Escape Velocity by Charles Portis
A lot of them also have to rush back from the man-wrecker road to meet their Opry commitments, or to tape their syndicated television shows. This is the new mark of prestige, the syndicated television show. Flatt and Scruggs have one, and so have the Wilburn Brothers and Leroy Van Dyke. Carl Smith has a network show on Canadian television. Porter Wagoner’s show, sponsored by a purgative called Black-Draught, is probably the most successful. It is shown in 80 “markets,” and claims an audience of 20 million people. This is about the same size as Jimmy Dean’s ABC network audience.
For most country singers there is not much money in records. “Country records are like salt and pepper in the grocery store,” says Owen Bradley. “The turnover is not big but it’s steady.” This reassuring salt metaphor (sometimes flour) is often heard in Nashville.
Eddy Arnold (Bouquet of Roses), most durable of the country crooners, has had 56 top-10 records since 1948, which makes him far and away the leader over a period of years. He, Miller, Cash or Owens could make a handsome living on record sales alone, but not many could.
In fact, a record can make the top five in the country charts and not sell more than 15,000 copies. At a wholesale price of 50 cents per record the company gross on a 15,000 seller would be $7,500. Take at least $700 off the top for the cost of the recording session ($850 if choral voices are used, $1,200 with strings) and that leaves $6,800. The singer would then get about four percent of that or a $272 check for his “hit.”
And that’s all he’d get. Jukebox operators, who buy most of the country singles, pay no royalties to anybody because of a curious interpretation of the copyright law, and radio stations pay no royalties to the “artist” or singer. The stations do, however, pay royalties to the publisher and composer. So almost every singer and picker in Nashville seems to be a music “publisher” these days. The word actually is a misnomer, a holdover from the days when sheet music was a substantial part of the business. Acuff-Rose still prints sale copies of its songs, and Tree Music contracts out the printing of Roger Miller’s songs, but few others print anything. If you went to a small “publisher” and tried to buy a sheet copy of some thing like You Broke My Heart, So Now I’m Going to Break Your Jaw, the chances of getting it would be slim, unless you had a subpoena.
* * *
These days the “publisher” is really a talent scout and a copyright agent. He seeks out songs, copy rights them and peddles them, usually on demo tapes, to the singers and the record companies. For this service B.M.I. (Broadcast Music, Inc.) pays him four cents per radio play (the composer gets 2.5 cents). The composer and publisher get a penny apiece for each record sold.
At one time, in true folk tradition, just about every country singer wrote his own songs. Most of the classics are productions of the singer-writer: Jimmie Rodgers’s Blue Yodel series, Roy Acuff’s Great Speckled Bird, Jimmie Davis’s You Are My Sunshine, Hank Williams’s Cold, Cold Heart. The singer-writer is still very much around—Roger Miller sings only his own material—but in recent years there has been a proliferation of nonperforming writers. It is a precarious trade.
Miller himself first made his reputation as a writer. “The Opry never figured me for much of a singer,” he says. In 1958 he wrote a string of country hits such as Half a Mind (Ernest Tubb), Invitation to the Blues (Ray Price) and Billy Bayou (Jim Reeves). “I was a great big success; the only thing was, I wasn’t making any money.”
Writer Jan Crutchfield explains about that kind of success: “I wrote one in 1961 with two other guys that was in the charts 26 weeks. It was called The Outsider. Bill Phillips cut it. You know what my royalty check was? Thirty-three dollars. Yeah. I looked at that check and I thought, ‘Yeah, a few more hits like this and I’m going back to gospel singing.’” Crutchfield’s third of the royalty represented a sale of about 10,000 copies. Nevertheless, with a few really big sellers and a small catalog of standards, a writer can retire young.
Crutchfield and collaborator Fred Burch, both thirtyish and Kentuckians, are two comers, part of Nashville’s new wave. They wrote Dream On, Little Dreamer, which Perry Como recorded and which shows signs of becoming a standard, and they have had a number of moderate successes. Crutchfield is a tall, thin, moustachioed country hipster who used to share a boardinghouse room with Roger Miller. Burch is an admirer of author Terry Southern, and he has an upper-middle-class, tousled, campusy air. He once planned to attend the New School for Social Research in New York, and is writing a novel about the Nashville scene. Together he and Crutchfield write rock songs, pop songs, uptown country and hard country. At taping sessions, Crutchfield does the singing—now he’s Fats Domino, now T. Texas Tyler—and Burch sits in the control room and makes suggestions and laughs at the songs and Crutchfield’s antics. In two hours, with four pickup sidemen, they get eight songs on tape.
Afterward they sit in an office at Cedarwood Publishing and decide on the disposition of their newly minted tunes. One is called Push My Love Button. It breaks Crutchfield up. “That is one more raunchy song, ain’t it? Yessir, that goes to Ann-Margret.” Ann-Margret? Does she sing? “Hell, naw,” says somebody, “but she makes records.” Other people have drifted in, bookers and secretaries, to listen and offer advice. “Do me a favor, Crutch, and pitch that one to Lefty Frizzell.…Now that’s a George Morgan song if I ever heard one. Or Buck Owens. Buck’s would sell more, but I kinda like to hear George do it.…”
Detour, there’s a muddy road ahead.
Detour, paid no mind to what it said,
Detour, all these bitter things I find,
Should have read
That Detour sign.
Nashville is not a closed shop anymore, but, say Burch and Crutchfield, it’s still much safer not to stray too far from the mainstream of traditional country music. “Look at Roger Miller,” says Crutchfield. “He’s a genius and he was knocking around here for years and couldn’t get anywhere. They didn’t even know what he was trying to do.”
Miller’s career is a good measure of what the Grand Ole Opry is all about. In the bad old rock-’n’-roll days, the Opry stood firm when other hill billy shows around the South were giving way. The Opry came through it and the others only managed to lose both audiences. But this same conservatism led it to overlook Miller.
The pay is bad on this show and the working conditions are primitive, but a country singer will do anything—lose money, drive a log truck up from Moultrie, Ga.—to get on it. A few years ago a singer named Stonewall Jackson did that—parked his log truck outside the WSM building, went in, sang a song and won a spot on the show. The Opry’s pay scale starts at 10 dollars, and no body, big star or jug blower, is paid much more than $60 for a Saturday night’s performance.
Many singers have a deep loyalty to the Opry. Roy Acuff, the King of Country Music (Dizzy Dean gave him the title), has been a regular since 1938. He certainly doesn’t need the billing or the money, and he couldn’t be dragged off the show. “I never thought the Opry needed me.” he says. “I need the Opry. I still get a little shaky every time I go out on that stage.”
Every Saturday night in the cold and heat, people line up for blocks outside the ratty old Opry auditorium and wait patiently for three hours to get inside, where they will sit on hard church pews for five more hours of Hank Snow and Stringbean and Wilma Lee and Stony. Surprisingly, most of the people who come are not from the South but from Indiana, Illinois and Ohio. Family groups prevail—grim, watchful guys who you know are not going to clap, their subdued wives and small kids, who will be asleep on the pews, mouths open, before it’s all over. Along the waiting route there are souvenir shops that sell Kitty Wells cookbooks. A man out front with a big card in his hat sells chicken cacklers, little oral noisemakers. People are afraid it’s a trick, that the cackler won’t work when they get it home, but they are even more afraid to try it out there on the sidewalk and have 3,000 people watch them make hen noises. “I sell more than you would think,” says the cackler salesman.
Backstage, ther
While the show is going on, wives, girl friends, children wander idly back and forth across the stage. The announcer, Grant Turner, looks around to see if the singer he is announcing is actually there. If not, he brings on another one. The show runs in 30-minute segments and for radio purposes it must run on time. Somehow it does. No one is even sure who is going to be on the show until Thursday or Friday. “But that’s the Opry,” says manager Devine. “If we produced it we’d kill it.”
Hank Williams, who couldn’t stay sober, was dropped by the Opry in August 1952, for missing shows, and banished to The Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport, whence he came. He was making $200,000 a year, and people like Tony Bennett had begun to record his songs. If ever a country singer didn’t need the Opry, it was Hank Williams. And yet for the next five months, the last five months of his life, he was on the phone to Nashville almost every day trying to get back on the show.
“If you were an opera singer, you’d want to sing at the Met, wouldn’t you?” said Carleton Haney, a promoter who books Coliseum shows. “Look, there’s what?—four billion people on earth, and only forty-eight of them can be on the Opry. Think about that.”
Cigareetes and whusky
And wild, wild women,
They’ll drive you crazy,
They’ll drive you insane.…
The legend is that the country singer is a hell of a fellow. Big spender, big drinker, a poolroom fantasy come true. It is based largely on the life of Hank Williams and, to a lesser extent, that of Jimmie Rodgers. Rodgers set the style—sudden fame and riches, a short, tragic life—and Williams fulfilled it.
Rodgers’s influence on the music was all-pervasive in the 1930’s. Young Clarence (Hank) Snow heard his records in remote Nova Scotia and marveled, and left the farm to sing and yodel like Jimmie, so far as he could. Down in Texas and Oklahoma, Ernest Tubb and Gene Autry were doing it. Of this lot the widow Rodgers pronounced Tubb the champ, and she presented him with one of Jimmie’s fancy guitars, one that said THANKS on the back in mother-of-pearl. It remains an object of veneration in the country-music world, and Tubb plays it only on special occasions.
Rodgers was known to take a drink, and because of his tuberculosis he came to rely on drugs, but his excesses were as nothing compared to those of Hank Williams. Hank had troubles. Thin and sickly, he too had a legitimate need for drugs. He suffered chronic bouts of pain from a spinal injury. He was an alcoholic, the kind who can get drunk in 20 minutes; and, beset by chippies, his home life was often rancorous and stormy.
No one since Rodgers had shown more talent in the field. If it took him longer than a half hour to write a song, he said, he threw it away. He was known for his generosity, and for his black, bitter moods. “Y’all don’t worry,” he would tell his audiences, “cause it ain’t gonna be all right nohow.”
In 1952, as his drinking grew worse, he was fired by the Opry and divorced by his beloved Audrey. He went to Louisiana and married a pretty young divorcée (“To spite Audrey,” he said) named Billie Jean Jones Eshliman, who, as it turned out, wasn’t quite divorced. He married her once in a more or less private ceremony, again on the stage at a matinee show in New Orleans, and yet again on the night show, for those who had missed the matinee. He picked up a paroled forger who treated him for his alcoholism at $300 a week. This was H. R. (Toby) Marshall, “B.A., M.A., D.S.C., Doctor of Science and Psychology and Alcoholic Therapist”—who later admitted he had never got be yond high school. “Doctor” Marshall administered, among other things, chloral hydrate, a knockout potion he was fond of.
Hank was desperately trying to get hold of himself, and, right at the end, on Jan. 1, 1953, he got a bit of hope. The Opry finally gave in to his pleading and agreed to give him another try, in February. That day, with this happy news, he left Knoxville, Tenn., in the Cadillac with an 18-year-old chauffeur, Charles Carr, for a show in Canton, Ohio. Before leaving Knoxville he managed to get two shots of chloral hydrate. He stretched out on the back seat and Carr drove.
At Rutledge, Tenn., a policeman stopped the car for speeding. He wrote out a ticket and peered through the window at the form in the back. “That guy looks dead,” he said. Carr explained about the sedation, paid a $25 fine and drove on. But by the time he got to Oak Hill, W. Va., he sensed some thing was wrong. He touched Hank, found him cold and drove him to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Hank was 29. A coroner’s jury declared he had died of “a severe heart condition and hemorrhage.”
More than 20,000 people came to the funeral in Montgomery, Ala., including all the Opry luminaries. Red Foley sang Peace in the Valley, and “Doctor” Marshall presented the widow Billie Jean with a bill for $736.39 for his therapy services, possibly on the basis that he had stopped Hank’s drinking. Billie Jean suggested there was more to Hank’s death than met the eye. “I will never accept the report that my husband died of a heart attack,” she said. Later she and Marshall both testified at a legislative committee hearing in Oklahoma on narcotics traffic, but nothing came of it as far as shedding light on Hank’s death was concerned. Probably he did die of a heart attack. This was a clinical detail. He knew and his friends knew that he was running out of time. “I just don’t like this way of living,” he sang, and, “I’ll never get out of this world alive.…”
Disaster and sudden death have come to be a part of the country-music scene. In 1960 the unlucky Billie Jean was widowed once again by a country singer when her third husband, Johnny Horton (Battle of New Orleans), was killed in a car wreck. In March, 1963, Opry stars Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins and Cowboy Copas were killed in a plane crash near Camden, Tenn.
Two days after that accident, singer Jack Anglin (of the Johnny and Jack team) was killed in a smash-up while driving to Patsy Cline’s funeral. The venerable Texas Ruby was next; she died in a house-trailer fire. In August, 1964, Gentleman Jim Reeves, a crooner whose posthumous releases still appear in the charts, was killed in a plane crash just outside Nashville, along with his accompanist.
“We were burying ’em around here like animals for a while,” Roy Acuff recalls. “I don’t even like to talk about it.” Last July Acuff, who wrote The Wreck on the Highway, and guitarist Shot Jackson were badly injured in a wreck on the highway near Sparta, Tenn. Acuff, who is back on his feet now, had every sizable bone in the right side of his body broken. He thinks he and all the other singers who haven’t been killed yet are lucky and ahead of the odds, when their mileage, often mileage under pressure, is considered. Since the late 1930’s he has traveled about 100,000 miles a year. “But I’m thinking about cutting down.”
It’s not an easy life at all. There’s fame in it, of a sort, and money, and that keeps a lot of them going. But there’s some deeper feeling too that keeps them out on the road, with a night here and a night there and a long drive in between, singing their songs, some trash, some gold, about hearts and wrecks and teardrops. They can’t talk about those things, so they sing them.
An Auto Odyssey through Darkest Baja
This story appeared in the Home magazine of the Sunday Los Angeles Times on February 26,1967. In the same issue was “A Man’s Best Frie
The idea was to get something sturdy and fairly reliable for a drive down the Baja California peninsula. Something cheap, too, expendable. Something you wouldn’t mind banging up, or even abandoning if it came to that. The best thing is a jeep or a Scout or some other four-wheel-drive vehicle but for a one-shot trip a standard pickup truck is good enough.
I found what I was looking for on a Santa Monica car lot. It was a rat-colored 1952 half-ton Studebaker pickup. Just the thing. It had character and looked eager to please. It had big tires too, snappy 9.00/15 Cadillac whitewalls, a bonus in appearance, traction and height. There was a black diamond painted on the tailgate.
A crew-cut salesman spotted me and came over and said a man and his wife from Big Bear sure were interested in that truck and they were expected in momentarily. He looked at his watch. I got in the cab and turned the wheel and messed around with the pedals.
“It’s got overdrive and 40 pounds of oil pressure,” he said. “I didn’t believe that oil pressure myself at first. Both those spotlights work.”
I couldn’t find the starter.
“It’s under the clutch,” he said.
It wouldn’t start.
“We’ll have to get that battery charged up for you,” he said. “Kids come around at night and turn those spotlights on.” He called for a boy to bring over a booster battery. “I believe if you drive this little truck you’ll buy it. And I’ll tell you something else. You’re going to be happy with your gas mileage. Surprised. You’ve got your little Champion Six going for you and then your overdrive cutting in at about 35.”