Willie (9 page)

Bob sometimes carried a girl singer with him—like Ramona Reed or Laura Lee McBride—who could sing upbeat songs, not ballads,
and yodel. He hired only female yodelers. Every musician's eye was on him because when he pointed his fiddle bow at you, you'd better be ready to jump in and do something. Bob allowed his musicians to take individual breaks and do their stuff. He tried to make stars out of everybody on the bandstand. He mentioned their names on records—like “Take it away, Leon,” which made Leon McAuliffe famous. Bob didn't do many lead vocals. He'd stand there and smoke his cigar and wear his big white hat while Tommy Duncan sang, but everybody knew Bob was directing the band.

When you learned a Bob Wills song, you also learned the exact arrangements because they were so good. They were head arrangements of jazz riffs which the musicians would put together and add three- and four-part harmonies. The arrangements didn't change. They were group things that maybe Elton Shamblin or Tiny Moore or Johnny Gimble had as much to do with as Bob. He knew he wasn't the best musician, but he knew he was the best bandleader and could turn out the best sound. I tried to steal all the licks I could from his good musicians. I still do Bob's “Bubbles in My Beer” and “Stay a Little Longer.”

There are a lot of old guys doing Bob's tunes nowadays. But young guys do them, too. Like Ray Benson and Asleep at the Wheel. They do Bob Wills songs exactly like Bob did. It's like going back forty years in time for me to hear Asleep at the Wheel.

When Bob went on the Grand Ole Opry he was already a huge star in Texas but not so much in Nashville. Nashville musicians in those days were mostly bluegrass. The Opry told Bob he couldn't use his drums, so he refused to appear. Finally they said he could use his drums. Then Bob went onstage with his cigar in his mouth. They told him not to smoke on the stage, and he walked off again. So far as I know, that was his one and only appearance on the Opry.

How western swing started was men like Milton Brown using jazz and blues musicians to play the songs they had written. It came out western swing. Before Bob Wills became popular, the big men were Lightnin' Hopkins, Jack Teagarden, Duke Ellington. White people used to go hear the black blues. Whites were the only ones who could afford to go to the clubs where the black blues musicians worked—and of course most of the clubs were segregated, anyhow. A white could go to a black club if he had the guts to buy a ticket, but a black couldn't go to a white club unless he wanted his head busted.

Poor Bob wasn't any better at business than I am. He had several managers and agents and bookers and thieves hanging around. He was too good-hearted ever to accumulate much. When you're the
leader of a ten- or twelve-piece band, you have a lot of families to support. If Bob didn't work, a whole bunch of people didn't eat. There was always someone who needed money and Bob would always give it to them. He had more important things to think about than money. Bob finally died broke. I don't think it really bothered him to go out like that. He saw plenty of money in his life, but he didn't try to take it with him.

Probably he intends to come back and get it.

A musician always has periods of being between gigs, which means out of work. You've got to be very imaginative during times of no gigs. Up in Fort Worth in the fifties it wasn't all that uncommon for musicians to become gamblers or burglars or pimps or used car salesmen between shows. But there was no way to make a living out of crime in Abbott. They didn't allow crime in Abbott.

So one day I got one of my brilliant business ideas. I went to Frank Clements, who still cuts hair in Abbott to this day, and sugggested I set up a shoe-shine franchise in his barbershop. My gimmick was I would sing the song of the customer's choice after I polished his boots or shoes.

The way I figured it, my fame as an entertainer would spread, because downtown Abbott and the barbershop were on the Interurban line that ran from Dallas to Waco. The Interurban was a great thing, an electric train that carried people up and down Texas and back and forth between cities like Dallas and Fort Worth before the government started paving the country with interstate highways after World War II. As much as I love hopping into my car and driving fast and feeling free, the old Interurban was a cheap, easy way to travel. Go to Switzerland today and you'll find the country crisscrossed with electric trains like our old Interurban.

The Interurban Station in Abbott was close to the cotton gin as well as the barbershop, the cafe, the churches and the elementary school. I thought people would come pouring off the Interurban to do business and be drawn like flies to honey by the sound of my voice and the sharp crack of my shoe-shine rag.

After the first day's operation of Booger Red's Shine n' Sing, I went to Mr. Clements to collect my share of the gate.

He gave me fifty cents.

“This ain't right,” I said. “You must owe me at least two dollars.”

“Willie, I didn't even make two dollars today my own self,” Mr. Clements said.

I closed up shop and went to work baling hay.

But Bud Fletcher, who was tall and good-looking and slicker than bacon grease, started talking club owners into hiring our band on a fairly steady basis. We would play any kind of music the club wanted, whether we knew how or not. Sometimes we didn't succeed and were never invited back. Usually, though, we were a hit. If we didn't know the music they requested, we would fake it. It wasn't that hard. Bud didn't know hardly any music at all, but Bobbie knew nearly everything from “Stardust” to “My Bucket's Got a Hole in It” and I was learning more music every day.

Bobbie and I had been well grounded in music by our grandparents. Dad and Mom Nelson told us how the fiddle and the mandolin and the guitar had always dominated the old folk music gatherings like sewing bees or barn raisings or picnics. The oldest country music recordings I heard were fiddle bands like Sid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, and the Fiddling John Carson group. When solo vocalists started making records, they didn't seem to care much about instrumentation. They were backed by just a guitar or two and maybe a fiddle. It wasn't until the 1930s that you heard a full band playing on a country record.

Musicians moved from the country to the cities and took their country music with them but wrote songs about city life. When they returned to the country, they brought their experience of Memphis blues or New Orleans ragtime and jazz or maybe the wild mix of music styles of Dallas's famous Deep Ellum Street.

It never occurred to my grandparents that music could make money. Except for minstrels or traveling medicine shows, music was played for fun and for spiritual purposes. The radio and the recording industry changed all that.

No single person did more to make country music popular all over America than Ralph Peer of RCA Victor. Peer was a New Yorker, but he took portable recording machines into the South and set up studios in hotel rooms. Peer was the first to record Fiddling John Carson, who surprised RCA Victor by selling a lot of records and showing there was a big audience for country music. Peer set up his studio in Bristol on the Tennessee-Virginia border and invited country performers to audition. Over a period of what might be the four most important days in country music history, Peer made the first recordings of both the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers.

Jimmie Rodgers was the original country superstar. He died of tuberculosis the year I was born. But even before Jimmie Rodgers, a fellow who called himself Vernon Dalhart picked up a national audience on RCA Victor. Dalhart grew up in East Texas as Marion
Slaughter and went to New York City to record for Edison as an opera singer. He convinced RCA Victor to let him make what was then known as a “hillbilly” record. Slaughter chose a stage name by combining two Texas towns—Vernon and Dalhart—and cut the two songs “Wreck of the Old 97” and “The Prisoner's Song.” That record sold an unbelievable six million copies. Vernon Dalhart went on recording for every new record company that popped up, singing under twenty or thirty different names.

The big radio stations started “barn-dance” programs on WSB in Atlanta, WLS in Chicago, WBAP in Fort Worth, and WSM in Nashville, where the Grand Ole Opry began in 1925. Most of it was live music in the early days, before the radio stations and record companies realized they weren't competitors but were, instead, in bed together. By the time I started living with my ear against our Philco, the giant X radio stations were in full swing just across the border in Mexico. These stations, which all had X in their call letters, were 150,000 watts. Their signals reached all over the United States and much of Canada. The X stations broadcast country and gospel music along with a crowd of evangelist preachers. You could tune in any time of night and hear the Carter Family, the Chuck Wagon Gang, or the Stamps Quartet.

They didn't start calling it country western music until the singing cowboy movies of the thirties and forties. This was not real country or cowboy or western music, for the most part, that Gene Autry or Roy Rogers and Dale Evans or the Sons of the Pioneers sang around their movie campfires. These were movie tunes by pop songwriters who tried to sound country. But it all began to blend with the real country music of Red Foley and Ernest Tubb, and with the bluegrass music of Bill Monroe—who gave bluegrass its name from his band the Bluegrass Boys—and the innovative banjo picking of Earl Scruggs, and by the fifties you hardly ever heard us called hillbilly musicians.

By the 1970s Gramm Parsons, a country boy, came along playing rock and roll with a country heart. The Flying Burrito Brothers and the Eagles played rock and roll country. The Band did country lyrics in a sort of rock and roll hillbilly style. We got the Allman Brothers, and my friend Leon Russell, and God knows who all else, and by now country music is mixed up in everything.

But it was Bob Wills who put it all together for me, and it was our old Philco radio that taught it to me.

As Waylon said, Bob Wills is still the king.

In high school I loved sports and won letters from the Abbott Fighting Panthers in baseball, basketball, football, and track. I didn't have a dream, though, of going on with an athletic career and playing third base for the New York Yankees. Staying up late in honky-tonks was not the ideal way for a young athlete to keep in shape.

I mopped the cafeteria floors in school for a free lunch, and Bobbie and I held a variety of odd jobs around town. For a while we worked the night shift as Abbott's telephone operator—actually it was Bobbie's gig, but she cut me in on it—which was interesting, because we listened in on all the conversations.

Bud Fletcher kept getting us more and more jobs. We went from playing places that seated thirty people into huge halls like the Scenic Wonderland in Waco. Bud booked us in there for the gate. The Scenic Wonderland held 3,000 people. We drew our usual number—about thirty—and didn't get invited back. But we were working.

Bobbie was still feeling guilty about playing music in joints that sold liquor. It was so much against the way we were raised. In the eyes of the real staunch church people, we were sinful.

At that time a lot of people thought professional musicians were kind of a shiftless lot in a way, like actors. It was like on some of the old military bases where they had signs that said
Sailors and dogs stay off the grass
. The same thing applied to musicians.

But when Bud wangled us a job playing on KHBR radio in Hillsboro, I thought I had reached the highest stardom this world could offer. This was the ultimate. We had our own radio program, we were getting paid to play and sing on the radio, just like Ernest Tubb and my other heroes. I was famous, I thought. I was already a legend in my own mind. I was a teenager and people were asking for my autograph. My head started swelling immediately.

I thought I was a star because I was treated like one. If you're the only guy in town who can pick and sing, you receive the star treatment early in life. Same way right now. If you're the only guy in the barracks in the army who can pick up a guitar and sing a song, then in that particular barracks you're the star. A local star is just as happy as a national star. Maybe happier, because there's less responsibility.

I had found out early that a guitar would draw girls. I don't like to admit it, but if a girl baited her trap with sex, she'd catch me every time—and it's unlikely this will ever cease to work. As a teenager I already had a fan club. There was a group of girls who thought I was the greatest thing ever. They bought me a uniform, a nice Western suit, and paid for it themselves. They were like groupies. Everywhere I would play, they'd be there.

About this time I found another hero, a fellow named Pat Kennedy. Pat was a World War II veteran who had come back to Central Texas. He was shot up and pissed off. Pat was one of the first rebels that I remember, a real system-bucker. He told everybody in town where to get off. Pat didn't want to do a damn thing except listen to our band and give us advice. He was on disability. People in town made remarks about Pat not wanting to work for a living. Pat didn't give a shit what they thought. So what if they thought he was a no-good drunkard? He'd point at his ass and say, “You all line up and kiss old rosy.” Pat did whatever he wanted to do. He seemed like he was old and grown up, but he was in his twenties, a pal of Bud Fletcher's. Pat would stay up all night and play dominoes and smoke cigarettes with me in a clubhouse we built that had a stove and a domino table in it. He would do anything. You could say, “Pat, why don't you just go tell old so-and-so he's a stupid horse's butt,” and Pat would get right up and go tell them. I loved this guy.

He fell off a truck and killed himself.

I got out of high school and took a job trimming trees in East Texas with Zeke Varnon. I nearly went the way of Pat Kennedy much sooner than expected.