I don’t believe I ever worked as hard or had as difficult a time on anything in my life as I did learning those first chords on Russell’s guitar. My fingers got sore and my patience wore thin, but I stuck with it until I could play G, C, and sometimes a D chord. If you knew three chords, you could play a whole song, and that was just about the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.
I am not a natural musician. Even to this day, I have to work hard to achieve any degree of proficiency. And in those early days, I had a trying time, but I hung in there. I’ve never been short on tenacity when I really wanted something, and I wanted this more than anything I’d ever wanted in my life.
Life for Russell and me became music. We wore that old guitar out, and a few months later Russell’s daddy bought him a genuine Gibson flat-top acoustic guitar. It was by far the best instrument we’d ever had our hands on and excited us even more.
I had just gotten to where I could play G, C, and D with some degree of regularity when Tommy Wilkie came by one day with a mandolin, and I just had to get my hands on it. I don’t even remember how I learned those first few mandolin chords, but sometime later I bought one of my own and practically lived with it.
Joe Phillips started coming by once in a while with a five-string banjo; he could play a little bit. As soon as we got to the point where we could play a few simple songs together, we decided we’d form a band.
Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys were a daily feature on WPTF in Raleigh. Since they were our idols, we named our band the Misty Mountain Boys. Imagine that.
One night while we were picking and talking, we figured it was time for the Misty Mountain Boys to make a public appearance; it was time for the world to learn about this new phenomenon springing forth from The Gulf. After all, we could play three whole chords and actually play them together once in a while.
Joe Phillips came up with the idea of doing a benefit show for a needy local gentleman. That very night we went out and found some old movie posters, flipped them over on the blank side, and hand printed the fact that the Misty Mountain Boys would be making their maiden voyage at the Gulf Community Building on a Saturday night in the not-too-distant future.
We didn’t ask anybody about using the building. We didn’t even inform the gentleman we were doing the benefit for. We just block printed it all up on the back of those old movie posters and put them up around town.
Now don’t go getting any delusions of grandeur about the Gulf Community Building. It was just an old brick structure about thirty by forty feet with electricity and a few benches.
Our first problem was that we didn’t have a sound system, and the only person in our area having anything approaching one was a young black kid named Poochie Reeves. Well, it wasn’t really a sound system—it was just a National guitar amplifier. But with a borrowed microphone, we were in business.
We made a stage by laying boards across a couple of saw horses and hung a blanket across a piece of wire for a curtain.
The stage was set for the worldwide debut of the Misty Mountain Boys. When the big night arrived, we had about twenty-five or thirty people in the audience, including our parents. The red light on Poochie Reeves’s amplifier was shining like a beacon in the night, beckoning us on to fame and glory.
We took the stage: Russell Palmer on guitar, Joe Phillips on banjo, and Charlie Daniels on mandolin. My dad even came up and sang a song with me. We played our limited repertoire, which the crowd seemed to enjoy, or at least endure. But the biggest hit of the evening was when Ralph Willet took Russell’s guitar, which he couldn’t play at all, and accompanied himself on an out-of-tune, out-of-time rendering of a song called “I’m Gonna Kill Myself.” Ralph had a speech impediment and absolutely no concept of rhythm or pitch whatsoever, but he was by far the hit of the night. The place broke up.
When it was over, we were ecstatic. We had raised a few dollars for a good cause, and our first public appearance had been a success. Sure that fame and fortune lay just over the next hill, we went back in practice mode with a vengeance.
In the early 1950s, it was fairly common for small radio stations around our part of the country to have local bands doing weekly and sometimes daily radio shows. The stations got some free programming, and the bands could advertise the square dances and other functions they were playing. Most of the time the bands averaged from mediocre to downright terrible.
After we had learned a few more songs and become a little more efficient on our instruments, we figured we had progressed to the point that we should get our own radio show.
Russell worked up the nerve to call WWGP in Sanford and ask for an audition, which was so promptly granted that we figured we were off and running. The big day arrived, and we took off for Sanford with phrases like “Y’all are as good as some of ’em I hear on the radio” ringing in our ears.
We knew we were in trouble when we first laid eyes on the station manager who handled our audition. He was a business-like, no-nonsense kind of a guy. He listened to us play, made some valid criticism, and promptly burst our bubble. We headed back to Gulf to inform the home folks that there would be no radio show forthcoming for the Misty Mountain Boys.
Joe Phillips just gave up and stopped coming to practice, but Russell and I stuck to the cause. We had a fire in our bellies, and it would take a lot more than a failed audition to put it out.
Tommy Wilkie came by one day with a fiddle, and I had to give it a try. The fingerboard on a mandolin is the same as the fingerboard on a fiddle, so I kinda had an idea where to put my fingers. It was when I applied the bow that the trouble started. How my parents ever put up with me, I’ll never know. I made some of the most horrible noises on that fiddle you could ever imagine hearing.
Pat Thomas, one of the guys I went to school with, said that when I played the fiddle, it sounded like somebody stepped on a cat. It was that and worse as I squeaked and squawked my way through learning the basics. But as I said, I’ve never been short on tenacity. Before too long, I was playing a hoedown or two.
I never took a fiddle lesson and play totally by ear. When I started learning the fiddle, I learned all wrong. I hold the fiddle wrong. I hold the bow wrong and put too much pressure on it, which actually gives me the sound you hear on our records. It may not be proper, but as with so many things in life, it works for me.
The first money I ever made playing music was on a Saturday night when Russell Palmer and I were sitting around the local store with a guitar and fiddle, just hoping someone would ask us to play something. A car pulled up to the gas pump out front, and two couples got out and came into the store.
Noticing the instruments, one of the ladies said, “Play something.” Well, Russell piped right up and said, “You got any money?” The lady reached into her purse and pulled out four dimes. That’s twenty cents apiece. I wish I’d framed my two dimes.
Going to the Grand Ole Opry was a dream I’d had since I was a small child. It finally reached fruition in the summer of 1954, when Russell and me, along with a few of the local boys, chipped in for gas for a friend’s car and took off for Nashville.
We knew nothing about the procedure or protocol for obtaining tickets or show times and made no hotel reservations. We just piled in the car and, armed with a map and a whole lot of youthful fervor, embarked on the five hundred miles of mostly two-lane highways that led to Nashville.
The upshot was that after about three hours of standing in line outside the Ryman Auditorium, we did indeed get to see the Grand Ole Opry, all of it.
The Opry did two shows, turning the house in between to make room for the folks attending the second show. But instead of leaving, we found some empty seats and stayed around for the second show too.
The second show ended at midnight, and of course we had to go around the corner to the Midnight Jamboree at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop. We left Music City in the early morning hours, completely worn out but still inspired and buzzing in the afterglow.
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The Opry was almost sensory overload for would-be pickers like Russell Palmer and me; we had experienced so much great music up close. But just the realization that at long last, after untold hours of listening, imagining, and dreaming, we had actually seen a live performance of the show of shows, the Grand Ole Opry—it was almost like a dream.
The next year we went back a little more prepared. We stayed at a hotel right next to the WSM Studios, where the live pre-Opry show took place, which we attended. Then, with reserved seat tickets in hand, we walked the few blocks to the Ryman for both Grand Ole Opry shows.
Downright sophistication.
One day when I was about sixteen, Joe Phillips showed up with some beer he had got ahold of somehow. I had never tasted any alcoholic beverage and sneaked off and downed my first beer. I didn’t know what to expect, didn’t know if I’d feel tipsy or sick or what. The truth is, I really didn’t feel anything.
When I say I “sneaked off,” I am serious, and for good reason. Drinking alcohol was very much frowned on by my mother, and I was grown before I would have as much as a glass of dinner wine around her.
We lived in a dry county, and alcoholic beverages were hard to come by. But this was to be the first of many covert cocktail hours.
Musically, things started looking up when Russell found out that he had a natural talent for a five-string banjo, adding another whole dimension to the music we played. We hooked up with a couple of other guys who were serious about picking.
Dave Hall played rhythm guitar and sang, and Ed Cooper sang and played the doghouse bass. For the first time, we really started to sound like a full-fledged band, complete with vocal harmonies.
We went to a lot of what was called “fiddler’s conventions” in those days. “Fiddler’s convention” was just another name for a talent show with small cash prizes for the best band, the best singer, and so on, with the biggest prize going to the best fiddler, which was decided by a panel of judges.
The local musicians took them pretty seriously and would show up in droves. So, when I won the very first two I ever competed in, it was a total surprise. And the dreams of one day making a living playing my music grew a little.
We bought a used one-speaker, one-mic sound system and started playing anywhere we could get anybody to listen. We also got our elusive radio show on WWGP in Sanford every Saturday afternoon. Another milestone, another small victory.
Shortly before graduation, I had an accident in the shop at school that could have easily changed the path of my life. In the first place, I’m not good with machinery, as I was to prove to myself many times during my life. And what happened to me was caused by a lack of concentration and trying to operate a piece of equipment I was not familiar with.
I was sawing a small piece of wood on a table saw and made the mistake of turning loose one end of it. When I did, the saw bucked and jerked my right hand across the blade, severing the ring finger at the base of the nail and sawing deep gashes in three of my other fingers.
The closest surgeons were in Sanford, about twelve miles away. Our principal, Mr. Clayton, hurriedly put me in his car, and we headed full tilt for the hospital in Lee County. When we arrived, we found that both qualified doctors were in surgery and would be there for a couple of hours.
My hand felt as if it was in a vice and somebody kept ratcheting it up tighter and tighter.
As bad as I am at remembering names, I can’t even remember the name of the doctor who eventually treated my hand, but I will never forget the name of the angel of mercy who was in the emergency room that afternoon—Miss Ballard. She gave me a shot of belladonna, and pretty soon I was floating on a cloud and my mangled hand was floating right along with me.
After the doctor had amputated my ring finger below the first joint, stitched and bandaged and medicated me, Mr. Clayton took me home, and I had time to assess the damage to my fledgling music career.
The good news was that it was my right hand instead of my left, the left being the one I used on the neck of the instruments to form the notes and chords, the right being the one that held the bow or the pick. And as soon as I healed up, foregoing the possibility of a little different grip, I was going to be right back in business again. Had it been my left hand that took the injury, I’d have had to spend my life doing something besides playing a fiddle and you folks would probably never have heard of me.
But for the meantime, with the exception of having to eat with my left hand for a while, it would just be a major inconvenience.
Thank God.
CHAPTER 5
FINISHING UP AND STARTING OVER
Well, time marches on, and before any of us realized what was happening, it was time for the Goldston High School class of 1955 to don cap and gown. I had never given much thought to what I was going to do after I graduated. I knew what I wanted to do, but the opportunity simply didn’t exist at that time.
When there are only twenty-two people in your class, graduation is a sober, lump-in-the-throat kind of affair. How do you suddenly say goodbye to people you have shared so much with? We marched down the aisle to the melancholy strains of “Pomp and Circumstance,” picked up our diplomas, and walked out into a world we knew very little about.
A few in the class were headed for college, a couple for the military, some to run the family farm, and others, like me, to look for a job.
A couple of weeks after I finished high school, I started work at a capacitor factory in Sanford. Although I worked an eight-hour-a-day job five days a week, the nights and weekends were devoted to music.
My dream of someday being a full-fledged professional was just as much alive as ever. I knew where I wanted to go. I just didn’t know how to get there yet.
In the mid-fifties, a new kind of music was sweeping the nation with the force of a runaway hurricane, and I wanted in on it. I started doing Little Richard songs at the fiddler’s conventions and any place else we played. Now, I’ll have to admit that “Tutti Frutti” done with bluegrass instrumentation was pretty strange. But the people just ate it up, and I knew I was on to something. I had discovered the power of rock and roll.
In the summer of 1955, a steel guitar player named Jerry Clark drifted through our part of the country. He was a professional who had played on the Grand Ole Opry with Little Jimmy Dickens, big stuff to guys who had never performed outside the Tarheel state. He was miles ahead of us musically, and when he agreed to play with us, we were ecstatic.
However, there was one problem. Jerry had a steel guitar but he didn’t have an amplifier, which left him dead in the water. So, determined to make it work, I went down to Buchanan’s Music Store in Sanford and cosigned for him to buy one on time and make monthly payments.
I wasn’t too happy when Jerry drifted on out of town a few months later, leaving behind the amplifier and a bunch of unmade payments. Here I was, stuck with an amp, and I didn’t even own an electric instrument. So I went back to Buchanan’s and got a Gibson electric guitar.
It didn’t take me long to realize what a big favor Jerry Clark had done for me by not paying for that amp. I was getting more and more into the new rock and roll sound, and that electric guitar went right along with me. Little did I know that the rockabilly era was just around the corner.
Our singer and rhythm guitar player, Dave Hall, moved out of town, and we replaced him with P. T. Wilkins, who also played guitar and was a terrific singer. We started playing some of the mainstream country songs, and with my formative efforts at rock, we began jelling as a band. We actually started getting paid modest sums for our efforts once in a while.
Things were proceeding quite nicely. I was making a living at my daytime job at the capacitor factory and working with the band doing our Saturday afternoon radio show and playing square dances, fiddler’s conventions, and barbecue joints, where we’d set up in the parking lot and pass the hat.
CHAPTER 6
ANOTHER MOVE, AND THIS ONE HURT
Then Daddy changed jobs again,
and the family moved back to Wilmington. It was one of the most painful of the many moves we had made over the years. I was nineteen years old, and some good things were just starting to happen for the band. After all the hard work, I’d be leaving it behind, not to mention the best friends I had in the world.
I wanted to stay, quit my daytime job, and give it a go with the music full time. But my parents said I was too young to strike out on my own, and they were probably right. Time has a way of turning disappointment into triumph, and that move was a necessary component in what was to happen to me during the next few years.
I had a day job waiting for me in Wilmington at Taylor Colquitt Creosoting Company. That was the same company Daddy was going to work for and where my maternal grandfather was a superintendent. But don’t go getting any ideas about nepotism; it just wasn’t that way. This was a job, not a patronage.
I was learning to be a timber inspector: inspecting, culling, and classifying poles, piling, and fence posts as they were brought onto the plant yard. The job involved a cant hook, a chain saw, and a whole lot of elbow grease.
I was training under Louis Frost, who years before had trained my daddy and knew ten times more about the job than I ever would. I was technically his boss, but I should have been working under him and was in every way but my title. Louis had one problem: he was black.
That’s just how it was in those days. Civil rights legislation had been passed, but the perverse roots of segregation and discrimination hung stubbornly on in the Deep South. It would take many years and a lot of struggling before blacks gained much of anything from the newly passed laws.
I was born into a segregated Jim Crow society, and if you haven’t lived through it, you couldn’t possibly understand how it was.
Never Look at the Empty Seats Page 4