The Grand Tour (7 page)

Pappy released another single from the Houston session,
this one the jaunty “What Am I Worth.” Topping out at No. 7 nationally, it gave him back-to-back Top 10 singles, bringing more national attention his way. Around that time he also recorded a vintage tune that over time became a Jones standard. “Ragged but Right” was his adaptation of Georgia singer-guitarist Riley Puckett's 1934 recording of “I'm Ragged but I'm Right.” But where Puckett jauntily sang of being “a thief and a gambler” who's “drunk every night,” George, probably at Pappy's insistence, jauntily sang of being “a tramp and a rounder, and I stay out late at night.” The single, never a hit, remained part of his onstage repertoire throughout his active career. It also marked a new chapter. The vocal sounded less derivative, and it seemed that at last, all those misguided attempts to find his own voice were beginning to pay off. That was even more apparent on his optimistic original “You Gotta Be My Baby,” his third Top 10. The Hank, Acuff, and Lefty overtones began to recede. He tested his vocal range on this tune, his twangy tenor easily dropping to a deep bass as he infused the playful lyrics with a natural lightheartedness.

THE HIT SINGLES GOT HIM TOURING NATIONALLY. HE GOT A GOOD TASTE OF THE
road on one early trip. Booked in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, he hauled ass to the show, doing ninety through Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. The local cops took exception, arrested him for speeding, and threw him in jail. He had to call home, and money had to be wired to get him out. While he got to New Orleans in time for the show, his hotel room was robbed and he lost a watch and rings. One tour took him to the San Francisco area, where he looked up Bobby Black, who was playing with a band at the 1902 Club in downtown Oakland.

Black was surprised to see him walk in out of the blue. “I could tell
he'd been drinking,” he said. “I introduced him to the band. Nobody there had probably ever seen him before, but they were all familiar with ‘Why Baby Why.'” George agreed to sing it during the band's next set, leaving time for a few more drinks. When he was introduced and the band kicked off the song, Black recalled, “George sounded as if he'd never done it before and just barely got through it, forgetting words along the way. I don't think anybody there that night really believed that he was George Jones. On our next break, I took him across the street to the Doggie Diner and got him a hot dog and some coffee. He then just disappeared into the night.”

George still got off imitating Elvis onstage, but by the spring of 1956, the twenty-one-year-old from Memphis was becoming a worldwide phenomenon with the rockabilly sound he accidentally developed at Sun Records and continued at RCA, about to revolutionize popular music. Nerves became frayed in Nashville's growing country music industry. For a time country record sales fell, and some country stations jumped ship and embraced the rock 'n' roll format. Pappy's business sense told him this rock business wasn't fading anytime soon. He and Don Pierce decided they'd better jump on the bandwagon fast. Young rockers would soon be pounding on Starday's door, and many would join the label. But for now, Pappy opted to kick-start things using the existing roster, George included. Knowing George always needed money, he gave his star vocalist a direct order: write a couple of these rocking-type songs he could record. Elvis impersonations aside, George didn't mind others doing rockabilly. But while the idea of singing it himself was a notion he despised, finances trumped personal taste and he dashed off two simple rockers: “Rock It” and “(Dadgummit) How Come It.” If he spent more than fifteen minutes writing either one, it would be surprising. Their lyrics, little more than random, free-associative clichés, reflected his contempt
for the idiom. Beyond the money, the notion that Pappy would use him—Starday's top act—to capitalize on a sound alien to him left him furious.

From the first flurry of hard-strummed A chords on his acoustic guitar, clearly inspired by the opening of Presley's “That's All Right,” George, driven by a powerful confluence of booze and anger, screams the “Rock It” lyrics as Hal Harris's pulsing Chet Atkins–Merle Travis finger-style electric guitar percolates beneath him, the same way Scotty Moore played it behind Elvis. At times it sounded as if he was creating some sort of barbed satire of rockabilly. But there was also a clear, liquor-driven undercurrent aimed directly at Pappy:
“You want this kind of shit? Okay, here!”
If “Rock It” is grotesque, “How Come It,” kicked off by Doc Lewis's boogie-woogie piano, is simply sloppy as George rushes through the vocal, the band barely able to follow him. The final number, a cover of “Heartbreak Hotel,” was so messy it resembled Stan Freberg's savage 1956 parody of the Presley hit. Pappy wasn't that discriminating. He had something rocking to throw out there. But few bothered to buy it. That some rockabilly scholars and fans view “Rock It” as powerful and fiery is a hard premise to accept when the songs are placed alongside the best by Presley, Charlie Feathers, or Carl Perkins. The best rockabilly is intense, free, and loose. “Rock It” and “How Come It” were chaotic and uptight.

Thoroughly disgusted, George demanded Pappy not issue the single under his name. Drawing on his love of cartoons, he offered the pseudonym “Thumper Jones,” a play on the character Thumper Rabbit. Pappy agreed. Discussing the single forty-five years later, George said, “That oughta show you how bad I hated doin' it because I didn't want anyone to know it was me. I'd have done anything in those days to make a dollar, because I was hungry.”
Billboard
might have called “Rock It” “country blues with
an engaging beat” when reviewing the single, but radio and the public disagreed. Few stations played it, and sales were minimal. The passing of half a century didn't temper George's contempt for that bit of his history. In a 2006 interview, he called the record “a bunch of shit” and the “worst sounding crap that could ever be put on a record.” His aversion to singing rock himself didn't preclude his admiration for the music of two black rock singers: Little Richard and Chuck Berry. Berry was especially admired by other rock-averse country singers because of his skill as a songwriter. Ernest Tubb had a hit 1955 adaptation of Berry's “Thirty Days.”

George didn't have to worry about the “Heartbreak” cover, released by Pappy under the name “Hank Smith and his Nashville Playboys.” It was part of another Daily moneymaking idea. He'd produce cover versions of country hits, sung by George and unknown vocalists trying to impersonate the original singer, accompanied by a band roughly copying the original arrangement. He'd market them on radio as cut-rate singles and LPs. Finding hungry young singers willing to record these covers wasn't hard. Among those who jumped on board for the money: Roger Miller and Donny Young, the future Johnny Paycheck.

There was no small irony in Pappy, who'd pushed George to quit imitating other singers, paying him to mimic (with varying degrees of success) Johnny Horton on Horton's hit “One Woman Man,” Ray Price on “Run Boy,” Carl Smith on “Before I Met You,” Marty Robbins on “Singing the Blues,” and Faron Young on “I Got Five Dollars and It's Saturday Night.” Pappy marketed the discs via two popular late-night country disc jockeys with a national reach. One was Chicago's Randy Blake, the other Paul Kallinger, who worked at Del Rio, Texas, station XERF, his program broadcast over megawatt transmitters across the border in Mexico. The common thread with these and the Thumper single
was predictable. George declared that Starday “would pay me two hundred or three hundred dollars, which I needed real bad at the time, to go in there and do those type of things.”

Beaumont acknowledged George's growing fame when the
Beaumont Enterprise
ran a July 6, 1956, profile of him. Reporter Milton Turner declared, “He plays the guitar like he sings—enthusiastically. The result is he breaks about three or four guitar strings at each performance. This native Beaumonter is breaking other things too!” The story went on to claim “Why Baby Why” had sold half a million copies, a likely exaggeration. Turner also noted George's recent awards, such as his Best New Artist of 1956 Award by
Country and Western Jamboree
magazine. Turner's propensity for exaggeration peaked when he claimed the Thumper “Rock and Roll” singles were “rolling to the top—fast.”

Pappy and former Starday employee Gabe Tucker, now in Nashville managing Ernest Tubb, focused on moving George to the next level: Opry membership, or a permanent place in the show's cast of performers. Tucker, who'd worked for Colonel Tom Parker when the Colonel managed Eddy Arnold, was familiar with the highly political Opry environment. He secured George a guest spot for August 4. The 780-mile drive from Beaumont to Nashville was clear sailing compared to the bullshit he faced before he could set foot in front of a WSM microphone.

Opry guest spots did not always end well. Elvis's sole appearance in 1954 ended on a sour note when arrogant, conniving Opry manager Jim Denny, who disliked his performance, suggested he go back to truck driving. At the Ryman Auditorium, unspecified backstage bureaucrats claimed “union rules” barred George from playing his own guitar onstage since he wasn't a member of Nashville's Local 257, a red herring conceived to let guests know their place. Sober and nervous, George was terrified. As Ernest Tubb
introduced him, Opry stalwarts Little Jimmy Dickens and George Morgan intervened. Dickens handed George his own guitar; Morgan sent the timorous newcomer onstage, where he breezed through “You Gotta Be My Baby” before walking off. He decided not to push an encore. The Machiavellian nonsense aside, the appearance led Opry management to offer George that coveted membership a week later, making him a part of the show's artist roster. He performed on August 25 as a member. Over a decade and a half before, George Glenn lay in bed Saturday nights with Clara and George W listening on the battery radio and amusing family members by boldly declaring someday he'd appear on the Opry. Now, like Hank Williams, he was part of the Opry family after just one guest appearance.

On records, his momentum wasn't slowing down. “Just One More,” a morose barroom weeper George wrote himself, became his most successful single yet, reaching No. 3 on
Billboard
's country charts. It also showed his voice continuing to develop beyond his roots. The B-side, “Gonna Come Get You,” jaunty and upbeat, had an amiability similar to “You Gotta Be My Baby.” George's first hit duet with a female singer came well before Melba Montgomery or Tammy Wynette: “Yearning” teamed him with Hayride vocalist Jeanette Hicks, who'd been recording since 1953. Issued in early 1957, the single made it to No. 10, though George simply harmonized behind her lead. Even as his stature grew, his ties to Brother Burl and Sister Annie remained strong. He added melodies to three of Burl's religious poems and recorded them, adding fervent vocals to “Boat of Life” and turning “Taggin' Along” into a stunning, tent-meeting-revival tune complete with hand clapping, enhanced by Hal Harris's electric guitar. George adapted another of Burl's poems, “Cup of Loneliness,” into a plaintive ballad, one he would record with the same intensity as the other two.

“Why Baby Why” scored in
Billboard
's Top Country and Western Records of 1956 chart, in the “Best Sellers in Stores” and “Most Played on Juke Boxes and on Radio” categories. George's original compositions were getting around, attracting attention beyond Starday artists. Ray Price had a Top 10 single with the Cajun-flavored ballad “You Done Me Wrong,” which bore both George's and his name as composers. Jimmie Skinner recorded George's “No Fault of Mine.”

Pappy became the sole owner of Starday after buying out Starns. Don Pierce still remained president, but the company's fortunes were about to take a turn. Mercury Records president Irving Green and Art Talmadge, the label's vice president, realized they needed to boost the company's weak country music presence. Their solution: teaming up with Starday to create a joint Mercury-Starday operation based in Nashville with George as the flagship artist. Pappy, working mainly from Houston, would continue to oversee his business interests and produce other singers. Pierce would handle the business end and do some production. None of this would tempt George to move his family to Nashville. Shirley wouldn't want it, and he seemed to have little interest in putting down roots there, not when he could hang out and party in local hotels when he was there for the Opry or any other purpose. The Opry connections, however, demanded a greater Nashville presence. His new booking agent, former fiddler J. Hal Smith, who also managed Ray Price, worked out of Nashville.

George started recording in Nashville in 1957, using the Bradley Film and Recording Studio on Sixteenth Avenue South, an old house purchased by Owen Bradley, soon to become one of Nashville's preeminent producers, and his guitarist brother Harold. They built a studio in the basement. Hoping to attract industrial filmmakers, they attached a Quonset hut, a prefab, half-cylindrical
corrugated metal building widely used by the military during World War II. When a producer filmed a series of color movies there featuring Opry artists, the Bradleys built wooden sets inside the hut resembling the interior of a barn. Those sets, left behind after filming ended, inadvertently rendered the studio an acoustic marvel perfect for recording. It became known to all as Studio B, or just the Quonset Hut, one of Nashville's most iconic studios. George would do the bulk of his Nashville recordings there, but did his second Nashville session at RCA Victor's newly opened studio on March 18, 1957, resulting in the hit “Too Much Water,” credited to George and Sonny James. Among the Nashville musicians on the date: T. Tommy Cutrer, Hank Garland, fiddler Shorty Lavender, and pedal steel guitarist Lloyd Green. “Water” became the first of many Nashville hit singles Green would play on over the next three decades.