The Colonel (17 page)

“Well,” Parker added, “I manage Gene Austin, you know.” Arnold’s face lit up, and the Tampa dogcatcher knew he’d rolled a lucky seven. Gene Austin had long
been one of Eddy’s inspirations. And so it was with two agendas that Parker took Austin backstage at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium for a Grand Ole Opry performance not long after that
meeting with Arnold at WSM. Austin had filed for bankruptcy the previous year,
and if Parker could get him on the Opry to do a song or two, maybe book some club dates out of
it, he’d be only too happy to help an old friend. If in the process Parker should just happen to give Eddy Arnold the thrill of his life by introducing him to his hero, well, certainly
there’d be no harm in that.

Arnold recalls that when they talked in earnest, Parker didn’t mince words. “Tom was obviously interested in finding a new, young artist,” Arnold says. “Seemed like he
knew what he was talking about. And I was a hungry boy.”

After that, Parker began to pop up more and more around Nashville, getting in Eddy’s face whenever possible. Sooner or later, he would find a way to woo the Plowboy.

Parker’s frequent trips to Nashville reminded him just how much he missed the traveling and the exhilarating cadence of the wheels rolling beneath him. For that reason—and to study
the mind-set of the typical country musician, whose generally honest and unfettered psyche he had yet to fully grasp—Parker signed on as Pee Wee King’s road manager for the bulk of the
1943 season. Then, as King remembers, Parker was always eager to play cards and shoot dice with the band to kill the long hours on the drives between dates, keeping a $100 bill in his wallet for
gambling emergencies.

When the tour ended, he returned to Florida and booked personal appearances for newcomer Ernest Tubb. Parker was one of the best promoters there was, in Tubb’s estimation, but he told his
son, Justin, that he’d never use him on a long-term basis because “he’d constantly try to put one over on you—that was the life he’d led as a carny.”

Parker saw the extreme advantage to staying on good terms with a rising star like Tubb. Soon Parker surprised Justin, then almost nine, and his younger sister, Elaine, with the magnanimous gift
of two ponies: a black-and-white paint named Honey for Justin, and a smaller Shetland and buckboard for his sister.

The Tubb children, not knowing that Parker needed to unload the last vestiges of his kiddie ride concessions, were thrilled at such benevolence, even if Elaine’s pony, Trigger, was, in
fact, both old and blind. But their father suspected that Parker seldom did a favor without expecting one in return, and that while he gave the children the ponies because he hoped they would enjoy
years of pleasure with them, he also planned to use the gifts as leverage. Indeed, Parker had plans for expanding his relationship with the lanky Opry star.

Since 1941, the WSM Artist Service Bureau had been commissioning a series of summer tent shows that took the Opry from its base in middle Tennessee and out into the rural
South. Parker had tossed his hat in the ring as the booker and advance man, or “general agent,” for the Jamup and Honey tent show of 1944, which would go out that April, taking country
music to audiences that couldn’t travel due to wartime restrictions on tires and gasoline.

The Jamup and Honey show, he told Harry Stone, WSM’s general manager, held special interest for him. Aside from the blackface comedy duo, who’d heard about Parker’s prowess as
a promoter from Roy Acuff, the show starred old-time banjo player Uncle Dave Macon, Minnie Pearl, and Eddy Arnold, the rising performer who, in his first year on the Opry, was already being
considered to host his own segment. With Stone’s and - Acuff’s recommendations, Parker got the job.

On the day that the Jamup and Honey tent show opened a five-day run in Mobile, Alabama, the rain came down with such velocity that great tongues of water lapped at the slopes of the taut canvas
tent, finally seeping through and dripping down below. By the time for the first of two shows that evening, the ground under the tent brimmed like a river, so much so, as Gabe Tucker, then Eddy
Arnold’s bass player, remembers, “We performed barefooted, it was so bad. And God, it rained every day.”

Still, the April showers could not deter the throngs of people who came not just from Mobile, the Azalea City, but from the outlying rural areas, eager to plunk down their hard-won, wartime cash
of twenty, thirty, and thirty-five cents a head—even the top ticket price of $1—to hear and see the Grand Ole Opry under canvas. For hours, they stood in a great snake of a line, the
men in suits and ties, the women in Sunday dresses and long coats to keep off the spring chill, hoping to be among the lucky 1,500 to crowd into the 80-by-220-foot tent.

For Tom Parker, who had traveled the back roads of the central South and Midwest as part of the booking agent, bill poster, and advance-man crew, the choice of Mobile was not by happenstance. In
selecting the spots where he would recast his life once again, following the WSM radio clear-channel signal, he returned to the city where he most likely came ashore in 1929 and reshaped himself
into an entirely new entity.

Now, as the tent show got under way for the second week, Parker doubled back to Mobile to see if he had delivered what he’d promised both WSM’s general manager, Harry Stone, and Lee
Davis “Honey” Wilds, the owner of the show, whose daily operating expenses reached nearly
$600 (“Everybody said we were crazy,” admitted Wilds), and
who paid the radio station a weekly commission for using its call letters and the name Grand Ole Opry. Almost always along the route of one-night locales like Caruthersville, Missouri; Harrison,
Arkansas; and Meridian, Mississippi—the idea was to pick little towns that didn’t have auditoriums—Parker would discover with great satisfaction that the shows sold out, often
with monstrous crowds still waiting at the door. Sometimes nearly the whole town showed up: in one Oklahoma berg of 1,500, 1,100 people turned out to sit shoulder to shoulder, ten to a row, in
sections marked by lines of slender poles. Word quickly filtered back to Nashville.

“Even with the tent shows,” says Pee Wee King, “Tom seemed to know how to put them in the right place at the right time. Some of us would go out on the road in Georgia,
Mississippi, and Alabama and have rain. And Tom would be in Illinois and Indiana and Iowa, maybe also having rain, but still drawing crowds.”

As the poster of the 21-by-28-inch signs (
HEARD THEM ON THE AIR
!
STARS IN PERSON
!
MAMMOTH TENT THEATRE
!) that brought
folks flocking to a tent illuminated by dangling lightbulbs and thrown up in the middle of a farmer’s pasture, Parker traversed the country in a well-worn International panel truck, painted a
somewhat sickening shade of yellow and festooned with bright red letters boasting
WSM
,
GRAND OLE OPRY
,
ADVERTISING
.

“They furnished him that ol’ truck and gave him Green Stamps for gasoline,” says Gabe Tucker, who first met Parker on the show, having admired his promotional skills since the
Gene Austin days in the late ’30s. “He slapped them big posters, the three [30-by-60 pictorial] sheets, up on the sides of barns with flour and water, and oh God, that truck smelled
awful, just sour as hell. And he slept in it every once in a while out there on the road. I felt sorry for him, dressed like a tramp in them awkward-lookin’ shoes with his britches halfway
down ’em. Marie was in Tampa, and he was so damn lonesome. It was pretty rough living.”

But being attached to the show brought Parker in close proximity to Eddy Arnold. The singer’s management contract with Dean Upson wasn’t due to expire until October 1945, yet Parker
wanted to lay the groundwork now. Both Tucker and Little Roy Wiggins, the eighteen-year-old who played steel guitar in Eddy’s band, remember seeing him standing in the shadows, watching, only
the red glow of his cigar giving him away.

The tent show was a perfect vantage point from which Parker could talk to Arnold, persuade him, and learn more about him. To achieve that, he needed to be around the singer
often enough that Arnold would feel comfortable with him and seek his advice. Even though Parker felt superior to most of the troupe, particularly with his shrewdness about money, he also wanted to
make a favorable impression on the people around him, both by his actions and results as an advance man, and by the sheer force of his personality. Since he was not just establishing himself, but
still recreating himself as a country promoter, he hoped to bolster his own reputation and to further his education in the hillbilly ways. He knew the way to win their confidence was to gain
popularity.

And so at least once a month, or every ten days if he could manage it, Parker made a point of circling back to the show on the pretense of working out a problem or to pick up his pay.

“He was trying to make friends with everybody that was there, because he didn’t know who was heavy [with power] and who wasn’t,” says Gabe Tucker. Since Parker envied
Tucker’s proximity to the star, “we got along just fine. But back then, he could get along with anybody. He was the nicest guy in the world when he needed you.”

Before long, Parker was traveling in the car with the eccentric, whiskey-nipping Uncle Dave Macon—who in 1926 became a cornerstone of the Opry as the first individual featured
performer—and his handsome son Dorris, who accompanied his father on guitar.

A plus for Parker when he accompanied the troupe was that although they traveled at night, while it was cool, and arrived in the wee hours of the morning, he got to sample the downy comfort of a
real bed, rather than sleep in the truck, even if the accommodations were, as Honey Wilds remembered, “little wasp-nest hotels.”

Although Jamup and Honey wrote and performed comedic songs, their primary act was a lively amalgamation of Southern humor, drawn from the nineteenth-century minstrel tradition and mugged in
blackface as tribute to the Negro culture.

With his sulfurous sense of humor and appetite for the practical joke, Parker was more naturally drawn to comedy than he was to the homemade music of the rural Southeast, with its reliance on
story songs chock full of drunks, disappointed love, and deferred dreams. And perhaps because a joke about a bumpkin farmer from small-town Tennessee was not so different from a joke about a farmer
from a small village in Holland, Parker reveled in the stories about rube hillbillies, ethnic immigrants,
and the hayseed who got the best of the city slicker that made up
the country comic’s stock-in-trade.

Whether he realized it, Parker’s six-month excursion in the company of country comedians had a profound effect on his thinking and entrepreneurial style. In years to come, he would often
book a comic on his shows, whether the headliner was Hank Snow or Elvis Presley, and even when such opening acts were no longer fashionable or appropriate.

Out on the road, Parker spent long hours with the troupe, sharing meals, leisurely telling stories, strolling around the town with them before packing up the cars and heading out to the tent
grounds for the performance. Yet when Minnie Pearl, who had known him from his earlier days in Tampa, tried to engage him in intimate conversation about his youth and growing-up years, the usually
gregarious promoter turned silent. As she said years later, “I was with him for months at a stretch, and he never even slipped and mentioned anything about his background.”

Pearl was mystified, since “Southern people talk about their grandmother, their great-grandmother, what their daddy did, what their grandfather did. They’re involved in background
and family.” The rumor, which she believed, was that “the enigma,” as she called him, was born down around Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. But no matter how hard she tried to confirm it,
Parker refused to divulge a single detail.

However, he seemed to enjoy a more relaxed rapport with Honey Wilds. While Parker naturally would have tried to cultivate the show’s owner—the man who hired him “right out of
that dog pound,” as Honey remembered—the towering Wilds was not the easiest man to know. Like many comedians, the off-stage Wilds was frequently difficult and unpleasant, with a streak
that ran close to morose. He also gave off an air of danger. Wilds routinely carried a pocket knife, which he always prided as the sharpest in the room and, on the lot, a ten-inch crescent wrench,
which he brandished like a weapon. For the countless miles of travel, he armed himself with a pistol, sometimes shooting it within ten feet of someone just to get their attention.

The basis of his bond with Parker, concludes David Wilds, Honey’s son, “was that what each did appealed to the other. My father was a total creative rebel. He was a lot like Tom in
that he was a very intelligent guy who worked really hard to either dominate a situation through any means necessary, or pretend that he wasn’t as shrewd as he was. Tom’s thought
process was just constantly evolving, and Daddy had a tremendous appreciation for his ability to get things done.”

As the nights turned nippy and the tent show ended its season that fall of ’44, Parker threw a big dinner for the troupe in Tampa. In retrospect, say members of
Arnold’s band, such uncharacteristic generosity came more from Parker’s hope to impress Eddy than anything else, since Eddy still hadn’t made up his mind about this uneducated
hustler with the faulty English.

Parker was already full of plans on how to make Eddy a major name, even outside the confines of the Opry. But until he was able to snag the singer’s management contract, Parker hired on
with J. L. Frank as a stump man, a combination of promoter, road manager, and advance agent, keeping Frank’s acts working in the South and Midwest.

At a time when most country acts booked dates and tours from their home telephone, and the switchboard operator at the Grand Ole Opry acted as an answering service for the few personal managers
working out of Nashville, Parker ran his business out of the lobby of Nashville’s Andrew Jackson Hotel, making use of its free wall phones and letter desks.