The Grand Tour

by Rich Kienzle

  For George Glenn, it was a paradox: being coerced to do the one thing he loved doing more than anything else—singing—or face a belt whipping. It became one of a number of deep scars that led to depression, conflicts, and feelings of worthlessness that didn’t fade as he grew into adulthood. As he became one of the great singers of his time, beloved by fans and admired by peers, his shyness remained, aggravated by a gnawing sense he was somehow undeserving—particularly when he drank. Given what he endured in his youth, he would identify with the underdog his entire life.

  George W was not always so irresponsible. He acquired a Zenith battery radio in the late 1930s that allowed the family to sample the wider world beyond Saratoga. Glenn, not surprisingly, gravitated to music on various stations in Beaumont and to the east in Louisiana. But it was the Grand Ole Opry, heard from Nashville on WSM’s fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel signal, that truly captivated him. The Opry began in 1925 as the WSM Barn Dance, conceived by ex-Memphis newspaperman-turned-announcer George Dewey Hay, formerly an announcer on the country’s first such rural-oriented radio show: Chicago’s National Barn Dance on WLS. In Nashville, he created a specific, rural-South concept for the program that contrasted with the Barn Dance’s broader musical content. The early Opry presented performers from middle Tennessee. Many were string bands like the Gully Jumpers; among the solo performers were fiddler Uncle Jimmy Thompson, black harmonica virtuoso DeFord Bailey, and rollicking elderly singer and banjo strummer Uncle Dave Macon. With the powerful WSM signal, the Opry’s popularity expanded nationwide throughout the 1930s.

  Glenn found two new musical heroes on the Opry. One was Roy Acuff. An east Tennessee singer and fiddler, the onetime baseball player turned medicine-show performer had developed a powerful singing voice performing at venues that often lacked microphones. He’d worked around Knoxville since 1934. A 1938 guest performance on the Opry led WSM to invite the thirty-five-year-old singer and his band to join the show that year. Acuff quickly became the Opry’s preeminent personality. Propelled to national stardom, he and his Smoky Mountain Boys had an unforgettable dynamic: his fiddling and rough-edged, deeply emotional vocals were accompanied by a raw, traditional string ensemble. Mixing secular numbers like his signature song “Wabash Cannonball” with gospel favorites like “The Great Speckled Bird” earned him a huge following across the country.

  The Opry welcomed Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys in 1939. Monroe, a singer-mandolinist from Rosine, Kentucky, had already achieved considerable success with his guitarist brother Charlie as the Monroe Brothers, a close-harmony vocal duet. When the brothers parted ways, Bill devised a new, dynamic approach to string-band music with his group, centered around a strong backbeat, intense high-harmony vocals, aggressive fiddle solos, and his own fiery mandolin playing. Glenn was captivated by the fervor in Acuff’s voice and by both Monroe’s eerie high tenor vocals and the Blue Grass Boys’ sound, tighter than that of Acuff’s musicians. If things were calm on Saturday nights, Glenn would crawl into bed next to his parents to listen, asking them, if he dozed off, to wake him if Acuff or Monroe came on. Soon he had fantasies about his own Opry stardom, telling anyone who would listen about this seemingly impossible goal.

  Sixteen-year-old Helen departed the Jones household in the fall of 1938. She’d met twenty-year-old Wayvard Thomas “Dub” Scroggins, a farmer from Kerens, Texas, northwest of the Thicket and not far from Dallas. He knew about old man Jones and his abuse and when he beat Helen yet again, an infuriated Dub solved the problem by marrying her in Saratoga on October 21, 1938. The couple, who would have five kids of their own, would remain a positive touchstone in George Glenn’s turbulent life. Known for ingenuity and earthy common sense, Dub became a lifelong hero to George.

  GLENN’S LIFE WAS NOT ALL HYMNS, THE OPRY, AND BEATINGS. HE BECAME A rambunctious kid who developed a sly, ornery sense of humor he carried into adulthood. His older brother Herman and his wife, Evalina, lived nearby; when her husband was away, Evalina, fearing the hobos who roamed the area, rapping on doors begging for money and food, kept their screen door latched. Knowing this, Glenn would tease her by rattling the door and uttering hobolike requests. Sober or drunk, he played similar tricks on family and friends for decades, and some of his fellow country stars weren’t exempt from them.

  The Joneses departed Saratoga in 1940 for the larger Thicket town of Kountze (pronounced Koontz), northeast of Saratoga. It had a railroad stop that gave the family greater freedom to travel. They could take a train to visit Beaumont, the port city built around oil development, shipping, and shipbuilding connected to the Gulf of Mexico by a large ship channel. Clara found the First Gospel Tabernacle in Kountze, pastored by the Pentecostal evangelical team of Wilbertine Burl Stephen, known as Brother Burl, and his singing, guitar-playing wife, Annie Pharris Stephen, known as Sister Annie, who also taught Sunday school.

  LITTLE GLENN’S ABILITY TO REAR BACK AND INFUSE OLD HYMNS WITH FEELING led the Stephens to take him, with his parents’ approval, along to revival meetings they held throughout the area, at Kountze’s H&H Store, and in other nearby hamlets and larger towns. After Burl did the preaching, Annie would sing hymns Glenn already knew, such as “Canaan’s Land” and “Farther Along.” Since he knew how to drive his daddy’s used vehicles, Glenn wound up educating Burl on the niceties of driving and gear shifting. Singing with Burl and Annie in various settings became basic training for Glenn. It instilled in him the fundamentals of how to project and reach an audience in ways his casual singing or the old man’s command performances never could.

  Glenn had a respite from his family for a couple summers when he visited Helen and Dub’s farm, joined by Ruth and Doris the second year. The Jones family’s days in the area of the Thicket, however, came to an end for an entirely different reason: the Japanese attack on the United States Navy base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

  For impoverished laborers throughout the South still struggling to recover from the Depression, the war offered an escape from poverty. In Texas, Gulf Coast shipyards, gearing up to produce new vessels for the war effort, needed laborers, skilled and otherwise. Though many Texans headed west to California, opportunities nearer home were abundant. The Joneses moved to Beaumont, where, at the venerable Pennsylvania Shipyard, George W found employment that was more secure and lucrative than any jobs he’d done in the Thicket. Formerly the Beaumont Shipping and Drydock Company, it had turned out ships for World War I. The influx of defense workers and their families led to a housing shortage and culture shock for the city as Beaumont’s population quickly rose from 59,000 to 80,000. Around the country, the federal government began building public housing for the newcomers and their families. Beaumont’s huge six-hundred-unit Multimax Village was one such project, created by the Federal Works Agency. While stark and utilitarian, the government-subsidized Multimax apartments had running water and electricity, new amenities to some who settled there.

  At some point in 1942, George W and Clara took Glenn to Jefferson Music, where his daddy bought him a sunburst Gene Autry cowboy guitar. Glenn later put his name on the back of the instrument as “George Jones,” noting his age as eleven. Glenn needed some guidance on playing it, and a better guitar instructor was just a train ride away: Sister Annie. She taught him some basic chords on one of his return trips to Kountze. When he returned for his next visit, she discovered he’d mastered everything she’d taught him and even expanded on it. Glenn had a small library of tunes in his head along with all those ancient hymns. He could sing Acuff or Bill Monroe songs and a myriad of other country songs he heard on the radio. One day, he wandered into downtown Beaumont with his guitar and began singing in front of a penny arcade on Pearl Street. Soon coins were flying into a cup someone put on the ground. When he quit singing two hours later he had twenty-four dollars, a princely sum for an eleven-year-old. He promptly blew it on a meal and in the arcade, but he realized the potential. He continued singing downtown and later set up a shoeshine stand, singing when he was
n’t polishing footwear.

  A kid singing country songs and hymns on the streets was a tranquility Beaumont needed by 1943. The massive and rapid population boom had led to problems. Multimax could not handle all the newcomers, and soon poor whites who’d arrived from rural areas found themselves in a situation they considered unpalatable: coexisting closer to blacks than they ever had in the past. That tension culminated in June when a white woman declared she’d been raped by a black man. The incident sparked rioting, with whites rampaging through black neighborhoods until all available lawmen, the Texas Rangers and the Texas State Guard among them, were brought in to restore order. For one day, June 19, A. M. Aikin, the acting governor of Texas, imposed martial law in Beaumont.

  FORMAL EDUCATION WAS NEVER HIGH ON THE JONES FAMILY’S LIST OF PRIORITIES. Glenn’s report cards were far from acceptable. He had to repeat seventh grade, but the income from singing on the street gave him the incentive to quit school for good. Things at home, however, weren’t much better. Herman had married, and his other sisters were moving on with their lives. Glenn, still at home, had to deal with his daddy’s onslaughts, like the times the old man brought friends home and forced performances from the kids. Clara sometimes left for a while to visit her married children. Glenn did the same, visiting his sisters for a respite. As Glenn grew into his teens, the old man’s meltdowns grew less tolerable, and after one confrontation, he simply headed out of town.

  It’s not clear how he knew Clyde Stephens, a kid who resided in Jasper, Texas, fifty-eight miles northeast of Beaumont, but Glenn took off heading north and looked up Stephens when he arrived in Jasper. Knowing George’s love of music, Stephens introduced him to young Dalton Henderson. The two became fast friends and Glenn wound up living with Henderson and his parents. By his own account, with Clara not around to warn him against such things, Glenn did his first serious drinking there. One bit of partying with some new friends got him four days in the Jasper County jail. Glenn and Dalton bummed rides to sing in bars all around the area. For a while they sang live on Jasper’s KTXJ radio. Glenn’s personality made him a favorite of the Henderson family, although at times he could become as explosive as his daddy. The Jasper interlude lasted only a few months before he decided to move on. Eventually he wound up back in Beaumont, living with family members or friends.

  Eddie and Pearl Stevens were regulars on the club and dance-hall circuit around Beaumont. The middle-aged husband-wife duo were a self-contained act. Eddie sang, strummed guitar, and occasionally blew a harmonica on a wire rack around his neck; Pearl sang and played upright bass. Their repertoire centered around crowd-pleasing, meat-and-potatoes country favorites and hits of the moment. Mondays through Fridays, from 4:05 to 5:00 every afternoon, they hosted a live show over Beaumont’s KRIC radio that also allowed them to promote their upcoming gigs. One night they were performing at Playground Park, a combination of carnival rides and an outdoor honky-tonk, when Glenn, toting a new acoustic guitar with an electric pickup, came in with a buddy. When his friend asked the Stevenses if Glenn could sit in, they were fine with it. In his autobiography, Jones recalled, Eddie “told me what he was going to play, and I must have impressed him because I knew everything he did, which was mostly Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb songs.” George became the couple’s new lead guitar man. They had plenty to do: the radio shows, plus four nights playing the local circuit, including Playground Park. For that, George received $17.50 a week. He continued living where he could, bunking with various musicians wherever he could find someone willing to let him stay. At other times he stayed with Eddie and Pearl.

  FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD LUTHER NALLIE WAS AN ASPIRING GUITARIST WHEN HE first saw George with the Stevenses in 1948, picking guitar and singing occasional harmonies with the couple. As he was with his family, George was still known to many as Glenn. On radio, Nallie remembered, “Every once in a while they’d let George sing. Eddie kind of had his own style. He sang [in] just a normal country voice. Didn’t sound like anybody. Eddie was a good MC. Pearl—she looked older than Eddie—played that bass, very simple. She’d sing ‘Make Room in Your Heart for a Friend.’ When George was playin’ with them, he added a little relief on the instrumental part. Eddie used to call him ‘Glennie Boy.’ He’d say, ‘Now here’s Glennie Boy gonna sing a song for ya!’”

  He generally got on well with the couple, even when Eddie’s drinking at the end of the night sometimes forced Pearl to drive everyone home. Over time, his solo spots started gaining attention among Eddie and Pearl’s fans, Nallie remembered. “They all called him Glenn. They’d say, ‘You know Glenn Jones?’ They loved him. They loved the way he sang.” If there was a conflict, it involved the “kitty” Eddie set up at shows for tips from the crowd, especially for requests. George’s singing earned him his own tips, causing occasional dustups when Eddie pushed him to throw his tips in with the rest. He often flatly, angrily refused.

  As he gained greater stage experience, George found a new idol who, to him, surpassed Acuff and Monroe: Hank Williams. Eight years George’s senior, Williams got started singing around Alabama as a teenager. In those days he busted his ass to emulate Acuff’s emotional vocals and using them as the basis for his own style. Unlike Acuff, Hank also possessed a rare, innate genius for writing simple tunes that conveyed humor, anger, sarcasm, or deep emotional pain. He’d learned the ropes of performing on the radio in Montgomery and in rural Alabama honky-tonks, some so violent he bought the original members of his Drifting Cowboys band blackjacks for self-defense. Occasionally, he sacrificed a guitar on an assailant’s head. While his youthful taste for booze evolved into full-blown alcoholism, in 1946 he had the good fortune to connect with Fred Rose, a veteran pop and country songwriter who’d formed the Acuff-Rose song publishing company with the business-savvy Roy Acuff. Rose, who published Hank’s songs, became a benevolent father figure to the young singer. He got Hank a short-term recording contract with a small New York label, then maneuvered him into a new contract with the larger MGM label and became his producer. The year 1947 brought four hit singles in a row, beginning with “Move It On Over,” followed by “Honky Tonkin’,” “I’m a Long Gone Daddy,” and “Mansion on the Hill,” all Williams originals. That notable start didn’t impress officials at the Opry. Aware of his reputation as an unreliable boozer, the show was reluctant to even offer him a guest shot. Less concerned was Shreveport’s KWKH Louisiana Hayride, a Saturday-night Opry-like stage and radio show launched in April 1948. The Hayride welcomed him as a cast member that August. Randall Hank Williams, Hank and his wife Audrey’s only child, was born in Shreveport in May 1949.

  Hank’s rising fame took a drastic turn after he recorded a song he’d picked up from fellow Alabama singer Rex Griffin. “Lovesick Blues” was a 1920s pop number that Rose saw little value in recording. When an obstinate Hank stood firm, the producer relented. In May 1949, it knocked George Morgan’s ballad “Candy Kisses” out of the No. 1 spot. The single was still riding high when MGM issued a new single May 13: “Wedding Bells,” a ballad that Hank didn’t write. Neville Powell, KRIC’s program director, knew Hank personally, and when Powell heard he was playing Beaumont’s Blue Jean Club, he invited Hank to swing by Eddie and Pearl’s broadcast to promote the new record. For George, it became a life-changing experience: a chance to meet his hero, man to man.

  Hank, advised that George was an Acuff fan, gave the kid a tip or two that George recalled years later. “When he found out that I loved him and was singin’ his songs—you know, someone put it to him I sounded just like him—he said, ‘I’ll tell you. I was a pretty good imitator of Roy Acuff, because he was my favorite, but I soon found out they already had a Roy Acuff, so I started singin’ like myself.’” George, who intended to be at the Blue Jean Club, asked Hank to sing “I Can’t Get You Off of My Mind,” a tune he’d recorded about two years earlier. Hank agreed. The point of the KRIC visit, however, was to promote “Wedding Bells.” He sang it accompanied by Eddie, Pearl, and George. Anxious to play the
song’s guitar intro, George was disappointed when Hank barreled right into the vocal. Any disappointment was mitigated that night when about midway through the show, George remembered, “He said, ‘I want to do this song for a young man, George Jones, who wanted to hear it’ . . . and I just couldn’t believe it.” Hank achieved his own goal on June 11. Invited to the Opry as a guest, his showstopping performance of “Lovesick Blues” landed him a place in the Opry family.

  George, after the better part of two years with the Stevenses, was ready to perform on his own in 1949, working the same clubs he’d played with Eddie and Pearl. He picked up his own lead guitar man: Luther Nallie, now fifteen. “He was really a very nice person,” Nallie said. “He always wanted to be a singer. He was what he was; he never did change what he was. I’ll say to this day he was the best country singer I ever heard. Of course he . . . loved to sing Hank Williams songs. He liked Acuff and he liked Lefty Frizzell . . . George could imitate some of those guys.”

  The two had one minor point of contention. George had never studied guitar beyond the simplest licks and chords. When Nallie, who’d learned to play the complex, jazzy western-swing guitar favored by bandleaders like Bob Wills and Cliff Bruner, played rhythm behind George, it sometimes led to oil-and-water moments onstage. “I’d make one of them jazz chords, and George’d go, ‘What was that funny sound?’ Our playin’ was a little out of phase, but at that time, we needed each other. I needed a job and he needed me. And we made it through. I was young but every now and then I’d sip on a beer and we’d be ridin’ along somewhere, and we’d go to singin’ and we’d do it sometimes out playin’. George used to like ‘Maple on the Hill.’ We did it high [in harmony] and he had me singin’ that high part to it.”