Crash Course Timeline, No. 53: Hank "Herky" "Skeets" Williams, Country's OG Rock Star

I like this one. Captures the fuss.

“Hank Williams’s legend now overshadows the rather frail and painfully introverted man who spawned it. Born Hiram Williams, the ‘Hillbilly Shakespeare’ came from a rural background.”
- Country Music Hall of Fame Bio

The Basics
The Country Music’s Hall of Fame doesn’t have much to back up that framing, but Hank Williams did squeeze a lot of hits and a lot of trouble into a short life. He was born Hiram Williams in 1923 in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, called Mount Olive. He was also born with spina bifida occulta, a cosmic accident that shaped his life from cradle to grave, but had more consequences on the back end.

His father, Elonzo Huble “Lon” Williams, supported the family with work on lumber company railways, but he disappeared from Hank’s life at a young age. Lon Williams fell off a truck while serving in World War I and those injuries lingered until 1930, when he started developing facial paralysis brought on by an aneurysm. He spent more than eight years in the hospital – the balance of Hank’s childhood – which left his mother, Jessie Lillybelle “Lillie” Williams to raise the family. She proved more than up for the task, working multiple jobs (during the Depression to boot) and ran a succession of boarding houses - even after the first one burned down.

Lillie also encouraged Williams’ love of music. The story of how he got hold of his first guitar varies – one version has him selling peanuts to buy it, another has people from all over whichever town he lived in at the time (they moved around a bit) claiming they bought it for him – but the man who taught him to play it was a busker named Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne. Lillie paid Payne when she could for Hank's music lessons and fed him when she couldn’t, but he taught Williams the basics and on a blues-based foundation. Later, Williams would call Payne “my only real teacher.”

Circumstances – in this case a fight with a phys. ed. teacher – planted the family in Montgomery, Alabama, which is where his musical career starts. In 1937, Williams entered and won a talent contest at the Empire Theater playing a song of his own composition, “WPA Blues.” That earned him $15, but also an angle to sell himself to the local radio station, WFSA, when they saw him busking in front of their building on weekends and after school. The station’s producers handed him the equivalent of a part-time job ($15/week), but it started him on his way.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 52: Ernest Tubb, Country Music's Mid-Century Saint

Handsome fella...

Think of him as the bridge between the original generation and the modern one...

Ernest Dale Tubb was born in 1914 in the area around Crisp, Texas (southeast of Dallas, fwiw) to sharecropper middle management (his father oversaw a 300-acre cotton farm). He fell in love with and learned music on his own, mostly by listening to the Jimmie Rodgers records he pinched his dimes to buy (I covered Rodgers in an earlier chapter). By his late teens, Tubb had nailed down Rodgers style enough to get a sliver of time and too little money for performing on San Antonio’s KONO radio station, but he still needed day jobs (e.g., digging ditches for the Works Program Administration) to stay whole. Things could have carried on like that till Tubb met his maker, but two events changed his life.

First, he cold-called Rodgers’ widow, Carrie Rodgers, in 1936 (three years after his passing) to ask for an autographed photo of his idol when he found her name in a local phone book. Touched by his sincerity, she invited him over. A friendship developed and, "impressed by his friendly personality and heartfelt singing,” Carrie Rodgers became his mentor and champion, listening to his radio broadcasts to give him pointers and making introductions to connections at record labels. She got him signed with RCA, but they did little to promote him – a defensible choice given first singles like “The Passing of Jimmie Rodgers” and “Jimmie Rodgers’ Last Thoughts.”

Tubb’s second life-changing moment came when some undiscussed health issue led to a tonsillectomy in 1939. The procedure lowered his voice, putting both yodeling, higher pitches and a career as a Jimmie Rodgers imitator out of reach. After some time to heal, write some songs and rework his vocals, he approached Decca Records – again, with Carrie Rodgers making introductions. The label picked him up and sent him to Houston to record some new sides – “Blue Eyed Elaine” and “I’ll Get Along Somehow” – giving Tubb his first taste of success. Carrie Rodgers pulled some more strings and helped him to his first full-time gig as a musician: the “Gold Chain Troubadour,” named after Gold Chain Flour, a product put out by the sponsor of Fort Worth’s KGKO, Universal Mills. All that made him big enough to join package tours with other up-and-comers in mid-century country like Bob Wills and Roy Acuff, but his world changed in 1941 when Tubb wrote and released, “Walking the Floor Over You.”

The single sold 400,000 copies right away (though it wouldn’t go gold until 1965) and, in just two years time, scored Tubb an invite to play the Grand Ole Opry. Whether his name proceeded him or his just killed it that night, that debut performance received three standing ovations. From there, the rest is country music history.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 51: Gene Autry, "King of the Cowboys"

The scourge of outlaws across the West...

With this chapter, we enter the world of the Singing Cowboys...

The Basics
Orvon Grover “Gene” Autry was born 1907 and raised on a ranch in North Texas near a town called Tioga; for whatever reason, every source I read mentioned he was the grandson of a Methodist preacher, but only one (Alan Cackett) explained that’s where he learned music (on a mail-order guitar with his mom) and singing (in his grandfather’s choir). Autry started with a day job – as a “relief telegrapher” for the St. Louis & Frisco Railroad – but he kept himself going through the night shift by singing and playing. After a nudge from the famous comedian, Will Rogers, who’d heard him sing, he went to New York City to try to land a spot, but got an encouraging rejection instead – i.e., they told him to come back after a couple years on radio.

Autry started in the Tulsa market and got big enough on KVOO (he was "Oklahoma's Yodeling Cowboy") to due some recording (“My Dreaming of You” and “My Alabama Home,” both with a former co-worker, Jimmie Long) and pad his resume for a return to New York. He arrived just before the 1929 Stock Market Crash and a profound depression in the recording industry, but he made up for that by recording for any label that would have him, at times “cutting masters for five different companies, each of which issued his sides on multiple labels for chain-store distribution.” Because he started in the business before country fully separated from the blues, some of his early tunes (see, “Do Right Daddy Blues”) carried the influence, but he mostly sounded like Jimmie Rodgers (profiled here). Both his sound and image cleaned up over the years, starting in 1933 when he started to play up his cowboy persona (which he’d earned; he did work on a ranch), but he refined it further still over about 20 years first in radio, then the movies, and finally on TV.

The work ethic he brought to his earliest recording work never left him. Over a career that dipped into the early 1950s, Autry made 640 recordings, wrote or co-wrote 300 songs, and he scored more than a dozen gold and platinum records (something I read said he was the first to receive a gold record, but I’ve read that at least three times now). On the back of country hits that include his signature single, “Back in the Saddle Again” (a guy named Ray Whitney wrote that one), “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way),” not to mention just about every mid-century country standard you can name, plus, some of the most famous Christmas songs ever written/recorded – e.g., “Rudolph the Red- Nosed Reindeer,” “Up on the House Top,” and, his own composition, “Here Comes Santa Claus” – Autry’s recordings sold over 100 million copies.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 48: Jimmie Davis, Sunshine...and Some Unsavory Stuff

"The Singing Governor" they called him. He lived up to it.

Another chapter about a country musician turned politician. The origin story’s rougher in this one – as are the politics.

James “Jimmie” Houston Davis was born somewhere around 1899 (his actual date of birth was unknown) and raised dirt-poor with 10 siblings in Beech Springs, Louisiana, in Jackson Parish. In later interviews – and, given his career, he may have embellished a little – Davis recalled not having an actual bed until he turned nine and receiving a dried hog bladder and a "plucked blackbird" as the first gifts he received (he and his siblings used the bladder as a ball and they ate the blackbird). He figured out early that he’d need an education if he didn’t want to end his days as a sharecropper.

After graduating high school and wrapping up at New Orleans’ Soule Business College, Davis worked toward a bachelor’s degree in history at Louisiana College in Pineville. While there, he became a staple in a slew of music clubs – e.g., glee clubs and quartets with macho names like Wildcat Four and Tiger Four (he sang tenor) – and did a little more singing in the evenings, including on street corners, to help pay his way through. Despite the occasional setback (e.g., he had to drop out a term), Davis graduated and moved on to graduate school in Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he mastered in education...and wrote a master’s thesis on the “differences in intelligence between the races” titled Comparative Intelligence of Whites, Blacks and Mulattoes. This foreshadows part of the man in whole...

Jimmie Davis lasted only the 1928-29 academic year as a teacher at Dodd’s College for Girls, before taking a job as a clerk at the Shreveport Criminal Court, a job he held for nearly a decade. His music career actually started as moonlighting: he sang at Shreveport’s radio station, KWKH, for $5/week and was recording sides for Victor Talking Machine Company as early as 1928. About that:

“The roughly 60 sides Davis recorded for Victor between 1928 and 1934 were, in the words of country music historian John Morthland, as quoted in London, England's Daily Telegraph, ‘the dirtiest batch of songs any one person had ever recorded in country music.’”

The titles included “Tom Cat and Pussy Blues,” “Red Nightgown Blues,” and “Organ Grinder’s Blues” – the latter being a nod to “a popular anti-impotence monkey-gland treatment popularized by quack physician and heavy radio advertiser John R. Brinkley.” As an aside that shows the complexity of his time and place, Davis recorded a number of his earlier sides with a black blues musician named Oscar “Buddy” Woods. He would later move on from the down-‘n’-dirty blues, but, while he would downplay them, he never disavowed the recordings. When Davis started his political career in earnest, his opponents tried to offend voters by playing Davis’ early recordings over a loudspeaker; they started dancing instead.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 47: Bob Atcher, Country Singer, Architect of Schaumburg

Giving Bonnie credit 'cause they don't.

James Robert Owen “Bob” Atcher was born into a musical family in Hardin County, Kentucky. He learned to play violin from his champion fiddle-playing father and picked up guitar as well. Something else he learned – and this was either from his father or his grandfather (turns out you can only read the Chicago Tribune’s fond tribute once without a subscription) – was an appreciation for commerce and good business sense. Shockingly, the same person who said that encouraged Bob Atcher in his dream to become a professional musician (though this came after some time working on a family ranch in North Dakota).

Atcher made good on the bet, steadily climbing from regional radio platforms (Louisville’s WHAS) to the big, clear-channel national broadcasts that reached half the country. His first truly national platform - a regular radio gig on Chicago’s WBBM starting in 1939 – made him a national star. Mixing old country and folk with “novelty songs,” he scored a string of hits, some as a soloist (e.g., “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes” and a cover of Ernest Tubbs’ “Walking the Floor Over You,” which I can't find) and several as half of a duet with Loeta Applegate, who performed under the stage-name “Bonnie Blue Eyes.” In fact, their cover of Jimmie Davis’ “You Are My Sunshine” (and the later, “Answer to You Are My Sunshine”) and “Pins and Needles (in My Heart)” were the first things I found; sadly, Applegate doesn’t exist so far as the Internet’s concerned. “Pins and Needles” was the last song Atcher and Applegate recorded before he shipped off for World War, and it stayed in the charts for much of 1943 and became a standard for the war years.

Fans didn’t forget Atcher. He recorded a couple hits after coming back from the war – “Why Don’t You Haul Off and Love Me” and “I Must Have Been Wrong” – and graduated from a Columbia imprint (the venerable Okeh label) to Columbia’s main label. In 1948, he released one of that label’s earliest long play (LP) records with Early American Folk Songs; the same year saw Atcher sign on as a regular performer for the National Barn Dance on Chicago’s WLS station, aka, the then-big time for country music. He remained a fixture on the show “well into the 1960s” and, after bouncing between Capitol Records and Kapp Records in the 1950s, he returned to Columbia, where he re-recorded many of his old hits in stereo (I included his re-recorded “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes” on the sampler to show what that did to his sound).

Something else Atcher did: invest wisely and well. Perhaps more impressively, he went on to turn his business smarts to public service as the mayor of Schaumburg, Illinois from 1959-1975. Atcher moved there in order to be close, but not too close to WLS. To give a sense of the city he moved to, here’s a quote from a 1900 brochure advertising the village:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 37: Al Dexter and His Pistol Packin' Hit

Honky-tonk, from his lips to our ears.

Sources disagree on the birth year of Clarence Albert Poindexter, but most list either 1902 or 1905. Whatever the year was, Al Dexter was born in Jacksonville, Texas. Either nothing remarkable happened in his childhood or people didn’t find anything worth mentioning, but he started playing music during the 1920s. According to Country Thang Daily, Dexter did a little recording even back then, religious numbers mostly, until something other than divine intervention pushed him to another track: “However, after a friend asked him if he wanted to “write pretty songs or make money,” he was inspired to switch to honky-tonk music.”

Dexter made the switch, but the weight of the Great Depression squeezed Dexter out of music and into the painting business. The fire still burned bright enough that he started moonlighting with an all-black band playing private clubs and square dance parties, just to keep playing. For the record, Wikipedia tweaks that narrative, saying that Dexter kept forming bands throughout the early 1930s, including the all-black ensemble because he couldn’t get white musicians to play his style of music. Once he had enough of everything in place, Dexter toured his band and sound around East Texas oil-boom towns, finally earning enough to return to a career in music.

With money he’d earned on the road, Dexter settled down, opened a tavern, named it Turner Town, and set up as the house band. With that as a base, he further refined his sound until he had something new for American audiences. From a bio on the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame's website:

“Al Dexter is considered to be one of the forefathers of the honky-tonk music style. But rather than specializing in forlorn heartache laments, he emphasized the rollicking, good-time, barrelhouse side of this country barroom genre.”

Dexter recorded a smattering of songs in the 1930s, the biggest being “New Jelly Roll Blues” (1935) and “Honky Tonk Blues” (1937). The latter slipped the phrase “honky tonk” into a song’s title for the first time and into the American musical lexicon, but he spent years struggling to write a follow-up. As the slump deepened, people at his then-label, Columbia Records, urged its president to drop him, but Art Satherley still saw potential and the sound and the act and kept him on. Dexter kept playing Turner Town and tinkering with bands until 1939, when he finally found the right mix. With his name finally clipped to Al Dexter and “his Texas Troopers” behind him, he returned to the studio to take another run at recording…and then World War II broke out.

Crash Course Timeline Music History Index: The 1920s, the 1930s & Early Popular Genres

The roots of this haphazard history of American popular music originally started about a year earlier and at least one music blog before this one. The former timeline started with the 1820s - when the United States as we (sort of) know it was just over 30 years old - and continued up to the 1920s. It introduced a multiplicity of themes and pathways, among them: the homesickness genre, a product of the Industrial Age and families scattered as wide as they’ve been in human history; the interaction between popular music and waves of immigration; the bloodthirsty/God-is-on-our-side anthems of America’s wars, both civil and others; the massive, popular, semi-utopian “Jubilee” concerts that followed; the noteworthy spasm of Christmas carols that bloomed alongside the commercialization of that holiday; the odd devotional number; marching bands and the arrival of modern brass instruments; the maudlin borderline hackery of the late Victorian era; the establishment and growth of Tin Pan Alley and its remarkable marketing machinery; and, perhaps more important than any of them in terms of what came later, minstrelsy. No less significant: literally all of that moved about the country by way of sheet music, the first conduit for the mass marketing of popular music.

All of that both informed and laid the foundation for much of what followed, but it also existed and operated in a vastly different and slower world. I think citizens of the 21st century can conceptualize, even appreciate those times, but actually wrapping one’s head around all that silence requires more imagination that most of us have. So, I took down those posts (twice, in fact) and restarted this follow-up project from a different foundation: the dawn of recorded sound, aka, the beginnings of a time when people could hear music without having friends who knew how to play it and, by the same devices, listen to a song until it either inspired them or made them puke.

Recordings existed well before the 1920s - singers ranging from John McCormack and Eddie Murray to the famous tenor Enrico Caruso (who recorded for one label's “high-class series”) - but I decided to start with the 1920s for several reasons. The ability to record sound came several decades before (by memory, the mid-1870s), but even 40 years later the sound remained limited - e.g., the recordings literally could not pick up pitches on the high end and some instruments all together - and, therefore, terrible. It took a decade or five for all the tinniness/recording-in-a-bucket-inside-a-box to the leech out, but recording and records (it’s all still 78 rpm at this point) reached the lofty heights of reasonable listening experience as early as the mid-1920s and continued to improve into the 1930s. Once film and radio arrived, they opened avenues for musical artists to spread their presence and influence across multiple mediums - i.e., the essence of modern stardom. That brings the story to the beginning of the modern era, at least in my mind. That said, keep in mind that the entire concept and culture of radio belongs to the 1930s - i.e., a time when the collapse of the consumer market made something one owns and turns on for entertainment the thriftier choice over something one buys and collects. As you’ll see if you read the posts below, a lot of them end with the Great Depression.

That gets ahead of the story, so, pulling back ten years, people call the 1920s the Jazz Age, but that does a real disservice to proliferation of genres that started and blossomed in jazz’s shadow. While none of them actually started in the 1920s, the way communications shrunk the world made once regional sounds available to a national audience - and one with resources to burn. That included the beginnings of country music - which, incidentally, came from the folk traditions of the 19th century - and at least three kinds of blues - e.g., 1) the female royalty of the early 20s, 2) the lone, often haunted blues men of the late 20s, and 3), at the tail-end, boogie-woogie. To back up even further, all of those borrowed something from ragtime - aka, the first “scary” (read: black) music to spook establishment white audiences - and Tin Pan Alley blended all that with popular sounds and themes from earlier eras, and that’s what the 1920s sounded like. Innovation meets mass-marketing, basically; strip away technologies that forever expand availability and accessibility and it’s not so different today.

Crash Course Time Line, No. 12: Roy Acuff & Bob Wills, a Pair of Kings

Hear the echoes.

Because the subjects of this third and final chapter in this mini-series on early country music provide context all on their own, I don’t need to pad this as much as I did the last two. Both served as bridges to the growth and future of the genre and people called both of them kings….or they just laid claim to the throne. Let’s get to it.

Roy Acuff, the King of Country Music
“Stylistically, his clear, heartfelt vocals modernized the era’s predominantly stringband sound just enough to seem innovative and traditional at the same time.”

That quote from Roy Acuff’s biography on the Country Music Hall of Fame website (hereafter, “CMHoF”) caught my eye for two reasons. First, it speaks to the particular weight of tradition in the genre, i.e., innovation can’t happen without giving tradition its due. Second, I’ve heard Acuff’s voice enough to know that does it justice.

Roy Claxton Acuff was born into a prominent family in Maynardville, Tennessee in 1903. He had a Tennessee state senator hanging from his family tree, just one generation back, and his parents’ home was a popular spot for community entertaining; the young Acuff pitched in by balancing farm tools on his chin. Athletics interested him more than music growing up - just about every source I read noted he was a “three-sport standout” - but Acuff did sing in his school’s chapel choir and performed in “every play they had” during his high school career. His first pass at a career saw him try out for the Knoxville minor-league baseball affiliate to the (then) New York Giants in 1929, but Acuff collapsed during tryouts - “an after-effect of earlier sunstroke” according to the CMHoF - which resulted in what all accounts term “a nervous breakdown” that lasted into 1930. Music would carry him out of it.

Acuff learned to play the fiddle during his convalescence by listening to Fiddlin’ John Carson and Gid Tanner records and kept working from there. He started playing patent medicine shows (in blackface), and Wikipedia credits his experience working with no microphones for developing a clear and powerful voice; when he and his bandmates landed their radio gigs, that voice cut through the static nicely as well as carrying over the instruments. That backing band, the Tennessee Crackerjacks, featured Jess Easteray on guitar and a Hawaiian guitarist named Clell Summey, but became the Crazy Tennesseans with the addition of bassist Red Jones and upon being introduced as such by a radio announcer named Alan Stout (WROL was one station they worked, WNOX the other).

Crash Course Timeline, No. 11: Barn Dances, Oprys & Three Western Gals

Fun, accidental mash-up...

Due to poor artist selection, I’m going to have to pad this post a little. Who knew the Girls of the Golden West left such a thin history?

I took a stab at a short history and light theorizing about country music in the first post in this mini-series, so I thought I’d fill that in by talking a bit about two of the iconic vehicles for popularizing the genre during the 1920s through 1940s. Those would be, in order, the National Barn Dance, which broadcast out of Chicago, Illinois, and the show that became the Grand Ole Opry, which broadcast out of Nashville. WLS-AM carried the former, WSM-AM carried the latter and both were “clear-channel” stations, 50,000 watt behemoths with almost unimaginably powerful signals in today’s radio market. As noted in the Wikipedia entry on the National Barn Dance:

“…because the clear-channel signal of WLS could be received throughout most of the Midwest and even beyond in the late evening and nighttime hours, making much of the United States (and Canada) a potential audience.”

A guy named Edgar L. Bill started the National Barn Dance in 1924 - which, incidentally, predates the alleged birth of country music, 1927’s famous Bristol Sessions (see the first post in the series) - and he started it on a hunch:

“Having lived on a farm, he knew how people loved the familiar sound and informal spirit of old-fashioned barn dance music.”

After starting as a one-off (“an impromptu sustaining program”), it became a fixture once an “avalanche of phone calls and letters” confirmed an audience existed for Bill’s kind of programming. Both shows lasted for hours at some point during their runs - four hours for the Grand Ole Opry and 6:30 to midnight on Saturdays for the National Barn Dance - and both became long-time staples for radio audiences across a lot of the American Midwest (and beyond). Both shows piled in the top country, bluegrass, Western, Americana, and folk artists of the day - both of this post’s feature artists were regulars on the National Barn Dance; Uncle Dave Macon (again, see previous post) was an early, if irregular, staple of the Grand Ole Opry - and larded those long time slots with skits and comedy. And, yes, Hee-Haw would follow almost the exact same path only for TV audiences (i.e,. it started as a filler for an open summer schedule and public pressure made it permanent).

Crash Course Timeline, No. 10: The Carter Family & Uncle Dave Macon, Intro to First Gen Country

Dig the confidence, Bristol.

Webster’s Dictionary defines country music as….I kid, I kid.

As part of my disjointed series on the history of American popular music, this post and the next two after it will make a quick introduction to country music and a few of the first major acts in the genre. What became popularized as “country music” existed long before it was recorded or played on the radio, of course, but it would also evolve due to its entry into the public sphere, not least by influences from other musical genres. But the two artists highlighted in this post - Uncle Dave Macon and the Carter Family, along with Jimmie Rodgers, who I profiled in an earlier post (whoops) - get you as close as you can get to what country music sounded like immediately before the first recordings. Which still leaves open the question: what is country music?

I didn't bite and claw for an answer, but I don't know that I could find better answers than the following (both from Wikipedia):

“…a genre of popular music that originated with blues, old-time music, and various types of American folk music.”

Its origins and influences fill in the picture a bit:

“Immigrants to the southern Appalachian Mountains, of the Southeastern United States, brought the folk music and instruments of Europe, Africa, and the Mediterranean Basin along with them for nearly 300 years, which developed into Appalachian music.”

The “old-time music” and American folk music” tradition stands out a bit for me, in that country, as a genre, has long tended toward cultural conservatism. While other contemporary genres that became popular in the same period (e.g., jazz), or even before it (ragtime) embraced musical innovations like syncopation, a wider variety of instruments (e.g., brass and woodwinds), and more complex arrangements, country stuck with simpler, “folksy” musical structure, themes and sounds from popular 19th-century songwriters like Stephen Foster and traditional instruments like guitar, banjo, harmonica and fiddle. It never had any trouble borrowing from other genres - a tradition that runs from Western swing in the 1940s to country rap today - but country rarely drives musical innovation.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 6: Jimmie Rodgers, Tuberculosis & YOLO

Died at 36. Nuts.

By the time he turned 13, Jimmie Rodgers had twice tried to organize musical road shows, only to get retrieved by his father both times; he even got stranded with at least one of those. It’s not surprising, in other words, that Rodgers eventually worked as an entertainer. The real shock is how long he lasted working as a railroad brakeman.

Born in 1897, in either Meridian, Mississippi or Geiger, Alabama, Rodgers grew up in a large family that alternately fractured and diminished after his mother died when he was between six and seven years old. After some shuffling around, Rodgers moved back to Meridian to live with that same father, Aaron Rodgers (different Aaron Rodgers), who finished raising him and set him up with work on the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad. The younger Rodgers started as a water boy, but later rose to the occupation of brakeman. Hence, his nom du career: The Singing Brakeman.

His Wikipedia entry talks about how Rodgers continued his musical education with help from railworkers and “hobos.” It also speculates that he picked up “work chants” by listening to the black employees of the rail-lines who maintained the railroads before machines took over - and he was certainly open-minded enough to do that. For a man with stars in his eyes, Rodgers stuck with his career on the railroad for a surprisingly long time. Famous people, even the eventually famous, get that final “nudge” from all kinds of places: in Jimmie Rodgers’ case, that nudge came with a tuberculosis diagnosis at age 27 (in 1924).

It wasn’t a clean break. He attempted another traveling show, only to see his tent destroyed by a cyclone; Rodgers returned to the railroad after that, relocating as far West as Arizona (on the theory that drier climes would help with the TB; he really did try) - but, by 1927, he returned once more to Meridian and finally and fully committed to a career in music.

It started with a free radio show with Charlotte, North Carolina’s WWNC. He recruited a band from Tennessee called the Tenneva Ramblers and, by the second half of 1927, he/they performed a weekly slot on the station - an unpaid gig, according to his Country Music Hall of Fame biography notes. The band performed as the Jimmie Rodgers Entertainers (hold that thought) and, per the bio posted on the Jimmie Rodgers Foundation, they didn’t sound like anything else on the local radio. It buzzed loudly enough for one area columnist to write: “Whoever that fellow is, he either is a winner or he is going to be.” Because the radio show didn’t pay, Rodgers and the Tenneva Ramblers played resorts to make some scratch.

One Hit No More, No. 11: Terry Stafford, Suspicion, and How You Can't Keep a Good Man Down

How I'll remember him...

Dick Clark: “You’ve had right good luck so far. Does the future scare you at all? You know once you get one hit you have to get the second. Now you’ve had two in a row. Do you worry about the third one yet?”

Terry Stafford: “Sure ... I think it’s always something that always scares you.”

Terry Stafford, Oklahoma-born, Texas-raised, and hungry AF, will forever own the honor of, as one extensive biography phrased it, “breaking The Beatles stranglehold on the Top 5” in 1964. The song was “Suspicion,” a song that sounds like Elvis because Elvis had already recorded it in 1962, on the album Pot Luck with Elvis. If you listen to Elvis’ version against Stafford’s, you’ll hear why Stafford’s went further (or you’ll just like Elvis’ version better; free country) – and, along with Dick Clark, everyone wanted to know how Stafford (et. al.) produced those melodic accents. (They used an organ with paper bags over the organ’s speaker.) “Suspicion” topped out in the spring of ’64 at No. 3, between “Twist and Shout” and “She Loves You,” and Stafford was a young man on his way. (And, since I have it, here's Stafford's appearance on American Bandstand.)

He appeared on American Bandstand one more time – this time supporting “I’ll Touch a Star” – and that’s when the surprisingly prescient conversation quoted above took place. Stafford stayed in music until (at least) the 1980s (I tapped out on the extended bio around page 12), doing a lot of song-writing, but also enjoying a genuinely remarkable second act. It never went smoothly, but Stafford never gave up, and this quote from sometime in the early 1980s reveals a man whose spirit would not break:

“I never booked myself on any ‘oldies and goodies’ shows, because I feel my career has been progressing.”

In the first part of his career, Stafford relied on other writers – notably, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, who wrote some of Elvis’ famous hits (including personal favorites like “A Mess of Blues,” “Little Sister” (cool video, btw), and “Viva Las Vegas” – and, on the back of the success of “Suspicion,” they fleshed out and released an entire album with the same title. In spite of having ample connections, Stafford’s days of recording as a knock-off Elvis lasted barely two years. Going the other way, those same connections opened doors for Stafford to start recording songs for movie soundtracks, and even appearing in some of them. His credits include, Le Spie Vengono dal Semifreddo (translation: "Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs"), and a 1966 sequel, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine. He wouldn’t actually act until 1969’s Wild Wheels, where he played “’Huey,’ a dune buggy-riding surfer whose club tangles with a motorcycle pack,” and played “Wine, Women, and Song” over the fire at a clam-bake (good (dated) track, fwiw).

His second career started shortly after that, along with the rest of a life of writing signature songs for other artists. While on tour, Buck Owens heard Stafford’s song, “Big in Dallas,” on the radio in 1969 and thought he could make it into something bigger. He contacted Stafford and got his blessing to rearrange the song and change the setting, and that’s how “Big in Vegas” (here’s Stafford’s version) became such a big part of Owens’ repertoire that it was the last song he ever played according to that extended bio. Owens was, frankly, kind of a dick toward the man who did him a solid. As Owens put it:

“It was his idea and something that I enlarged upon. It worked out well for him because I’m sure it paid the rent one month.”

Perhaps (or probably) inspired by the success of “Big in Vegas,” Stafford started writing more in a country vein. He eventually landed on Atlantic Records fairly-recently launched country music division, where one of his key contacts, John Fisher, had started working. They assembled an “A-team” of session musicians and recorded Say, Has Anybody Seen My Sweet Gypsy Rose in 1973. The album was well-received critically, but the marketing side botched the roll out by failing to list “Amarillo by Morning” among the singles to promote. The song would very decidedly take on a life of its own, seizing air-play on its merits, and it was later re-recorded in 1982 by George Strait for his second album and, for the second time in Stafford’s career, he wrote a song that would bring fame to another man, but only the thinnest sliver of credit for him. Here’s the coda for that one:

“At the Country Music Association awards on November 6, 2013, with Strait sitting in the front row, hosts Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood sang an ‘Amarillo by Morning’ parody, ‘Obamacare by Morning,’ much to the amusement of the audience with Paisley acknowledging Strait’s presence. ‘By the way, thank you, George Strait, I always loved [‘Amarillo by Morning”].’”

I want to close with the most fitting note possible for Terry Stafford. He recorded a second country album (I think) in 1973, which he titled We’ve Grown Close. Almost immediately after the first single came out – “Stop If You Love Me” – Atlantic Records folded its country music division and, without anyone to direct promotion, the album languished briefly, then faded away.

As I’ve discovered with a lot of alleged one-hit wonders, Terry Stafford put several hits into the world – hell, CMT named Strait’s version of “Amarillo by Morning” #12 in its top 100 country songs of all-time. I’ve been listening to both Strait’s and Stafford’s version of that tune since at least Tuesday, and it’s Stafford’s that’s growing on me (which is how it wound up on my May 2019, Week 3 MAME Playlist). That’s a song about keeping after one’s dreams, obstacles be damned. The same theme holds together, “Big in Dallas” and “California Dancer” (can't find this one), a song written by a woman who moves to California to turn professional dancer, only to have her dreams thwarted.

Stafford only tapped out when he died of liver failure in 1996. Here’s to hoping he died as proud as he deserved to be.