Willie (21 page)

The first thing a man in Texas was trained to do was to find the guy his wife was running around with and kill him. I didn't know who Martha was seeing on the side, so I went looking for a lot of suspects. I always carried a gun back then. It was part of the uniform. You carried a gun, you looked mean. Everybody I knew carried a gun. You stuck it in your boot or in your belt if your shirttail was out.

I was mad enough to shoot somebody. But the circumstances never quite called for it. Sometimes if I had showed up an hour earlier, no telling what might have happened. If the other guy had said, “Okay, Willie, I'm Martha's boyfriend, so go for your gun,” then at least one of us would have gotten shot. Fortunately the guys I was after had a little more sense than I had, or else they didn't want to get shot over a piece of ass.

It's strange that this is how I was raised, coming from a strong church family. But I was taught you had to at least whip a guy who flirted with your wife, and you had to shoot him if he went far enough to threaten your family. One of the greatest laws, I thought when I was growing up, was a Texas law that made me real proud to live in the state of Texas. I understood that it was just in Texas that it was legal for you to kill anybody you caught screwing your wife or husband. You could kill them both and legally walk away free. I always thought, boy, what a great law that is. I never thought what might hapen if I was the one who got caught in bed. It turns out the Texas law didn't exactly say you could kill your mate's lover. But I do know some people who got killed doing things like that, and nobody went to prison.

In Nashville my fighting with Martha became more and more physical, as if we had screamed all we could stand. Martha was a tough old girl. She fought like a tiger. She took a lick pretty good, and she dealt one out even better. One time I had my hand around her face and she got my little finger in her mouth and bit it to the bone. Slowed up my guitar playing. My voice went about four octaves higher when I'd hit a chord.

Hank Cochran rescued us from Dunn's Trailer Court. He asked me to go with him to Pamper Music in Goodlettsville about twenty miles north of Nashville. The owner of Pamper Music, Hal Smith, listened to my songs, and nodded and said he'd call me. I went back to Dunn's to wait. Hal told Hank, who was his top writer and song plugger, that he liked my stuff well enough but couldn't afford to hire me. Years later I heard Hank said Hal could take the $50-a-week raise Hank had just received from Pamper and pay it to me as an advance against my royalties.

Hank drove back to our trailer to tell us the news. He had an easy time finding the trailer because Hank and Roger Miller had both lived in our same trailer earlier.

When Hank said I at last had a real job that paid a real salary for writing songs, I broke down and cried.

Martha cried, the kids cried, Hank cried. We were so happy. It was a real big deal for me—my first job as a professional songwriter.

We moved to a nicer place in Goodlettsville and I started working in a garage at the Pamper office. There was just a door, a window, a guitar, and the walls. I started talking to the walls, like I had done when I was a child in Abbott reading the pages of the
Star-Telegrams
that kept the wind out. Hank walked into the garage, and on a piece of cardboard I had written “Hello Walls.”

Faron Young cut “Hello Walls” and it sold two million copies. Suddenly, my world started spinning. In 1961 Patsy Cline recorded “Crazy,” Billy Walker recorded “Funny How Time Slips Away,” and Ray Price recorded “Night Life.” All four made the Country Top 20. “Crazy” and “Hello Walls” cracked the Pop Top 40.

Chubby Checker had started a new craze called the Twist at the Peppermint Lounge in Manhattan that year, the Berlin Wall was built, the Bay of Pigs happened, and Roger Maris hit sixty homers for the Yankees. But for me 1961 was the year I started making it as a songwriter.

Faron Young had loaned me $500. When I got my first royalty check of $3,000 from “Hello Walls,” I ran to Tootsie's and found Faron sitting drinking at a table and kissed him flush on the mouth I
was so excited. I tried to pay Faron the $500, but he wouldn't take it. “I don't want your money, son,” he said. “Wait till you can afford it and then fatten a steer for me or something.”

It took years, but I finally paid Faron back by giving him a prize bull my son Billy bought at a livestock auction for $38,000.

After “Crazy” and Hello Walls” were recorded, I heard Ray Price's bass player Donny Young—now better known as Johnny Paycheck—had quit. I talked Ray into hiring me to play bass with the Cherokee Cowboys. Ray didn't ask if I knew how to play bass, which I didn't.

The Cherokee Cowboys hit the road. Johnny Bush, Roger Miller, Darrell McCall, Buddy Emmons—they all played for the Cherokee Cowboys. I was making $25 a day faking it as bass player, but more royalty checks started coming in. I blew the money as fast as I could. Every time the Cherokee Cowboys pulled into a town, Ray would put us all up at a Holiday Inn. But I'd get the biggest, most expensive suite they had—a penthouse if there was one—and have a party for the boys until the money ran out. Between Jimmy Day and me and a couple others, the money just disappeared. I even took to flying commercial airplanes to the next gig instead of riding the bus.

You can imagine how this went over with Martha. She was getting some of the royalty money, but not as much as she should have.

Martha and I had advanced into the worst type of marital discord. There wasn't so much hitting each other any more. Now it was fighting with cruel words that once you say them you can't ever take back. If you hit somebody, or they hit you, it's over with. It's out of your system. But if you speak mean angry words, it goes to the bone and stays there. Just your tone of voice can do damage. Maybe you hardly notice how harsh you sound, but the other person never forgets it. They'll always hear your words and your tone and remember what you meant. You are what you are thinking and what you say is what you mean in those situations. You've got to watch that. It's heavy shit.

I bought Ray Price's 1959 black Cadillac with fishtail fins, a classic car, and gave it to Martha. She would get drunk and terrorize Nashville in that car. I was so worn out from being jealous and macho that I got to where I barely cared any more if Martha was carrying any boyfriends in the Cadillac.

There was a rumor I heard on the road that Roger Miller and Martha had something going. I never did ask either one of them if it was true. But Roger wrote a song called “Sorry, Willie.” Actually I was with Roger the night he wrote the song someplace outside of
Tulsa. By then, Martha and I were separated and I didn't care to know what might have happened between them.

In fact, I recorded “Sorry, Willie” on Liberty with Joe Allison. Roger was at the session. It wasn't that I had become broad-minded about such shit as that, but, you know, I wasn't sure of anything. And art is art wherever you find it.

I went into Tootsie's one night toward the end of our marriage and tried to talk to Martha. We were both drinking. She didn't want to hear any more of my crap. She started throwing glasses at me. One hit the wall and shattered and cut Hank Cochran's face pretty bad. I took him to the hospital, but I was wiseass drunk and wouldn't let the doctor touch Hank, whose face was a mess of blood. I kept telling the doctor, “If you're a good doctor, how come you're working at this hour of the night?”

Hank said, “Willie, shut your fucking mouth and let him sew me up before I bleed to death.”

One night Hank showed me an 8 × 10 glossy photo of a girl singer named Shirley Collie.

She was already pretty well known. Shirley was a regular on the old Phillip Morris road show with Red Foley and a bunch more. She was an old pal of Grady Martin, one of the world's best guitar players. Shirley was—and still is—one of the finest female vocalists and yo-delers and probably the best harmony singer I've ever known. When we worked together, Shirley sang as close harmony with me as anybody possibly can. She second-guessed me. Like with my band today, they always guess where I'm going to go with a song. Shirley could sense that, too. Shirley and I were pretty much on the same level of thinking, music-wise, whatever that was. However low or high that was, we were very close.

Shirley and I cut duets of “Willingly” and “Touch Me.” Both records reached the Top 10 in 1962.

It was the final blow for Martha to find out I was seeing Shirley, who was married to a DJ friend of ours named Bif Collie. Martha packed the kids into her black Cadillac and took off for Las Vegas in 1962 to get a divorce.

You hear stories that when I married Shirley I thought she had six months to live. It's true she had told me she had a terminal disease called lupus. If she had it, she got over it. But that had nothing to do with why I married Shirley.

Shirley traveled with me for quite a while singing and playing bass. I had left the Cherokee Cowboys, and it was me and Shirley with
Jimmy Day playing steel guitar, just the three of us. I would follow her every night on stage. She'd sing “Penny for Your Thoughts” and then she'd do “Bet My Heart I Love You,” which is a yodeling song. Shirley tore the house down yodeling. I mean she was great. The last time I saw her, a year or so ago, I invited her onstage and she yodeled and tore the house down again. She's still great.

I had learned from Ray Price to sing songs the crowd is familiar with if the crowd is not familiar with you. But this didn't prevent me from trying to do it my own way when I started a band called the Offenders. We didn't really intend to offend people, but it seems like we always were. Maybe it was our attitude. It could be that because we fancied ourselves as the Offenders, we naturally became offensive. We played jazz and things that people who had come to dance didn't want to hear. We played whatever we wanted to play.

Finally we broke up that band and I started singing songs the audience was familiar with. I did “Fräulein” and “San Antonio Rose” and “Columbus Stockade Blues” and all the old favorites that got their attention. The same music that got the crowd up on the dance floor would get them out of their seats in an auditorium. Once I figured that one out, it was pretty simple. I discovered “Rolling in My Sweet Baby's Arms” was just as hot in a concert as it was in a dance hall. That was a big revelation to me. I had always been told you couldn't play that kind of music in an auditorium because people came to listen and they didn't want a lot of yelling and screaming, they wanted to hear the record just like it was when you made it. But this wasn't necessarily true, and it opened up a whole new area to work in.

In 1963 Shirley and I went to Reno for her to get a divorce. I took boxing lessons while we waited. Then Shirley and I married and returned to Nashville. On the day President John F. Kennedy was shot, we found our dream house. It was a house thirty miles east of Nashville on a farm that we called Ridgetop. I was eating liver and onions in a restaurant on the Gallatin Highway with Shirley when we heard the awful news about President Kennedy. I decided to quit the road and settle down with Shirley at Ridgetop and be a farmer. I was thirty years old, and I had retired from the road. I thought it meant a major change in my life.

I just wanted to write songs for a while. I wasn't making any money on the road, and I really wasn't having no big fun, and I just figured it was time I got off somewhere by myself and wrote some songs.

I decided if I took myself off the market for a while, maybe when I did go back out, I'd be able to draw more money, and as it turned out, it was true. I had a great time, doing nothing but raising hogs.

We had Lester and Earl, the Foggy Mountain Hogs. On our mailbox it said
WILLIE AND SHIRLEY AND MANY OTHERS
. We had all kinds of dogs and cats and horses. The old man that used to work for me, Mr. Hughes, was a great colorful old guy. A clever horse trader, he'd buy horses for me, and buy cattle for me, and run the farm. His wife was named Ruby. Ruby was a big old gal, and Mr. Hughes was a tall skinny old man that didn't weigh hardly 100 pounds, and she weighed close to 200.

He used to come in and I'd leave a bottle of whiskey down in the cabinet so he could get to it. He was always sneaking whiskey. I'd notice every day there'd be a little gone, a little more gone, and I'd always keep a full one, so when he'd run out, I put another one in there. And we used to sit down and drink a lot together. We'd get pretty loaded, and he'd say, “Well, I'm gonna go home and if Ruby's
got me a steak cooked, I ain't gonna eat a bite of it, and if she don't have me one cooked, I'm gonna kick her clothes off.” He was a funny old man.

Shirley loved farming as long as I was there with her. But then when it come time for me to go back on the road, she had to stay home. I knew that was probably the wrong thing to do. I should have taken her out with me again. So pretty soon, I was out on the road, and Shirley was home taking care of Lana, Susie, and Billy, who'd come back to live with us. She became a mother. I'm not sure that's what she had in mind in the beginning, but she did great, and it worked out fine for a while. Then she got restless, and the marriage started going downhill after that.

I didn't lose much money farming, but the fact that I lost any money at all was hilarious. I was making a little money writing songs and raisings hogs was just a hobby for me, to give me something to do.

Johnny Bush and I went out and bought seventeen weaner pigs. Paid 25¢ a pound for them. In the sleet and the snow, we built a pigpen and throwed them in the pen. But what we'd done when we built the pen, the bottom plank was just about a fraction of an inch too high. Soon as we turned the pigs loose, they went right out under that bottom plank and into the hollow down there and it was cold and sleeting and we chased them God damn pigs all over that hollow. We wouldn't have worked that hard for no man alive. Ever. But we finally caught them, every one of them, and got them back in there, and I put them on a feeder where all they had to do was eat and get their bellies full and go over there and get them a drink of water and go back over there and eat some more.