Waylon (7 page)

Bill Black, Elvis’s bass player, called Dave to set up some details of the date. He was kind of acting as manager then. Now
Bill Black sounded black; he had that Memphis drawl, and we hadn’t heard many Memphis people. Dave didn’t know what he had
gotten himself into; he was talking around it, through it, and finally came out with it. “Bill, are you black?”

“Hell, no, we’re white,” said Bill. That was how it was then, back when black people could write the songs but nobody wanted
them to sing them. Which is how Pat Boone got to cover Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,” if you can believe that. In Lubbock,
audiences might have been legally integrated, but blacks still sat in the balcony while whites sat in the orchestra.

I didn’t get to see Elvis the first time he came through town. I heard about it up in Littlefield, how he performed at the
Fair Park Coliseum with Hank Snow and Martha Carson and stole the show in his red britches, orange sport coat, and white buck
shoes. How he played the Cotton Club out on Slayton Highway southeast of town and got in a little scrap or something there.

The second time Elvis hit Lubbock, they paid him four thousand dollars. He was part of a package tour that also featured Billy
Walker, Jimmy and Johnny (though Johnny had already been kicked out of the group and was replaced by Wayne Walker), and Tillman
Franks, who played bass and managed Jimmy and Johnny. He later worked with the
Louisiana Hayride
and as Johnny Horton’s and David Houston’s manager.

Usually up-and-coming performers would spread out when they hit a region, trying to earn a little extra traveling expenses
and a few additional fans. I booked a show for Billy Walker and Jimmy and Johnny at the Littlefield high school auditorium.
They asked me to put up the posters, and they’d give me a percentage. My then-girlfriend Maxine took the tickets. I’d also
get to sing on the show.

I had heard there was a talent scout there. Jimmy, of Jimmy and Johnny, was making eyes at Maxine, singing “If you don’t want
to love me, honey, somebody else will,” and trying to make out with her. I never realized that was part of being a singer.
Finding the girls. I hated him.

Billy told the longest joke I ever heard in my life. I’m laughing. I’m sitting there with my eyes like dollars. I’m thinking
Tillman Franks might be the Mercury Records talent scout.

Right in the middle of my spot, I was singing a Faron Young song, “If You Ain’t Lovin’ You Ain’t Livin’,” when my voice went.
In the back of my palate, I have a long thing that hangs down like a match stem. Sometimes, if I’m anxious or nervous, it’ll
touch down to the back of my tongue, or hit my vocal cords, and that’ll just take my voice away.

All of a sudden I stopped singing. I thought my life was ruined. I couldn’t believe that there was my big chance and I blew
it.

I did make thirty-five dollars at the door. And I got to meet Elvis in Lubbock. Even then, he was about the hottest thing
to hit West Texas. They invited me backstage, gave me free tickets, and the whole show was there. He and Scotty were standing
over by the stage, and Elvis was just jumping around everywhere, bouncing and bubbling over with enthusiasm, full of more
energy than anybody I ever saw. He was talking to me like he’d known me a thousand years.

“I’ll sing you my next thing I’m going to record,” he said. It was “Tweedle Dee,” the LaVern Baker song. “My next single,”
though I don’t think he ever recorded it. He did it on the show that night.

I was crazy about Elvis. I loved that churning rhythm on the bottom. He didn’t even have drums yet, but the rock ’n’ roll
part was unmistakable. You’d think it was overnight, but he’d been plugging away a long time. He had a hard way to go, because
they were fighting him from every corner in the South, calling him names—white trash bebop nigger stuff; though he could pretty
well handle himself. I think he popped a couple of guys on his way up.

On my radio show we’d do some of the rock ’n’ roll things: Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Little Richard. Every time I played a
Little Richard record the owner would come all the way back to the station from home. He wouldn’t even call. He’d just cuss
me, until one night I played two of them in a row and he fired me.

My hero then was Sonny Curtis. He was so far advanced to what I was as a guitar player that I seemed struggling compared to
him. His uncles were the Mayfield Brothers, a bluegrass group, and Ed Mayfield had actually been in Bill Monroe’s band. Sonny
couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t know how to play guitar. We had met when he used to come to Littlefield to perform
at the Palace. I’d do a few songs, he’d do a couple more, and then we’d sing “It’s Been a Blue, Blue Day” and collect our
ten dollars.

We were all coming out of the woodwork. We’d seen most of us at the small-town talent contests and country music shows in
the area, and when KDAV in Lubbock started hosting
Sunday Party,
as early as August 1953, we got to meet each other on a regulee, regularily, uh, regularlee scheduled basis.

KDAV was located in a small shack outside of town, with a big tower rising beside it and 580
KC
. painted on the side. On Sunday afternoons at about two all the local teenagers would drive out and park around the station,
radios tuned to KDAV, sitting on their cars and watching us play through the station’s glass windows. It was kind of a free-for-all.

Everybody had bands, and whoever booked the gigs would mix and match musicians. I had a band with a steel guitar player, Bill
Clark. I didn’t get as much into the Elvis thing as I did Bill Haley’s sound, because of the steel. There was Hope Griffith,
who was about fourteen and dressed like a cowgirl, and had appeared on a local television show in Lubbock; I played rhythm
guitar in Hope’s band, alongside steel guitarist Weldon Myrick, who became one of the best pedal players in Nashville. Later
on a singer from Wink, Texas, named Roy Orbison would turn up. Nobody thought Roy had a chance with his high voice.

One night I was in a restaurant in Lubbock over on Avenue Q, with Sonny Curtis and Weldon. We didn’t have any money, and I
had hitchhiked to Lubbock. Sonny took the only nickel that was among us and put it in the jukebox and pressed Chet Atkins’s
“Poor People of Paris.” Sonny could play in that finger-picking style. I admired him so much, I wanted to change my name to
Sonny. I even tried to stand like him.

There was one other musician with us at the restaurant. His name was Charles “Buddy” Holly. He was only a year older than
me, but he seemed to have a lot more experience. He had been born in Lubbock, and was half of a group called Buddy and Bob,
later expanded to include Larry, and I’d seen him every now and again. He sang mostly country songs with Bob Montgomery, in
classic Delmore/Louvin Brothers fashion; but after Elvis came through like a whirlwind, he added Larry Welborn on bass, so
he had his Scotty and Bill. Sonny Curtis sometimes joined them on fiddle.

He was a highlight of the
Sunday Party.
He didn’t look like the type of guy you’d expect to turn on the crowds, but I always enjoyed him as a performer. He wasn’t
as impressive a singer in country music. But man, the minute he hit that rock and roll, he was something else.

Buddy called it Western and Bop, which could include everything from the “Annie Had a Baby” rhythm and blues he heard coming
out of
Stan’s Record Rack
on KWKH in Shreveport, Louisiana, to the country and western that sprouted from the same town on the
Louisiana Hayride.
Much like the western swing of Bob Wills, when rural string band music started colliding with the big band jazz of the early
thirties and the Hot Club sound of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, this new breed of country crossed all boundaries.
It was called rockabilly, bay-buh.

KDAV was the first full-time country music station in the country, and Pappy Dave Stone, the Man with a Smile in His Voice,
ran it along with disc jockey Hi Pockets Duncan. They were kind of a team. Dave was the businessman. He knew how to make money
out of these things. Hi Pockets was the guy who came up with ideas. He was a tall, walking encyclopedia of country music,
kind of a ladies’ man, and his favorite food was chocolate cake with cream gravy. Is that rich enough for you? He had a winning
smile, and a brash, self-confident look about him. In those days, disc jockeys were stars. If a singing star came to town,
the disc jockey was probably the bigger of the two.

Hi Pockets would do voices on the air, real slapstick country stuff. He’d be Herkimer, or speak high and scratchy like an
old woman. His theme song was the “I.H. Boogie,” a guitar shuffle that he said stood for “Introducing Hi Pockets.” He was
a natural-born emcee. For the live shows he would dress up and do comedy. Later, when Buddy, Bob, and Larry got to be so popular
that they had their own scheduled slot on the
House Party,
he became their business manager. He was always good for a glad hand and some discreet advice. Hi Pockets would always talk
to you where Dave might have been talking down to you.

There was some question whether this new rockabilly was country, but that’s a question they’re always asking. Though they
gave him a hard time at the Grand Ole Opry, KDAV came down on the side of Elvis being country, and even instituted a
Rock ’n’ Roll Hit Parade
for a time. For Dave Stone, it was rockabilly with an emphasis on the
billy.
Buddy not only appeared with Elvis at the opening of a Pontiac dealership when he was just starting out in early 1955, but
supported him on a package show with Ferlin Husky headlining later that year. Buddy’s big break came at a Bill Haley concert
in October 1955, at the Fair Park Coliseum, when “Lubbock’s own Buddy, Bob, and Larry” were discovered by Eddie Crandall of
Decca Records. Rather, Buddy was. Decca was probably looking for their own version of Elvis, who had just been signed by RCA
Victor, and Buddy was it, even though they clearly didn’t understand rock and roll judging from Buddy’s experiences in Nashville.
I thought about that in years to come when I made my first records there.

He went to Nashville with Sonny Curtis and a new rhythm section, drummer Jerry Allison and bassist Don Guess; the rest is
his story.

In the meantime, I was busier than a three-peckered goat. People have always said that I “attack” work, and I guess I can’t
help it. I was always doing something. I’d play at a parade or the community center and then go do my radio program before
trying to win a trophy in a talent contest. After I got fired from KVOW I went over to KLVT in Levelland, where I had a country
show. I’d start making up these little songs about the radio station—jingles set to the tunes of the day. I’d do imitations
of Hank Snow, which sounded like Waylon trying to imitate Hank Snow, or John Cash, or George Jones. It was attention-grabbing,
and I was noticed by the Corbin family, whose dad, A.G., and two of his sons, Slim and Sky, were about to buy a station in
Lubbock, atop the highest, most prestigious building in town: the Great Plains Life. They were pretty tall themselves; each
Corbin brother stretched about six feet five inches, and their mom wasn’t far behind.

Lubbock was the biggest city in the south plains, the Hub of the Plains, as they liked to say. KLLL, the station started up
by the Corbins, hit that town like a truckload of geese. They bought it, hired me, and there we were, shit-on-the-boot cowboys
ready to take on the competition. KDAV had already staked out their claim; they were country, and we were country. There was
nothing left but to go to war.

We started using the station’s studio as a production center. I taught them how to do jingles, and we prided ourselves in
being airtight. In those days, KDAV would be very loose and sloppy. “Here’s Hank Williams,” they’d say, and there’d be some
dead space and then the record would start. We’d cue that record right up to the groove and let it go when we finished talking.
KDAV read all their commercials; we produced them.

We didn’t make fun as much as cut up about being country. We used it as humor. Instead of “Friends and neighbors, y’all,”
we’d say “Hi there, all you friends and neighbors out in radiolint.”

We did remotes from local grocery stores and meat markets. I’d sing a little, and talk to the owners, Morris Fruit and Vegetables
at 704 East Broadway, or his competitor, George Sewall. Ten pounds of flour for forty-nine cents, twenty-five pounds of potatoes
for just seventy-nine cents, sausage at three pounds for a dollar, mustard greens at ten cents a bunch; where you can save
yourself a bushel of money, friend, on good vittles. One time I said, “Come on down to George’s Fruit and Vegetables. You
can’t beat George’s meat.” The phones lit up pretty bright after that one, and those cards and letters kept comin’ in.

Nobody knew what to make of us. People went crazy because of all these “hillbillies” up at the station. The secretaries in
the Great Plains Life Building would walk past on their way to the restaurant at the end of the hall and they’d stare through
the glass at us. I think they liked what they saw, and we’d be looking back at them, especially Ray “Slim” Corbin, who was
my best friend for many years. We were wilder than guineas.

Hi Pockets joined us from KDAV, and he became one of the four main K-triple-L disc jockeys. It was a daytime station, though
we used to have a guy who was a holdover with the station, named Mr. Sunshine. An old hypocrite was what he was. He’d be talking
sweet to these old ladies and shut-in women on the phone, trying to put the make on them while he was playing some gospel
music on the air, and we’d be fixin’ to get his ass. He had a disc of “Give the World a Smile Each Day,” and it was Mr. Sunshine’s
theme. We duplicated the sticker and put Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire” on it. “It’s time now for the Sunshine Hour,”
he said, and turned it loose.
“You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain …”
He sat there and watched it go around until it played completely through, acting like nothing happened.