Willie Nelson (14 page)

Almost overnight, “Crazy” became Patsy Cline’s signature song. The record peaked at number 2 on the country charts and, like Faron Young’s cover of “Hello Walls,” crossed over to pop and easy-listening charts but in an even bigger way, breaking into the pop Top 10. A number one country song was good for maybe a hundred thousand copies sold. A pop chart topper could sell up to ten times that.

Patsy also covered Willie’s “Funny How Time Slips Away.” Billy Walker had done the first cover version and others would follow. A particularly soulful interpretation by Jimmy Elledge, an eighteen-year-old singer produced by Chet Atkins, would reach number 22 on American pop charts and was eventually certified gold for selling one million copies. Teen heartthrob Johnny Tillotson’s version of “Funny” peaked at number 50 on the pop charts, while a mellow falsetto interpretation by Memphis soul balladeer Joe Hinton for Houston’s Peacock Records in 1964 broke into the pop Top 20.

Willie possessed an innate understanding of a great country song—keep it short, keep it simple enough to work within the box that producers provide, and make it tug at the heart. Willie had been composing sad songs since he was a child, before he could comprehend the emotions he was writing about. Cindy Walker, a Christian woman who grew up twenty miles from Abbott and never took a drink of alcohol in her life, said she wrote “Bubbles in My Beer,” a hit for Bob Wills, using her imagination. Willie possessed that gift too. But as an adult, he drew on firsthand experience for his hard luck songs about lost love, and it showed.

Willie’s songs, and his adoption of Tootsie’s as his home away from home, were following in the footsteps of Hank Williams, the honky-tonk spirit of country music. “It was called Mom’s when Hank Williams was hot,” explained singer-songwriter-picker Darrell McCall, who was a Tootsie’s regular when Willie hit town. “Hank would go out the back alley behind the Ryman. Hank and the boys would have a bottle back by the rear entrance of Mom’s where some cardboard boxes were stacked. Later on, some tables were put in the back room. The owners knew we wanted to pick and stay up all night. So they got to letting us go in that top room. They come up and say, ‘Boys, you can stay as long as you want to, but we’re going to have to close the bar down. Help yourself to the beer box. We’ll be back tomorrow morning.’ When they’d open back up in the morning, we’d still be picking.”

The change in ownership of the humble beer joint was a mere formality. Tootsie Bess’s stepson, Steve Bess, drummed with Ray Price. Her husband was a prison guard. “So nobody gave Tootsie too much trouble,” Darrell McCall said. “She had a damn hat pin about [twelve inches] long. If someone got drunk in there, if someone got belligerent, it could be a picker or anybody, she’d pull out that hat pin and push them all the way out the door.”

T
HERE
were three levels of pickers in Nashville: the A team, the musicians who got most of the studio work; the demo guys, who honed their chops so they could make the A team; and the club guys, who played live or on the road.

The artists, the ones who sang the hits, liked to carouse and gamble and trade war stories; they could afford country clubs and second homes out on Old Hickory Lake. The songwriters were bent on playing their latest compositions for their peers in the hopes it might lead to an artist interested in the songs. All the pickers wanted to do was pick. Whenever they weren’t on the road playing behind one of Nashville’s stars or working in the studio, they were picking and playing as long as they physically could in some motel room or somebody’s house.

Darrell McCall came to Nashville with another local boy from southern Ohio, named Donny Lytle, who would later change his name to Donny Young, then Johnny Paycheck. Darrell and Donny were taken in by Buddy Killen, owner of the Tree International song publishing house. Both fell into work as harmony singers in the studio, complementing the vocal talents of artists such as Faron Young, Webb Pierce, Ray Price, and George Jones.

“That was our little niche,” Darrell said. “I did a ‘hearts’ album with George—‘Heartaches by the Number,’ ‘Candy Heart,’ ‘This Ol’ Heart,’ then ‘Keys to the Mailbox’ with Freddie Hart. Faron [Young] heard me and picked me up and I started doing harmony with him in front of his band on the road and on his recordings of ‘There’s Not Any Like You Left’ and ‘Congratulations.’”

In 1960, Darrell’s harmony work led to his unintended role as one of the Little Dippers, a harmony group whose recording “Forever” was in the Top 100 songs of 1960 and landed them on television’s
American Bandstand.
But Darrell was all about hard-core country and fiddles and steel, which led to road work with Faron Young, Ray Price, and Webb Pierce while he was trying to develop his own career, with sporadic success. A booming baritone with considerable vocal power—he sounded operatic—he sang the title song to the motion picture
Hud
and had a Top 20 country hit in 1962 with “A Stranger Was Here,” his first and biggest country hit. But when he was off the road, he ran with pickers like Buddy Emmons, Jimmy Day, Bobby Garrett, and Tommy Jackson. “We were all one little group,” Darrell said. “If one of us had five bucks, we all had it. We all ate out of the same bowl of chili.”

They shared illicit substances to keep it all going. The pills were as much to stave off an appetite as to stay awake. Pickers lived hand to mouth. “We was all eating those diet pills, Roger [Miller], Buddy Spicher, all of us,” Darrell said. “Buddy gave me my first Old Yeller diet pill. L.A. Turnarounds. West Coast Wagon Wheels, Black Mollies, those were the heavies. We were more into Dexedrine Spansule capsules, but mainly the Old Yellers. They were a vitamin pill for pregnant women. They were full of vitamins but they had Obedrine in them. You take two of them and you’re ready to pick—I mean
pick
—in front of the president of the United States.”

Darrell got to know Willie when “Hello Walls” hit for Faron Young. “He was so different,” he said. “Up until that point, Faron’s idols were Eddy Arnold, George Morgan, and Hank Williams. You’d hear a little of each of them up until that point. Once ‘Hello Walls’ hit, you heard Willie. Faron took to him right away.”

Willie was the toast of Music Row. But all the time he spent with his rowdy friends and business associates, blowing his publishing royalties as fast as he could, was time away from his family. Martha did not necessarily approve, especially when she was still waiting tables and tending bar while he was out having a good time with his party pals. One night at the Wagon Wheel, Willie egged her on so bad that Martha picked up a shot glass and aimed it at her smart-mouth husband. Willie ducked and the glass hit the wall and ricocheted straight into Hank Cochran’s chin. Willie took Hank to the emergency room. Ben Dorcy, a Nashville hanger-on who saw what happened, walked up to Martha and said, “You can’t talk that way to my friends.” Martha stared daggers into Ben’s eyes, reached down and picked up a giant ashtray, and coldcocked Ben on the head, splitting his head open.

Faron Young urged Hank and Ben to file a lawsuit on Mrs. Nelson, but they just chalked it up to the price of running with Willie. The hot-headed wife was part of the package. Willie knew Martha had a right to be pissed, putting up with his crap. He was a no-good scoundrel. He drank too much. He chased women who chased him. But he wasn’t about to give up those ways. Whatever his faults, he was finally being recognized and making enough money to provide for his family. Wasn’t that the important thing?

W
ILLIE
was a star songwriter, at the top of his game, but the urge to perform still burned deep inside. He played briefly behind Bobby Sykes, Marty Robbins’s guitarist, who was being promoted as a solo act with several hit singles, including “A Touch of Loving” and the truckers’ tune “Diesel Smoke and Dangerous Curves.”

Then Frankie Miller called. Willie’s pal from the Cowtown Hoedown in Fort Worth had relocated to Nashville and was working his single “Blackland Farmer” again after it had been rereleased on Starday. Booking agent Hubert Long had put together a small package show with Frankie and Hal and Ginger Willis to promote Frankie’s 45. Frankie thought Willie might like to come along.

The “tour”—six people stuffed into a sedan pulling a trailer—got off to a bad start. “The first job we went to was in Bangor, Maine,” Miller said. “I was playing those air bases and army bases. That was our first date. But there was a cop stop on the highway on the way, and they ended up fining everybody in the band, but we didn’t have enough money to pay our fines. I left my D-twenty-eight guitar as collateral, and the justice of the peace let us go. I picked it up on the way back.” Willie saw poetry in the guitar payment. “Frankie’s the only one carrying anything worth something,” he said. “We got to Bangor, Maine, and they were closing the joint up. A sergeant put us up in empty barracks and helped us get some cash with the Mobil credit card I had.”

Willie switched from guitar to drums and back again on show dates in Syracuse, New York, and suburban New Jersey, while a player whom Willie called Skinflint played steel. “[Willie] wasn’t worth much on drums but he did fine for what we had,” Miller said. For Willie, the run was fulfilling. “I was getting out of town,” he said. “But I don’t know what Frankie was thinking.”

That brief taste of the road informed Willie’s thinking when Ray Price tracked him down in 1961. “He co-owned Pamper Music and called and asked if I could play bass,” Willie related. “I said, ‘Of course, can’t everybody?’” Price’s bass player, Donny Young, had quit Price’s band and moved to California. Willie signed up for a hitch as a Cherokee Cowboy alongside Darrell McCall, Buddy Spicher, Steve Bess, and Pete Wade for $25 a day. Martha altered the Cherokee Cowboy suit designed by Nudie of Hollywood that had been passed on to Willie, sewing sequined music notes down the side of the slacks. Willie hit the road, riding in style on a real country music star’s bus. On the way to the first gig, Jimmy Day taught him how to play bass.

Touring with Ray Price was nothing like touring with Frankie Miller or Bobby Sykes. “Anywhere we went, everybody knew Ray,” Willie said.

Besides owning the publishing house that fronted Willie $50 a week, Ray Price became Willie’s role model as a bandleader. He’d enjoyed a decade-long run as a recording artist and remained a big draw on the road. For two consecutive years,
Cash Box
magazine had recognized him as the top singer on the jukeboxes. He was a smooth, sophisticated crooner as uptown as Sinatra, while his band worked a beat known as the Ray Price shuffle made for western dancing. Price was discovered while attending North Texas Agriculture College in Arlington. He had been singing at a place in Arlington called Roy’s House Café. “There was a small group of musicians at the barracks where I was staying when I was going to school and I guess they heard me sing, because one guy asked me to sing a couple of songs of his to a music publisher,” Price said. “So I agreed to do it. The publisher [Jim Beck] heard the song and looked at me and said, ‘You can come back tomorrow.’ I came back the next day and there was a guy from Nashville, Tennessee, with a record contract who signed me to the Bullet label.”

The record went nowhere, but Ray kept singing and landed a spot on the Big D Jamboree alongside Lefty Frizzell, whom he met at Jim Beck’s studio in Dallas.

Price followed Lefty to a little town near Beaumont called Voth, where Neva Starnes, the wife of Jack Starnes, who started Starday Records with Pappy Daily in Houston, was booking bands. “We was playing dance halls, playing in Louisiana a lot, playing in Texas, anywhere she could book us. I tried to get on the Louisiana Hayride, but they didn’t want me.”

A Nashville publisher named Troy Martin got Ray signed to Columbia in March 1951, where he covered Lefty Frizzell’s “If You’re Ever Lonely” as his first single. Later that year, Martin introduced Ray to Hank Williams. Hank took him on the road and cowrote a song for Price to record, taking full credit for the song, “Weary Blues (from Waiting),” which Ray recorded with Hank’s Drifting Cowboys in 1952.

They roomed together the last year of Hank Williams’s life. “I learned from Hank you have to be yourself,” Ray said. “When you figure that out, you got it whipped.”

After Hank died on the road in Oak Hill, West Virginia, on New Year’s Day of 1953 at the age of twenty-nine, Ray hired Hank’s band, the Drifting Cowboys, eventually renaming them the Cherokee Cowboys. He developed the Ray Price shuffle on May 1, 1956. “It just came out at the end of a session one night,” he said. “I heard it in my head, I got to talking to the musicians, got them to listen and get it down, then we recorded ‘Crazy Arms.’” The rhythm became the standard for country music you could dance to.

Ray Price consistently topped the charts with “beer-drinking songs” that were cleaned up and polished by his whiskey-smooth vocals accompanied by strings, not fiddles, which rendered the music “prettier and sweeter,” as Ray liked to put it.

Price had the good sense to start up Pamper Music during country’s growth spurt fueled by radio. Publishing was the one safe place where it was hard to get screwed, as long as you held on to your rights and didn’t sell your song for $50. Price was known for hiring some of the writers at the publishing house as Cherokee Cowboys to go out on the road as his backing band, including Willie Nelson.

“I’d heard his songs,” Price said. “We knew what Willie was like. Willie had the desire. He was willing to work for it. He had the best song pitcher in the world on his side, Hank Cochran. We knew good songs. Harlan Howard out in California, I found him. Those were the songwriters we were looking for. I did quite a few of Willie’s songs.

“Willie knew he had it,” Ray said. “He worked at it all kinds of different ways. He was raised in the honky-tonks, just like I was. They were the only places you could get a crowd to play to in Texas. Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, the west—they were all honky-tonk places. Honky-tonk people are a hard crowd,” Ray said. “They’re drinking and dancing, they’re not thinking about the music too much. They’re busy polishing their belt buckles.”