crowd to begin the show and also singing vocal harmonies with Price) in the Cherokee Cowboys. Miller and his wife moved back to Nashville, where he toured with Price and continued writing songs, including "Invitation to the Blues," which was recorded by both his boss and Rex Allen. Price's version became a number-three hit, and Roger Miller suddenly found himself not a struggling songwriter but a successful one. Grand Ole Opry bassist Buddy Killen signed Miller to a songwriting deal with Tree Publishing (still in business today as Sony/ATV publishing). Tree was a veritable gold mine of unknown talent that also employedfuture stars Johnny Paycheck (then known as Donny Young) and Bill Anderson as well as many other future notables. Miller wrote many hits during his tenure at Tree, including "Half a Mind" for Ernest Tubb, "That's the Way I Feel" for Faron Young, and "Home" and "Billy Bayou" for Jim Reeves.

While he was establishing himself as a proven writer of hits, he also earned a well-deserved reputation as a loose cannon, and Buddy Killen was always after him to make a finished song out of the hundreds of brilliant scraps he left in his wake. Bill Anderson recalls, "Ernest Tubb wrote the last verse of 'Half a Mind' because Buddy couldn't get Roger to sit down and finish it. Roger was the most talented, and least disciplined, person that you could imagine. It was his personality. Roger was the closest thing to a genius I think I've ever known." Buddy Killen adds, "The songwriters in Nashville would follow him around and pick up his droppings because everything he said was a potential song. He spoke in songs."

Another of Miller's peers, Darrell McCall, said of his old friend, "Roger had what I call a double-barreled brain. He just thought differently than everybody else. If you rode along with him in a car, he'd be thinking of something from the back end forwards, for instance one of my favorite Roger quotes: 'I went to a fight last night and a dance broke out.' He just had a really unique way of looking at the world."

Miller became fast friends with Donny Young, aka Johnny Paycheck, and the two became infamous "roaring" buddies, staying up all night on a combination of uppers and pure nervous energy. Both managed to get signed to Decca as artists around the same time, with Miller contributing vocal harmonies to Paycheck's first single, "On This Mountain Top," recorded in September 1958. Paycheck sang harmonies on Miller's "A Man Like Me" b/w "The Wrong Kind of Girl," recorded three months later and released as Decca 9-30838. Both were excellent songwriting efforts by Miller. "A Man Like Me" stands the test of time as one of the finest honky-tonk records ever made, with superb production by Owen Bradley and his A-team session musicians. The flip was another brilliant weeper. Sadly, though Miller clearly poured his heart and soul into this record, it sank without a trace.

Six months later, on June 30, 1959, Miller again returned to Owen Bradley's studio, where he cut "Sweet Ramona" and "Jason Fleming," which were released as Decca 9-30953. "Sweet Ramona" was an attempt at a country pop hit, whereas "Jason Fleming" was as close as he ever got to rock and roll. The session logs for "Jason Fleming" say it was recorded between midnight and 2:30 a.m., which echoes the loose, party atmosphere of the record. The Bradley studio was really swinging that night, and session drummer Buddy Harman plays some of the best snare fills of his career on this one. Overall it's a marvelous record, one of the most infectious Miller ever cut, a solid gas from the first note to the last. While it's usually easy to say forty-plus years later that it "should have been a hit," the sad fact is that it's truly hard to figure out why "Jason Fleming" didn't click. It strongly foreshadows the sort of carefree, good-natured songs that Miller would take to the charts just a few years later, but when it was released in late 1959 it didn't make a dent. Miller (just like his buddy Donny Young) was soon dropped as a Decca recording artist.

One reason for this alarming lack of success may have been that although Miller was a well-known songwriter around Nashville, he was still very much an unknown as a performer and didn't tour much under his own name. One story has Miller, Donny Young, and Bill Anderson setting out on their lone solo tour, only to end with Miller having to pawn his new portable record player (purchased so that the trio could listen to their own songs while on the road) for gas money home.

Back in Nashville, Miller had the dubious distinction of being a successful songwriter who had somehow managed to spend all of his royalties and was back to being broke. 1959 and 1960 were lean and somewhat desperate times, and like his buddies Donny Young and Darrell McCall he found himself taking on scab (nonunion) sessions, recording soundalike versions of current hits down at Starday (which had by this point established its own low-rent studio in Nashville) for ten bucks a pop. No doubt Miller needed the money, but those ten-dollar sessions came back to bite him a few years later. At the time a few of the songs were released on a couple of obscure, budget, top-hits-of-the-day discs with anonymous artist billing, but in 1965, after Miller was a real honest-to-goodness star, Starday issued everything they could dig up (save for one unreleased track, included here, "Hot Rod Lincoln") on a cash-in LP called Wild Child Roger Miller: Madcap Sensation of Country Music (Starday SLP 318). No doubt fans of his recordings for RCA and Smash--big-budget, high fidelity, current-sounding discs--were in for a shock when they bought the Starday LP. Made to look like it was his most recent album, Wild Child was a collection of some of the most primitively recorded stuff any country star had ever done, and most of it was covers of songs that had been hits years before by other artists! While it was a great relic for collectors, one can only imagine that Miller must have been less than thrilled when it was released.

Below: The Starday cash-in album of earlier material, released after his breakthrough success.

During the lean years of the late 1950s, Darrell McCall remembers, "If it hadn't been for Ray Price, Faron Young, and George Jones, we'd have all starved to death." One way to stay afloat was to sign on as a sideman with an established act. Faron Young recalled seeing Miller hanging out one day at Tootsie's Orchard Lounge, seemingly depressed. When Young asked him why he was so down, he replied it was because he didn't have a job. Young then asked if he was a drummer. "No, but when do you need one?" was Miller's reply. "Monday," replied Young. "Well," Miller responded, "Monday, I'm a drummer!" Young sent Miller to pick up a set of drums, and he toured as Young's drummer for over a year.

Faron Young also employed Miller's old buddies Donny Young and Darrell McCall, who had both carved a niche in the Nashville scene as excellent harmony singers and utility musicians. Their wild times on the road are legendary. McCall summarizes what it was like to tour with Young and all the boys together in a cramped station wagon: "I remember we crossed over into Mexico, and on the way back, Faron had to tell the border guard 'AMERICAN!' as we drove back over the border. Well, a short time later the same day, Roger and Donny were under a blanket in the back seat, smoking pot, and there was some kind of road construction going on. Faron, thinking it might be a police checkpoint, yelled at the two to stop what they were doing, and in something resembling a scene from a Cheech and Chong movie, Roger came out from underneath the blanket in a huge cloud of smoke, just in time to roll down his window and exclaim 'AMERICAN!' at the flagman just as we passed by."

It was during Miller's tenure with Faron Young that he signed his next record deal, with RCA-Victor. His success with songs he wrote for Jim Reeves brought him back to Chet Atkins's office, where he had flubbed his audition many years before. He had a new song that Buddy Killen was hot on, called "You Don't Want My Love." Killen suggested to Atkins that Miller should cut it himself, and in one of the least-corporate moves of his career, Atkins agreed.

Commonly known as "In the Summertime," "You Don't Want My Love" was released when Miller was still touring with Faron Young. Darrell McCall reveals that Young was intensely jealous of others' ambitions and told Miller many times he didn't have what it took to be a star in his own right. When Young played at Carnegie Hall weeks after "You Don't Want My Love" was released, he poked fun of his drummer to the audience and told him to come up and sing his new hit record, thinking he was setting Miller up for failure. "Roger got up there to the microphone and said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, I am the king fool,'" Darrell McCall remembers, "and when he sang 'You Don't Want My Love,' the place just went absolutely nuts for him. That night was the turning point. After that night, there was no doubt--Roger Miller was a star."

Miller went on to have an incredibly successful run in the business. He had dozens of hits, won several Grammy awards, had his own NBC television show, and eventually became a Tony award-winning composer for Broadway plays. After he died in 1992, he was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. That much of the story is well known to Miller's fans. Hopefully this release will shed some much-needed light on the early days and the lean years of one of the most brilliant men in the country music business, Roger Miller.

By Deke Dickerson, with special thanks to Darrell McCall

The (Almost) Death Of Deke Dickerson

2011-04-27T12:11:00.000-07:00

(NARROWLY ESCAPING) A MOST IGNOBLE DEATH

I have cheated death on several occasions. Somehow I survived riding with teenage drunk drivers in high school, jealous men bent on revenge killing, and even playing on a cruise ship to Mexico with Kid Rock and 2600 deranged Kid Rock fans. The closest I’ve ever come to the precipice of eternal sleep, however, involved a chocolate chip cookie. Thank god I’m alive to tell this story, otherwise I would have undoubtedly wound up as a third paragraph in ‘News Of The Weird,’ people chuckling about my colorful demise.

I make my living as a touring musician on the road. One thing that really means a lot to me is how supportive and nice that people can be, often times complete strangers met on rainy roads in the middle of the night. These ‘patrons of the arts’ make up the gap between a very depressing existence and a satisfying life. Whether it is in the form of laundry, free dinner, shelter, vehicle repair, or the like, people help musicians out of the goodness of their hearts. With that in mind, please note that I do not wish to sound ungrateful in the telling of this story, nor do I wish to place the blame on anybody for what happened. The villain and the clown in this story without a hero are both one and the same, and they both camp out, like squatters, inside the empty warehouse between my ears.

This story begins when some very nice fans made ‘care packages’ for the band after a show. These were little gift bags for each member of the group, with crackers, cookies, raisins, bananas, and nuts. We were grateful, fawned over them as you’re supposed to do to show our appreciation. The care packages went into the van, shoved into our own little found cubbyholes for gradual consumption.

Perhaps the most difficult part of being on the road for myself has been living with Type One diabetes. When you’re a diabetic under the best circumstances, it’s difficult to control your blood sugars and eat right. When you’re in a touring band, you find yourself eating at odd times of the day or night, stranded in places where fried corn nuggets pass as a vegetable. Even with the best of intentions and effort, I always find myself fluctuating between periods of really high blood sugars, which make you lethargic and exhausted, and really low blood sugars, which make you shaky and weak.

I wish that the tale of my closest brush with death involved swashbuckling on the high seas, motorcycle stunt jumping, rescuing a baby from a burning building, or the martial arts. It does not. My near-death incident involves a chocolate chip cookie. In my mouth.

My band and I were scheduled to play a record store ‘in-store’ appearance in Atlanta, and it was looking to be a great show. Record store appearances can be a great boost to your following, or they can be depressing reminders of your obscurity (insert Spinal Tap reference here). This record store had done their promotion, as had some local friends and fans, so the place was packed in anticipation of our appearance.

As is my preference, I was out in the parking lot getting changed in the van. Many times, people have asked me why I prefer getting changed in the van to other options like a dressing room or a bathroom. The answer is simple—I have left too many pairs of jeans and shoes behind in dressing rooms, because I am a forgetful moron. I have my routine, and it works for me. No need to feel sorry for me—in my van I am a king.

There I was in the van, stripped down to my boxer shorts. A crowd of people and my band members waited for me to stroll in the front door, looking confident as a cool breeze, ready to rock the house. There was nothing but a dress shirt, a pair of pants and some brand new slick Stacy Adams dress shoes between victory and myself. Then, I felt a low blood sugar incident coming on.

Diabetics will know exactly what I’m talking about, but for the rest of you, when you feel a low blood sugar crash coming over your body, you know that you have to eat something right then and there to prevent looking like a drooling and shaking object of pity fifteen minutes later. There’s also a chance of passing out, or going into a seizure. It’s serious stuff.

A quick visual check through our bug-splattered windshield told me there was nothing in a one-block radius where I could buy anything to eat. A mental checklist reminded me that somewhere in the van was the ‘care package’ handed to me several days earlier. In that care package was a chocolate chip cookie. A chocolate chip cookie—that would do the trick. That would get me over the hump. I was shaking, but I would be fine.

Rummaging around the floor of the van, I found my care package, where it had been seared by floor-of-van heat in the several thousand miles we had covered since the care packages were handed to us. Anybody who has ever crossed the country in a van knows about floor heat. You do anything to keep your feet off the floor—lie on the bench seats, put your feet up on the dash. A fool who keeps his feet on the hot van floor during a tour winds up with wicked athlete’s foot, and never does it again. The heat is like a griddle, and when I got to my little care package, the bag was hot to the touch. Inside the bag was the chocolate chip cookie. I noticed right away that it didn’t look fresh. In fact, it looked terrible, the way that worms look on the sidewalk after a heavy rain, when they realize they’re dried up and they’re not going to make it to the other side of the sidewalk. Whatever it looked like, that chocolate chip cookie was going to have to get me out of my low blood sugar situation.

I unwrapped the Saran Wrap and put the whole cookie in my mouth as I began trying to wrestle on my dress pants. This cookie is dry, I thought. Every bit of previously delicious Toll House moisture had been soaked out of the cookie from the hot drive and the days since it had been made. I kept working on it, trying to soften that sonofabitch up with my saliva. It was hopeless. This cookie was like a chunk of the Saraha Desert in baked goods form, a black hole of anti-matter vacuum-pressed into a deadly edible.

Somewhere in between the attempts to soften the damn cookie and chew the thing, I took a breath. Fine particles of cookie dust flew into my windpipe and lungs. Within a space of one second, the effort to get the cookie in my mouth instantly became an effort to get the cookie out of my lungs so that I would not die.

Suddenly, as they say, my life flashed before my eyes. I was dying. I was going to choke on a goddamn chocolate chip cookie outside a record store in Atlanta. My ignoble death was going to be the sole reason I was ever remembered. People would howl with laughter. Even those who loved me would agree: what a way to go! Beads of sweat rolled down my forehead. This was not good.

In those few seconds, I thought of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Bon Scott--all Rock & Roll legends who choked to death on their own vomit. Even that had a sense of rock and roll flair to it, a departure that mirrored the life of drugged excess those stars led in their brief times. I saw a vision of cool looking rockers hanging out at Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris, then I saw my fated flat slab marker in a budget boneyard, with some fan’s lacquered chocolate chip cookie on my headstone, mocking me in tribute.

I thought of Buddy Holly’s plane crash, Otis Redding’s plane crash, Stevie Ray Vaughn’s helicopter crash. Eddie Cochran’s car crash. Johnny Horton’s car crash. All of these places where talent had been snuffed out so suddenly I had visited as pilgrimages on my travels, to honor my musical heroes. I imagined one fat kid thirty years from now reading a footnote about an obscure musician who choked to death on a cookie, and him deciding the two mile trek to his local graveyard not worth the visit.

Mama Cass, the celebrated fattie opposite the hottie in the Mamas and Papas, famously choked to death on a ham sandwich. Oh god, I was going to be at the end of the list, right next to goddamn Mama Cass. I was going to be the guitar player who choked to death on a dusty old chocolate chip cookie. This was not good. It was most certainly not cool. It was the exact opposite of cool.

Chocolate chip cookie dust sealed my lungs like a construction worker blowing insulation into a wall. My pants were halfway on. I was wearing no shirt. God, no, I’m going to be the shirtless fat guy on the stretcher! Hot nurses will stare at me and give each other looks that say good god, that’s disgusting! Is that poo on his chest? No, it’s a chocolate chip! Gross, they would say, correctly.

General Douglas MacArthur once gave a stirring speech to his soldiers, telling them that the human body is weak, but the mind is strong. If the mind decides something is possible, the body will follow, even if the body could not do it before that moment. It is the concept that allows martial arts experts to break concrete with their bare hands, or for ordinary people to do incredible things that defy explanation. It is the Jedi Mind Trick that allows petite mothers to lift cars off of their babies when terrible accidents happen. MacArthur spoke the truth, and these things are real.

Staring out the windshield at the dumpster, some inner force decided that I was not going to be the fat guy with no shirt on that died choking on a chocolate chip cookie. I finished wrestling my pants on, jumped out of the van and wheezed out cookie dust like a coal miner with black lung disease, convulsing my body into whatever shape it needed to expel the Famous Amos from my piehole. A homeless man in the alley saw me and undoubtedly thought to himself, Man, those hillbillies cannot dance, and have no rhythm. Somehow, I prevailed. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t do anything but cough and hack, but I fought the cookie, and I won, dammit. It was not my time to die.

Five minutes later, given a bottle of water and time to regain my composure, I strolled in the door of the record store to loud applause.

If they only knew, I thought. I put on my guitar and rocked the house.

Deke Dickerson

April 2011

JOHNNY PAYCHECK aka DONNY YOUNG: THE EARLY YEARS

2011-04-03T20:01:00.000-07:00

SHAKIN' THE BLUES

Much ado has been made of "the early years" of the artist known as Johnny Paycheck. In recent times several excellent compilations of his Little Darlin' label recordings have been made available, which has been a blessing for collectors and new fans alike.

However, everything that has been written about the man born Donald Eugene Lytle seems to suggest that one day in 1964, he emerged perfectly hatched as country superstar Johnny Paycheck. Only a few of the bios mention in passing that he had made a few failed records early on under the guise of Donny Young, and even then only in the shortest words possible, as if this was an unpleasant factoid to be swept under the rug and forgotten.

What these historians seem to forget is that Paycheck (who, despite his numerous pseudonyms, shall be referred to henceforth as Paycheck, even when referencing his earlier self) had spent years making a slew of brilliant honky-tonk, near-rockabilly, and stone country records, some of the best records he would ever make, under that forgotten nom de plume of Donny Young.

The fact that these records did not sell--truthfully, that they could not even be given away--fails to diminish the excitement that they offer when heard with fresh ears some forty-five years down the road. They are great records, great songs, and great productions.

Nashville, then as now, only recognizes financial success, and these records were flops, therefore they must have been terrible records, according to the Nashville standard. Nobody bought Cadillacs from these discs, and the name Donny Young draws a blank stare from all but the most astute music historians. However, their failure was more likely due to the uncontrollable, ornery, drugging and drinking nature of the young man who sang them, and to the lack of promotion on the part of the record labels, than to any lack of musical greatness. The greatness was there, fully intact; it would just take a name change, a smart manager, and the advent of Outlaw Country before the Cadillacs would come, and the respect of the country music establishment with them.

Donald Eugene Lytle was born May 31, 1938, in Greenfield, Ohio, an unlikely place for a future country star to hail from, but not entirely out of character. Outside of Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, Ohio was one hick town after another, and country music had always been king. The great radio powerhouse WLW broadcast out of Cincinnati, bringing the sounds of country music to towns like Greenfield, and of course WSM and the Grand Ole Opry were well within broadcast range.

The giant record label King was based out of Cincinnati, releasing hundreds of budget country albums, and the Jimmie Skinner Record Shop, also based out of Cincy, distributed millions of those country discs to rural areas such as Greenfield and every other little town in a thousand-mile radius.

When asked about his early years, Paycheck remembered his mother having Hank Williams 78 RPM records in their house and reckoned that Hank was his biggest influence. His mother gave the lad a guitar at the age of six and began entering him in talent contests in the nearby area when he was nine. By thirteen he was working steadily as a professional singer at Paul Angel's Club 28 in Greenfield.

Not content with local stability, Paycheck began drifting early on, hopping a freight train at the age of fifteen and traveling to all the cities in the tri-state area. Wherever he would land, he would get a job as a singer at a local honky-tonk, and he worked at many of the top country nightclubs in Ohio before making the big decision to join the Navy.

It's hard to imagine anyone less suited for the rigors of military life than Johnny Paycheck, and sure enough within a few months he had been court-martialed and put in the brig for fracturing an officer's skull during a brawl. In 1956 he was sentenced to hard time for the offense and began serving it at a military prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

While in the brig, Paycheck attempted to escape so many times that eventually they reduced his sentence, and long before his release date they let him go out of sheer exasperation. After being freed, Paycheck drifted to Florida, Texas, and then finally decided to give it a go as a professional country music singer in Nashville.

After arriving in Nashville, Paycheck was discovered by Buddy Killen, who gave him a job as a songwriter and demo singer for Tree Publishing (still a huge force in Nashville, but now called Sony/ATV Music Publishing). While it was a professional gig in the music business, it was the sort of job where one barely made enough money to rent a hot attic room at a boardinghouse.

Paycheck caught a break, however, when the producer Owen Bradley, who also acted as an A&R man for Decca Records, heard one of his demos and signed him to a recording contract, which must have seemed like a huge break for the struggling young singer. It was, but as it went for Buddy Holly with Decca a few years earlier, simply having releases on the label was no guarantee of success.

Producer Owen Bradley must have believed in the young singer, though, as four singles were released over the next three years, all excellent examples of hard-core honky-tonk and country.

The first release was "It's Been a Long, Long Time for Me" b/w "On This Mountain Top," released as Decca 9-30763 in November of 1958. The topside was written by Paycheck, a great bouncy number reminiscent of the hits Faron Young was having at the time. The flip featured Paycheck's "roaring" buddy Roger Miller on harmony vocals, and Miller was given a cobilling on the label. The record was superb on all accounts, with an impassioned vocal and the full A-team session-man treatment from Owen Bradley. This statement can be echoed time and time again throughout these notes, but it should have been a hit. It was a great record.

Paycheck and Roger Miller were both destined for stardom, but in the studio at that moment in the fall of 1958 they were unknown, two very small fish in a very big pond. It would be years before either one would taste the glory of a hit record. By any standard it was an auspicious debut, but for all intents and purposes, the careers of both men began that night--the start of a long, hard slog for both of them.

The second record, "The Old Man and the River" b/w "Pictures Can't Talk," released as Decca 9-30881 in April of 1959, was yet another two-side artistic success that garnered no sales. Roger Miller's tune on the topside (he was also writing song demos for Tree Music at the same time) was a great Cajun-flavored song with a memorable chorus, and Paycheck's flip was a first-rate weeper that suited his wounded enunciation perfectly.

By this point Paycheck must have been tasting the bitter pill of realization, just as Buddy Holly had a few years earlier: that good product didn't automatically translate into hit records and those elusive Cadillacs.

By the time of the third release, "Shakin' the Blues" b/w "Miracle of Love," Paycheck really hit his stride. This record can only be considered a masterpiece in every respect: songwriting (it was written by none other than Paycheck's boss at this point, George Jones), arrangement, performance, and production. It was a record that had "HIT" written all over it, and yet again it failed to chart.

While "Shakin' the Blues" has seen release on numerous rockabilly compilations, the truth is that it was just hard-driving honky-tonk with a beat. The twin fiddles and steel guitar could have made it a Ray Price session, but Paycheck's frantic vocal separates into something else entirely, something entirely his own. The mold for the later Paycheck hits was cast with this record--edgy, unpredictable, and raw--which certainly would make him a good candidate for rockabilly but actually foreshadowed the Outlaw Country movement that would come some years later.

Ignored by the public and critics alike, as time went on gradually people became aware of "Shakin' the Blues," and now some forty-five years after its release, many collectors and country music aficionados now consider it one of the best records cut in Nashville during the golden era of the late 1950s "Nashville Sound."

The failure of "Shakin' the Blues" must have soured Decca on the marketability of Donny Young, and he was allowed to record no more sessions at Bradley's studio. One more 45 was released in July of 1961, "I Guess I Had It Coming" b/w "Go Ring the Bells" (Decca 9-31283), which was made up of two leftovers from the earlier sessions. The topside was written by Paycheck and dated from the first session in 1958, featuring Roger Miller on harmony vocals once again, though he was not credited on this release. The flip was a ballad by Don Gibson, who was hot as a pistol at the time, but it didn't seem to help Donny Young one bit. Although both were again great songs with a lot going for them, this release seems to have been an afterthought, with no promotion put behind it whatsoever. Decca dropped Paycheck soon thereafter, and he moved back to Ohio.

Collectors rejoice: One unreleased song from the Decca period, "Story Behind the Photograph," has surfaced and is included here for the first time. Also, it should be noted that several Paycheck discographies list a record credited to Jimmy Dallas, "Hurtin' in My Heart" b/w "My Kind of Love" (Decca 9-31133), as actually being Paycheck singing under a pseudonym. This simply isn't the case. Jimmy Dallas was a fairly established country singer from Kansas City who had been making records since the early 1950s, and this Decca release bears no resemblance to Paycheck's style whatsoever, making its inclusion on several Paycheck discographies all the more baffling.

While licking his wounds back in Ohio, Paycheck had the fortune to hook up with a like-minded young singer named Darrell McCall, who was also an Ohio native with a love for hard-core country music. The pair started singing together and discovered that their vocal harmonies meshed perfectly. Soon Paycheck was plotting his return to Nashville, this time as part of a duo, which he christened the Young Brothers (and, indeed, Darrell McCall would be known as Darrell Young around Nashville for a number of years).

As McCall recounts, the pair hit Nashville with something less than a splash, with literally pennies between them. The first night in town, they slept underneath the Main Street bridge before getting a room at Mom Upchurch's boardinghouse, which served as a headquarters for broke musicians looking for work. Roger Miller also lived there, and Paycheck relished being reunited with his old buddy. Between Paycheck, McCall, and Miller, they began setting a standard for rowdy behavior that is the benchmark for country musicians to this day.

Darrell McCall blames most of this on their copious use of uppers, a common party favor during the 1960s. To quote McCall, "You had to take uppers back then, just to keep up with the grueling pace. We started out with what they called Ol' Yellers, which weren't too bad for you, as they had vitamins and nutrients inside. Then we got into White Crosses, Black Mollys, Yellowjackets, and Speckled Birds, which were harsher and harsher forms of speed as time went along. By the time we got around to Speckled Birds, things were getting pretty nuts."

During Paycheck's tenure with Decca Records, he had been hiring himself out as a sideman to help pay the bills. In fact there hadn't been much promotion of Donny Young the solo artist to speak of, save for one aborted tour with Roger Miller and Bill Anderson that had ended with Miller having to pawn his newly purchased portable record player (which he had bought so the trio could listen to their own records while on the road) for gas money home. Paycheck had a reputation as a good bass player and high harmony singer, and he filled that role with Porter Waggoner, Faron Young, Ray Price, and, most notably, George Jones over the next few years.

Darrell McCall remembers that Ray Price had a custom suit made originally for Paycheck, and that due to Paycheck's volatility, both he and Willie Nelson were called on at various times to play bass for Ray Price, simply because they both fit into Paycheck's suit--something that didn't sit too well with McCall due to both Paycheck's and Willie Nelson's extreme body odor!

Faron Young took Paycheck, Roger Miller, and Darrell McCall out as sidemen at various times during this period. Paycheck's yearlong stint with Young proved to be one of his longest uninterrupted road gigs.

Of all of his sideman jobs, it is probably Paycheck's tenure with George Jones that is best remembered. Jones and Paycheck had a long history over a period dating roughly 1959-66: an on-again, off-again relationship that was as stormy as it was productive.

According to Darrell McCall, Paycheck had a nasty habit of getting drunk and fighting with his employers, and George Jones was no pushover himself. Both men were short in height and short in temper. The explosive relationship between the two was tempered by the fact that both men dearly loved each other and would always forgive and forget, only to repeat the exact same scenario the next time around.

Notably, music historians have pointed out that George Jones seemed to absorb Johnny Paycheck's vocal styling during this time frame, a fact Jones has not exactly denied. Many of the inflections, dips to the low registers following by soaring high notes, and other examples of the classic George Jones style seem to have come directly from working with Paycheck during those years. The proof does lie in the chronology of the recordings: Jones's Starday and Mercury output before working with Paycheck demonstrates a completely different mode of singing that is more rooted in the traditional Hank Williams style than anything else. However, once Donny Young (aka Johnny Paycheck) began singing harmonies with Jones, the style so associated with Jones in later years began to take shape. Paycheck, to his credit, only intimated that both men influenced each other during the time they worked together.

Below: Donny Young aka Johnny Paycheck, playing bass and sharing the microphone with George Jones.

In fact it was Jones that got Paycheck his next recording contract, with his own label, Mercury Records. Another two excellent singles were issued under the Donny Young name, presumably backed by the Jones boys (who would also back up Paycheck a few years later on his first hit record, A-11).

"On Second Thought" b/w "One Day a Week" (Mercury 71900) was released in September 1961, only a few months after the last Decca record escaped. It was another great single . . . that yet again failed to chart. Despite Jones's efforts, the name Donny Young seemed doomed to obscurity.

The second Mercury release, "I'd Come Back to Me" b/w "Not Much I Don't" (Mercury 71981, released in June 1962) was a strong foreshadowing of the style that Paycheck would soon be recording for Hilltop and Little Darlin'. Again it made no waves and sank without a trace.

Paycheck had now had two major-label contracts without a lick of success. Continuing to work as a sideman paid the bills, but there were often months where there was no work, and the frustration must have been maddening.

One way to keep a finger in the business and earn some money on the side was by cutting scab, or nonunion, sessions for budget labels around Nashville. During the period of 1960-61 Paycheck, along with Darrell McCall and Roger Miller, would make many soundalike scab recordings for Starday. These were covers of the top hits of the day, which were then sold at a budget price to people who often didn't realize they were being duped by singers attempting to re-create the sound of the original hits.

Darrell McCall recalls that these sessions paid ten dollars each. That must have been demeaning, especially to such talented young men, but it was one way to keep food on the table and get experience in the studio as well.

Paycheck had several of his songs released on a series of Dixie EPs (Dixie was a Starday imprint) with no artist credit, and at least one track released on a budget Starday album was credited to Donny Young. All the tracks he recorded during this time are included here, some making their debut after having remained in the can for forty years.

While these are by no means the best recordings Paycheck ever cut, they are fascinating examples of low-budget early-1960s country music. Paycheck does attempt to sound like the singers he's covering, but his own personality can't be helped, and they sound more like what an actual Johnny Paycheck live show must have sounded like than anything else. Darrell McCall and Roger Miller (as well as George McCormick) can be heard singing vocal harmonies on these tracks, and Paycheck can in turn be heard singing harmonies for songs credited to both McCall and Miller, recorded at these same scab sessions.

It was at the 1962 Nashville Dee-Jay convention that Eddie Crandall, a music hustler associated with Marty Robbins, played a demo tape of songs for the New York-based A&R man Aubrey Mayhew, who worked for Pickwick Records. Although Crandall was attempting to sell the songs on the tape, Mayhew paid Crandall $200 just to know who it was singing on the demos.

Reportedly, Crandall then led Mayhew to the aforementioned Main Street bridge, under which Paycheck was sleeping one off (Mom Upchurch's boardinghouse locked its doors at midnight). Mayhew began managing the singer, at least as well as anyone could manage him, and spent the next couple of years developing him. According to Mayhew, Paycheck was supposed to keep a low profile and write songs, preparing for their big push, but the stipend Mayhew provided actually translated into pouring a lot of money into an endless black hole of parties and pills.

Paycheck ventured westward and spent most of 1962 and 1963 in both Southern California and Las Vegas. In Vegas he worked for Wynn Stewart, who ran the house band at the Nashville Nevada Club. Wynn's bass player at the time was none other than Merle Haggard, and Haggard hit it off with Paycheck right away--another pairing of two rowdy souls schooled in the art of "roaring."

Paycheck loved the West Coast and its country music scene and was a big fan of Buck Owens in particular. According to Darrell McCall, Owens had Paycheck to thank for finally getting him played on the radio in Nashville, which had shut him out up to that point due to his outsider status. Paycheck spent many sleepless nights staying up with Ralph Emery at WSM, and he persuaded Emery to play one of Owens's discs, which helped break Owens into the Nashville establishment. Later on, after being christened Johnny Paycheck, he would cover an obscure Buck Owens album track, "A-11," and turn it into his first breakout hit.

Exactly how Paycheck's last release under the name Donny Young came about is unknown. The Todd label was the brainchild of the Decca A&R man Paul Cohen, who had run it as a sideline business since 1957, releasing everything from rockabilly (Jericho Jones) to surf (Bobby Fuller) and all styles in between. Presumably Paycheck still had some contact with Paul Cohen from the Decca days, or perhaps it was a deal brokered by Aubrey Mayhew, but either way it was a great record that never had a chance.

"Don't You Get Lonesome" b/w "I'm Glad to Have Her Back Again" was released as Todd 1098 in early 1964. If it were possible, it made even less of a splash than the Decca and Mercury singles, vanishing without a trace, and today it remains the rarest of all the Donny Young releases.

Little is known about the Todd record, though both sides are again excellent honky-tonk shuffles. They closely resemble the type of songs that Paycheck would soon become known for on Hilltop and Little Darlin'. Gino King, who played guitar with Little Jimmy Dickens for many years, remembers playing guitar and singing harmony on the Todd disc, but beyond that all session details are unknown.

Another collectors' note: Several discographies list a Donny Young single on American-Canadian (AmCan) as being another Paycheck disc. The record features an obviously different singer and is not included here.

Had it not been for Aubrey Mayhew, the man born Donald Lytle might have continued using the Donny Young stage name indefinitely, perhaps making scads more obscure singles and touring as a sideman with a dozen more big-name stars. As it turned out, Mayhew rechristened Donny Young as Johnny Paycheck after an obscure prizefighter, and he even formed a new Pickwick subsidiary, which he named Hilltop, specifically to release Johnny Paycheck records.

The timing was right this time around. With Paycheck's third release on Hilltop, "A-11," Paycheck finally had a chart hit.

Check out an amazing vintage television clip of Paycheck singing "A-11" here.

During the course of the next few years Paycheck and Mayhew, along with steel guitarist Lloyd Green, would record a slew of highly influential records and set the mold for exactly who and what Johnny Paycheck was supposed to be--dark, brooding, moody, violent--with such milestone recordings as "Pardon Me (I've Got Someone to Kill," "You'll Recover in Time" (about being straightjacketed in a mental ward) and "The Cave" (a song about nuclear destruction), all of which sent influential waves of change throughout the country music community.

The seeds were sown during these years of 1964-69 for what would then be known as Outlaw Country, and no one could fit that bill better than Johnny Paycheck, a man who lived the life he sang about. By the time of his next resurrection in the early 1970s with producer Billy Sherrill, Paycheck was poised for superstardom with such megahits as "She's All I Got" in 1971, and of course his 1977 anthem "Take This Job and Shove It," the song that would forevermore define him.

It was an astounding nineteen years between the day Paycheck first entered a recording studio and his first number-one hit. It's likely that few of the bikers, truckers, and long-haired rebels buying the Paycheck records of the late '70s knew that the gravelly-voiced survivor dated back to a completely different era, when he was a skinny, pompadoured young man with a soaring, high voice, trying to make a name for himself with a name that no one would ever remember: the forgotten alias of Donny Young.

Postscript: Johnny Paycheck died on February 19, 2003, from emphysema and asthma. He is buried in Nashville at Woodlawn Memorial Park in a plot paid for by his old friend George Jones.

THE RECORD WHISPERER

2011-04-03T16:42:00.000-07:00

JIM COOPRIDER--
THE RECORD WHISPERER

If you ever find yourself at the Pasadena Swap Meet looking through records, he’s not hard to spot. Jim Cooprider is always there, carrying his trusty wooden record box, lacquered with rare record labels on the side.

The first few times I saw Jim Cooprider, I have to confess, I thought he must be completely insane. He wasn’t much for socializing with other collectors, at least while he was scouting for records. In fact he is usually found not auditioning records on a player, but instead doing something odd with them, like holding it up to an inch in front of his face, or holding it up to his ear while thumping it with his fingers. More often than not, he would talk to himself, saying things in a mysterious code that only a precious few could decipher:

“This is a Camden, New Jersey pressing.”

“This is the 1933 reissue, not the 1927 original.”

“Hairline crack…. looks fixable.”

Such uninvited utterances will scare off the timid. More than once I saw a visiting Japanese collector scouring Northern Soul 45’s back away from Jim as he muttered to himself, fearing that he must be one of those crazy Americans they’ve read about.

It wasn’t until I met Jim’s daughter Yvonne that I got to know him a little better. Once I got to know him, and understand where he’s coming from, I realized that Jim Cooprider understands records the way that lifelong farmers understand weather and soil conditions, or the way that an experienced surgeon realizes the interplay between all the body’s delicate internal systems. In short, I’ve never met a man who was in tune with the physical, emotional, and spiritual properties of records like Jim Cooprider.

When I say records, I mean records. A visit to Jim Cooprider’s house will find records of all kinds—33, 45, 78, and undoubtedly 16 and 80 rpm oddities, piled in every corner of every nook and cranny in the residence. That was how I eventually became friends with Jim Cooprider—for if you let him know that you love records too, you’ve made a friend for life.

Most of us record collectors, even the nerdiest ones among us, focus on the music contained in the grooves, and the condition of the record—for instance, if the scratches on the record impair the pleasure of listening to the musical performance contained within. Jim Cooprider loves music, don’t doubt that for a second (he is happy to espouse the virtues of 20’s jazz, or 50’s doo-wop, or obscure rockabilly gems), but Jim is the only person I’ve ever met who goes far beyond those simple boundaries.

Jim has handled so many records in his life that he can immediately tell what kind of pressing it is, and usually what pressing plant produced it, and whether or not the disc can be repaired if broken, warped or scratched. Amateurs such as myself know records to be made of different materials (vinyl for LP’s and 45’s, styrene for budget 45’s, shellac for 78’s), but Jim can reveal things about a record that few would realize or understand.

In this sense, Jim is the “Record Whisperer,” one of my favorite titles for him. Innately, he understands the physical properties of a record as if it were an external manifestation of one of his own vital organs.

Early on, I learned that Jim was famous for his offer to un-warp any record for a dollar. Dealers would bring in stacks of valuable records that had edge warps, dish warps, storage warps, and Jim would tell them just by looking at the disc what sort of result he would be able to achieve.

Later, when I was able to go to his home, I got to view this process firsthand, which was as astonishing as any demonstration I’ve ever witnessed. Jim has a method, perfected over decades, of fixing warped records that involves heating in his home oven to a particular temperature, removing the disc from the oven, placing it on a flat piece of heavy glass, and doing a form of rain dance around the disc, bouncing the floor just enough to make the pliable heated record slowly settle to flattened, un-warped perfection.

I’ve taken records to Jim that friends of mine deemed unrepairable. It doesn’t matter to Jim if the disc is a golden oldie from the thrift store, or a thousand dollar rockabilly record, if he can fix it, he’ll fix it for a buck.

One of the other tricks in Jim’s trick bag is his method of fixing broken or cracked records. Generally, if a record is broken in two it can’t be repaired to be unnoticeable, but rare discs can be repaired with a number of different chemical compounds on the edges, to get the record fused back together enough to be playable once again. I remember Jim rattling off a list of the chemicals that he uses to fuse records back together again (Methyl-Ethyl-Ketone, or MEK, was one of them—in fact “MEK” is one of the things Jim will often talk about in front of unsuspecting passers-by), all of which exhibited a certain chemical property relating to the particular chemical compound of the record itself.

In addition to his wizardly ways of working with records, Jim also likes to disc jockey wherever he is welcome. One of my favorite memories of Jim was seeing him DJ using 78-rpm records exclusively at a local venue featuring swing music. Of course, the selections Jim brought were all completely appropriate for the evening, and seeing them played on a 78 player with the CD jukebox in the background was a delightful juxtaposition of images.

The man has been collecting records for so long, that he’s able to expound on virtually any subject, so long as it relates to records. Unlike most of the “record snobs” I know, Jim is happy to talk about anything from banjo records to classical collections to rock and roll, all with his particular slant on why a certain release was better, be it the performance, mastering, pressing, or packaging.

One of the other things I dearly love about Jim is that while he does pay differing amounts for records, and has sold records that are valuable, one thing you’ll never hear Jim Cooprider go on about is a record’s collectible value. For myself, it’s a breath of fresh air, having been bored to tears listening to collectors talk about how much their collection is worth. For Jim, it truly is about the love of records.

With a house full of records, and decades of collecting behind him, it’s easy to wonder why Jim Cooprider still shows up early at the record swap meet. Does he need any more records? The answer is unequivocally no. It’s obviously an addiction, and an obsession that most of us reading this magazine share. However, none of us compare in sheer exhaustive record collecting extremism the way that Jim Cooprider does as a way of life. I love that about the guy. Sometimes, when I’m feeling too lazy to get up for the PCC Swap Meet, I think to myself—Jim’s out there, I need to get up out of bed. If I ever feel a twitch of reality and start thinking I have enough records, I think about Jim and I realize—you can never, ever have too many records.

Jim Cooprider is really one of the great American characters that make this country so damn interesting. The next time you see him at the swap meet awkwardly holding records right up to his eye, remember—there’s an Albert Einstein level of genius at work there. There are secrets he knows that you and I will never know.

As generations go by, there seems to be less and less importance on collecting. I remember growing up in the 1970’s that every block had a group of obsessed collectors—the guy who collected vintage model trains, the guy who collected glass telephone pole insulators, and the guy who collected old records. I loved those guys, and their passion, and the level of interest in things that most would find mundane. I wanted to be like them (and I guess I am).

Things like the mp3 player and the recordable CD have changed all that. Kids today seem unimpressed by a wall of vinyl, showing that their Ipod contains more songs on it than thousands of heavy record albums. Kids today also seem to have an attention span that is so short, they can’t be bothered to play individual records such as 45 or 78 singles—it’s too much trouble.

As such, we may see these intrinsic American characters like Jim Cooprider eventually disappear from the landscape of America. I, for one, will rue that day. Our world is richer for having them. Jim Cooprider is our “record whisperer,” and we should all thank him for it.

Deke Dickerson

Below: Jim Cooprider, the Record Whisperer.

From Vintage Guitar magazine--

2010-12-09T23:46:00.000-08:00

TINY MOORE’S 1952

BIGSBY MANDOLIN

This author recently contributed—in the form of research, photography, and detective work—to the newly released book “The Story of Paul Bigsby—Father Of The Modern Solidbody Electric Guitar” (written by Andy Babiuk, Hal Leonard publishing). The book was a mammoth undertaking, with myself and several members of the secret society known as the ‘Bigsby Brain Trust’ attempting to unravel the mysteries of the Paul Bigsby story.

When the book finally came out, I received many emails asking why Tiny Moore’s historic Bigsby electric mandolin wasn’t featured more prominently in the book (there is a single postage-stamp sized photo of Tiny from a 1980’s album cover). The answer was simple—we didn’t know where Tiny’s mandolin was!

Before the book was published, I had made some inquiries to try and find out the whereabouts of Tiny’s mandolin, with no success. Of course, after the book came out, several people pointed me in the right direction. The mandolin had been in safekeeping for Tiny’s family in the hands of Skip Maggiora of Skip’s Music in Sacramento, an institution in the California Capitol City. The mandolin is now part of Skip’s personal collection, along with historic instruments used by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys and other Western Swing legends.

Luckily, Skip turned out to be a very accommodating guy, and thanks to him we can now give some well-deserved publicity to both the story of Tiny Moore, the electric mandolin virtuoso, and Tiny Moore’s 1952 Bigsby electric mandolin, one of the most important instruments Paul Bigsby ever made.

Below: Tiny Moore in his heyday. (If any readers know where I can find a good original copy of this photo, I'd appreciate it--all I have is this xerox.)

Billie ‘Tiny’ Moore was born in Energy, Texas on May 12, 1920, to a musical family. As a baby, Tiny’s mother gave piano lessons and brought Tiny along in a buggy as she taught. As with many Texas families, nearly everybody in the Moore clan played an instrument, and it wasn’t long before Tiny was taking violin lessons and learning how to play the ‘fiddle.’

As a high schooler, Tiny played fiddle and guitar in a group called ‘The Clod Hoppers.’ When the family moved to Port Arthur, Texas, he played with another group that included future jazz guitar legend Jimmy Wyble, and later with a different group that included future jazz guitar legend Herb Ellis. Tiny also ventured into Cajun country, across the border to Louisiana, playing with groups like Happy Fats’ Rayne-Bo Ramblers. It was during this time that Billie Moore, due to his large size and stature, would earn the nickname he would carry the rest of his life—‘Tiny.’ For those unfamiliar with country culture, giant guys always got the comical nickname ‘Tiny,’ and for young ‘Tiny’ Moore, it stuck.

Tiny’s story really begins in early 1930’s Texas, where a new hybrid style of music called ‘Western Swing’ was starting to take root. Western Swing was essentially jazz music, and big band-style pop music, interpreted by country musicians. One important difference between Western Swing musicians and traditional jazz or country musicians was that the Western Swing players took right away to electrified instruments and loud drummers, a necessity in the loud dancehalls where western swing was popular.

Important electric musicians in those early days included Bob Dunn, the steel guitarist for Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies, an extremely influential steel guitarist who was the first to record with an amplified instrument; and his colleague Leo Raley, who played electric mandolin in Cliff Bruner’s Texas Wanderers in that band’s formation following the death of Milton Brown in 1936.

Leo Raley saw no virtue in the traditional acoustic mandolin. Raley added a homemade pickup to his Martin A-style, and played lead electric jazz mandolin, a role that the instrument had never taken before (it should be noted that the first commercially available electric mandolins, from Gibson and Vega, debuted the same year—1936—that Raley began playing his Martin with the homemade pickup). Raley didn’t play the chordal style so associated with the polite parlor mandolin, and he didn’t play like a Bluegrass boy—Raley instead reinvented the mandolin as a little brother to the electric guitar.

Leo Raley started a small movement in Southeast Texas when he began using the electric mandolin as a lead instrument for western swing. Raley was not a virtuoso soloist, but those who followed Raley’s example were. These included players such as Johnny Gimble, who went on to play fiddle and mandolin for Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys; Paul Buskirk, the Houston-area virtuoso who played mandolin and guitar for everybody from Tex Ritter to Willie Nelson (Buskirk didn’t really play like Raley, coming from a West Virginia background, but undoubtedly Raley’s use of amplification influenced him); and young ‘Tiny’ Moore, who decided after seeing Raley to concentrate on lead electric mandolin as his main instrument.

The first electric mandolin Tiny played was a custom-made instrument by his friend Raymond Jones. As Tiny progressed, he eventually bought a brand new Gibson EM-150 electric mandolin, strung up with only four strings.

As World War Two began, Tiny concentrated on learning the mandolin, and after being drafted in 1943, Tiny served a two-year stint in the military working as a radio operator in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The time spent in the Dakotas must have been good for woodshedding, for when Tiny returned to Port Arthur in 1945, he was a monster player, with the ‘Tiny Moore style’ fully formed.

In 1945 and 1946 Tiny played with legendary honky-tonk piano player Moon Mullican and his band the Showboys. It was by far the most professional gig he had worked thus far, and gave Tiny a hint of what might be possible, if he was lucky enough to catch a break.

Below: Moon Mullican on stage at the Big D Jamboree, Dallas.

That break came for Tiny in the most unlikely manner possible. Tiny had made plans to move to Oklahoma with a drummer friend in search of work, when the pair happened to drive past a late night diner in Beaumont, Texas, and saw Bob Wills’ tour bus parked in the lot. Bob Wills, lead vocalist Tommy Duncan, and Bob’s brother Billy Jack Wills were in the restaurant eating sandwiches after a performance at Beaumont’s Pleasure Pier, and Tiny wanted to meet them. Tiny struck up a conversation with Wills, and it wasn’t long before Wills asked him to get his mandolin from his car and play a little for them. Tiny was hired on the spot, got on the tour bus the next morning and became a featured member of Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys for the next four years.

Below: Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys, with Tiny Moore, second from left.

Bob Wills had been performing Western Swing music since the early 1930’s, first as a member of the Light Crust Doughboys (a corporate sponsored hot fiddle band that also included the other major architect of Western Swing, Milton Brown), and beginning in 1933 with his own band the Texas Playboys. The late 1930’s incarnation of the band was a large orchestra with brass and woodwind sections, however after losing most of his players to the draft in World War Two, Wills restructured the Playboys after the war to be a smaller, electrified combo with the emphasis on hot string players. The late 1940’s lineups of the Texas Playboys included incredible musicians like Junior Barnard on bluesy, distorted electric guitar; Herb Remington playing incredibly adventurous steel guitar, and fellow Texan Johnny Gimble on fiddle and mandolin. Together with Tiny’s hot electric mandolin, the group worked up incredible two, three, and four-part harmony leads that Western Swing scholars are still trying to pick apart today.

Below: Bob Wills and Tiny Moore.

In the late 1940’s, Wills owned a dancehall called Wills Point in Sacramento, California, but by 1950 had moved the Texas Playboys home base from Sacramento to Oklahoma City. After several years of hard touring, Tiny was beginning to tire of the road, and when Wills offered Tiny a position to manage Wills Point and stay off the road, Tiny jumped at the chance.

Bob Wills had three brothers, all of whom had their own bands. Many of the famous Texas Playboys came up through the ranks of Luke Wills, Johnny Lee Wills, or Billy Jack Wills’ various combos. Although the various Wills bands were essentially ‘farm teams’ for big brother Bob’s star attraction, ‘Billy Jack Wills and his Western Swing Band’ became something altogether different when Tiny Moore put together a new group for Billy Jack to front the house band at Wills Point.

The two CD’s of material that Billy Jack Wills and his band record in the early to mid-1950’s reveal that there was something truly magical going on in the group dynamic, much more so than in Bob’s band at the same time. Billy Jack Wills was 21 years younger than older brother Bob, and as such, the music was geared to a younger audience. Tiny, along with young virtuoso steel guitarist Vance Terry, guitarist Kenny Lowery, trumpeter Dick McComb and fiddler/bassist Cotton Roberts, created a hot dance band that filled the gap somewhere between Western Swing and the new Rock & Roll style of Bill Haley And The Comets. The playing was off the Richter scale, with Tiny trading insanely hot solos and breathtaking twin harmony leads with Vance Terry.

Below: Billy Jack Wills and his Western Swing Band (photo courtesy Andrew Brown).

Vance Terry, wanting an instrument like other top steel players like Joaquin Murphey, Speedy West, and Noel Boggs, ordered a custom-made Bigsby triple-neck steel guitar in 1951. A Bigsby steel guitar was something only the top professionals could afford at the time, as Paul Bigsby built each instrument by hand, with a waiting list a year long to buy his instruments. Bigsby’s handcrafted instruments also cost two to three times more than a comparable Gibson or Fender.

Tiny Moore followed Vance Terry’s example and went to visit Paul Bigsby. Tiny ordered a Bigsby electric mandolin for himself, to replace and update his ten-year-old Gibson EM-150. While Tiny has erroneously been credited with receiving the first solidbody electric mandolin, the truth is that Bigsby made his first electric mandolin (unless an earlier example surfaces) for Paul Buskirk in 1950, which was a ten-string mandolin strung in 5 courses (not to mention the fact that Bigsby instruments made after early 1949 aren’t true ‘solidbodies,’ they are neck-through-body instruments with hollow wings). Bigsby also made several other mandolins around the same time, including electric mandolins for Eschol Cosby and Al Giddings, and a re-necked Kay acoustic mandolin for Nudie Cohn the ‘Rodeo Tailor,’ among others.

Tiny originally placed an order with Bigsby for a four-string electric mandolin. The story of how Tiny’s mandolin wound up being a five-string is an interesting sidebar in the Bigsby saga.

After Paul Buskirk had his 10-string mandolin made in 1950, he brought it back to Houston, where a local mandolin player named Scotty Broyles saw the instrument and noted that Buskirk added a fifth pair of strings, tuned to a low C below the standard mandolin tuning of G-D-A-E.

A short time later Scotty Broyles went into the Navy and found himself stationed in San Diego at the Naval Base on North Island. San Diego had a tremendous country music and western swing scene in the early 50’s, centered at the Bostonia Ballroom east of San Diego in El Cajon. Here Scotty saw just about every top country music star of the day in person, and took color slide photographs whenever he could (in fact, several of Scotty’s beautiful color slides were included in the Bigsby book, including the only known color photograph of Merle Travis holding his 1948 Bigsby electric guitar).

Scotty befriended another country music fan on the Naval base, a musician and amateur guitar builder named Jim Harvey. Beginning around 1951, Jim Harvey built guitars, steel guitars, and mandolins in his La Jolla garage workshop, all showing a heavy Bigsby influence—neck-through-body construction, birdseye maple bodies with natural finish, aluminum nuts and bridges, etc. Soon Harvey agreed to build Scotty a 5-string electric mandolin, based on the Buskirk 10-string idea but with 5 single strings.

Jim Harvey’s earliest creations had DeArmond floating pickups, as they were the only commercially available pickup at that time (it might be hard to imagine, but 60 years ago guitar manufacturers wouldn’t sell their pickups or parts as separate accessory items). Jim Harvey was aware of Paul Bigsby’s pickups, and he decided to drive up to Downey to meet Bigsby in person and ask to purchase pickups for use on his own Jim Harvey instruments.

Scotty Broyles tells the story: “Jim asked Paul if he would sell him a pickup, and Paul said he’d have to see his work, and if it was good enough, he might consider it. Jim went out to his car and got the guitar he was working on, and Bigsby spent about ten minutes slowly looking it over. Finally, without saying anything, Paul walked over to a cabinet mounted on the wall, pulls out a pickup, comes back over to Jim and tells him the pickups are fifty dollars, and they’re the same price if he takes the pickup by itself or leaves the instrument to have him install it.”

Jim Harvey would go on to make a dozen or so instruments, about half of which used Bigsby pickups, including Scotty’s electric five-string mandolin.

Scotty recalls how Tiny Moore became associated with the five-string electric mandolin: “Jim Harvey had taken my unfinished mandolin up there to Paul Bigsby to have a five-string pickup installed. Well, it was sitting around Bigsby’s shop for a few weeks while he installed the pickup, and about that time, Tiny Moore came and visited Bigsby to see how his new electric mandolin was coming. Tiny had ordered a four-string mandolin, but when he saw my Harvey five-string mandolin lying there, he changed his mind and told Paul right then and there his had to be a five-string too. Paul was mad, because he was just about done with Tiny’s instrument! Eventually Tiny got his way, and that’s the reason Tiny’s Bigsby had five strings instead of four, was because he saw mine in the shop.”

Below: Scotty Broyles and his 1952 Harvey 5-string mandolin, with Bigsby pickup.

Tiny’s Bigsby mandolin was finished on September 3, 1952, and we know that because the serial number stamped in the body near the mandolin’s tailpiece reads 9352. Paul Bigsby didn’t leave us much information on the creation of his instruments, but we do know (because he told many of his clients) that the serial numbers represented the date of completion.

Tiny Moore’s Bigsby, although now weathered and showing the signs of decades of hard work on the road, is a magnificent example of Paul Bigsby’s work. One of the hallmarks of Bigsby instruments is the graceful slope where the neck joins the body. All genuine Bigsbys have this slope that seamlessly fades the back of the neck into the neck/body joint (and it’s easy to spot a forgery when they lack this feature), and the one on Tiny Moore’s mandolin is perhaps the most graceful example of the neck-to-body fade this author has ever seen.

The binding, inlay and construction are tight and expertly done. At some point Tiny replaced the early Klusons with replacement tuners, and moved the rear strap hook from the tail area to the top of the instrument, but other than that, the instrument is in remarkably original condition (astute Tiny Moore fans may note that the instrument had a few sets of different volume and tone knobs over its lifetime of use, but the ones on it now are the originals that Skip found inside the instrument’s case).

Detail for geeks: Note that the Bigsby 5-pole pickup used the same covers as the 6-pole pickup, which had cast "dimples" for the six poles. For the 5-pole pickup, Bigsby simply drilled between the dimples.

Tiny’s instrument has a couple of unique features, despite the fact that all Bigsby instruments are unique. A feature not found on any other Bigsby instrument is the master volume control located above the bridge, with the tone control by the pickup switch, suited to Tiny’s ergonomic preference. The bridge saddle is straight across at a slight angle, which all of Bigsby’s mandolins and the upper mandolin neck of Grady Martin’s doubleneck guitar have in common, unlike the typical compensated Bigsby bridge saddle found on the larger instruments. The mandolin’s top and back are made of figured curly maple, unlike the birdseye maple used on most, but not all, Bigsby instruments. The mandolin utilizes the standard mandolin scale length of 13 7/8”. With its neck-through-body design (with hollow wings) style of construction, the instrument is also light as a feather, as most Bigsbys are.

When Tiny received his Bigsby mandolin in the fall of 1952, he used the instrument extensively with Billy Jack Wills’ band, and also on several Bob Wills recording sessions in 1955. If you search out the Billy Jack Wills CD’s (not available on iTunes, but the CD’s are easily found on eBay), you can hear Tiny’s Bigsby in all its glory, and it really is a magnificent sounding instrument. With Tiny mixing Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian guitar licks into his mandolin playing, Tiny probably influenced more guitar players than mandolin players.

Tiny was so good, in fact, that he received offers from huge stars of the day such as Red Foley to go on the road and leave the Sacramento gig behind. Tiny refused the offers, though they would have meant a huge pay raise.

Below: Another classic shot of the Billy Jack Wills band (courtesy of Andrew Brown).

Bob Wills wound up drafting most of the Billy Jack Wills band into the Texas Playboys touring band in 1955, and after Wills Point closed in Sacramento, Tiny rejoined Bob Wills’ band for a short time before quitting the road once again, choosing to remain in his adopted hometown of Sacramento.

From 1956 to 1961 Tiny played locally and appeared on local children’s television as ‘Ranger Roy,’ a character he invented for a kid’s show with a monkey as his sidekick (Skip recalls: “Tiny had a real nice old Gibson flat-top acoustic guitar, but it got covered in monkey bites and claw marks during his ‘Ranger Roy’ phase!”). When that gig ended, Tiny founded the ‘Tiny Moore Music Center’ in Sacramento, selling instruments and giving lessons—where a young Skip Maggiora also taught and sometimes would run the studio when Tiny was on the road.

In the 1970’s, Tiny collaborated with Jay Roberts to make the Roberts ‘Tiny Moore Model’ electric mandolin, very loosely modeled after Tiny’s Bigsby. They were sold directly out of Tiny’s music store, and not many of them were produced. Today they are quite collectible, though the Roberts are not Bigsby copies—they are different in nearly every way except the basic appearance.

Tiny had a great second career when Merle Haggard came calling in 1970 to do a Texas Playboys reunion album. Haggard was obsessed with the music of Bob Wills and is directly responsible for bringing Wills’ name out of fading obscurity back into the limelight. Tiny played both mandolin and fiddle, and did so well with Merle’s band (‘The Strangers’) that he became a regular member of the touring and recording band. Tiny would continue to play with Merle Haggard on and off throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, eventually ending the Haggard gig when Merle insisted his entire band relocate to the Redding, California, area—Tiny declared he was staying in Sacramento and handed in his resignation.

Below: Tiny's original Bigsby case still has the "Merle Haggard Road Show" sticker on it from his 1970's tours.

In the last few years of his life, Tiny recorded a few new albums, mostly straight jazz albums by himself and with fellow mandolin virtuoso Jethro Burns. One of those albums, ‘Tiny Moore Music,’ shows the aging, but still agile, master of the instrument holding his battle-scared Bigsby mandolin on the cover.

Tiny Moore died on December 15, 1987, while playing a gig at Cactus Pete’s in Jackpot, Nevada. Until the day he died, Tiny was still playing great, rocking his little electric mandolin like the mighty instrument it was.

Skip Maggiora founded Skip’s Music in Sacramento in 1973, and Skip’s is now an institution around the area. Tiny’s three most important mandolins—the Gibson EM-150, Tiny’s personal Roberts mandolin, and of course, the legendary 1952 Bigsby mandolin are now treasured centerpieces of Skip’s personal instrument collection.

Below: The three instruments used by Tiny Moore in his long career, photographed at Skip's Music (thanks Skip):

While Tiny's Bigsby mandolin was sadly overlooked in the recent Bigsby book, I’m proud to tell Tiny’s story here in these pages. Thanks to Skip, we’re able to get a better look at this incredibly historic and important Bigsby instrument.

--Deke Dickerson

Thanks to Skip Maggiora, Andrew Brown, Chris Lucker, and Scotty Broyles.

The author is interested in hearing from readers with Tiny Moore stories, or from anybody with a Bigsby story to tell. Email Deke Dickerson here.