by Rich Kienzle
Daily came up with an impressive list of local honky-tonk talent: Smilin’ Jerry Jericho, Eddie Noack, Hank Locklin, and, from Shreveport, Louisiana, Webb Pierce. His amiable, supportive nature led Locklin to nickname him Pappy, but relations between Daily and McCall turned less cordial. McCall’s reputation for not paying people applied to Pappy’s efforts as well. He never got a dime for his Four Star production work or expenses. When they parted ways, Pappy could add record production to his extensive music portfolio. The only Four Star employee in California he got along with was Don Pierce, also no McCall admirer.
Exactly how Starns and Daily connected isn’t completely clear, but they were planning Starday by 1952. Having jumped ship at Four Star, Pierce, still in LA, helped the partners create the Starday Recording and Publishing Company with a music publishing company known as Starrite. Billboard’s June 27, 1953, edition announced the new label, identifying the founders as “well known c & w manager Jack Starns, Jr., and his wife, Neva.” After Starday’s first three singles, one of them by Crawford and the Cherokees, were ignored, fortunes suddenly changed when Jack and Neva discovered Arlie Duff. The twenty-nine-year-old Warren, Texas, schoolteacher, songwriter, and singer had a raw, nasal voice and a number of original tunes including the exuberant “Y’All Come,” inspired by a phrase his grandmother used. Starns recorded Duff, accompanied by the Cherokees, at a Houston studio. Soon after the late 1953 release of “Y’All Come,” it became Starday’s first national Top 10 country single. The song’s stature grew when Bing Crosby’s cover version reached the pop Top 20.
Starns had set up a makeshift studio in his home. Some recall it located in the living room; others in an enclosed back porch. He purchased a Magnecord portable tape recorder and microphones and fastened egg cartons to the walls to deaden the sound. His fourteen-year-old son Bill would work the recorder, flipping a light switch on and off to signal the singers and musicians when to begin and end a take, a quick and dirty way of getting records done and ensuring a steady flow of releases. By year’s end, George Jones, back on the local honky-tonk circuit, was ready to record.
HE AND HIS GUITAR ARRIVED AT THE STARNS HOME ONE DAY IN JANUARY 1954. The Western Cherokees were there to back him, although Jimmy Biggar had replaced Bobby Black, who’d returned to California. Also at the session was Big Thicket native Gordon Baxter, a local broadcaster and author who chronicled the Thicket and had his own musical aspirations. George brought five original songs: “No Money in This Deal,” “For Sale or Lease,” “Play It Cool,” “You’re in My Heart,” and “If You Were Mine.” After working out loose arrangements and making sure everyone was ready, Bill Starns hit the light switch. George kicked off “No Money,” the Cherokees falling in behind him, Burney Annett energetically pounding the piano as fiddler Little Red Hayes played rhythmic double-stops. George’s animated vocal wasn’t quite enough to mask his nervousness. It was a start, but not a terribly good novelty song. Even a shout-out to twin sisters Joyce and Loyce couldn’t save it.
It was glaringly apparent on the remaining numbers that the advice Hank Williams gave George about finding his own style had gone out the window. The wry “Play It Cool” and the ballad “You’re in My Heart” were blatant Hank imitations, with Biggar reproducing the high-register licks of Hank’s longtime steel player Don Helms. On “For Sale or Lease” and “If You Were Mine,” George unabashedly channeled Lefty, and Biggar imitated the steel-guitar flourishes Jim Kelly had made a trademark on Lefty’s early hits. The egg crates may have helped dampen the echo, but they didn’t filter all outside sounds. George recalled hearing eighteen-wheelers flying north and south on Voth Road during the session.
Starday wasted no time trying to generate interest. Billboard’s January 23 “Folk Talent and Tunes” section announced George and Baxter had been signed (no Baxter recording was ever released). When “No Money” was released, the March 6 issue, ignoring the technical flaws, declared, “Lively country novelty has a good catch-phrase.” “You’re in My Heart” elicited a more accurate evaluation: “Country weeper derives directly from the Hank Williams school . . . Jones belts it out with fair effectiveness,” essentially (and justifiably) damning the performance with faint praise.
When George met Pappy in person, the old man asked him to sing some other material. He obliged, invoking all his musical heroes, which led to Daily posing a now immortal question, worded slightly differently depending on the source:
“George, you’ve sung like Roy Acuff, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams, and Bill Monroe. Can you sing like George Jones?”
“I don’t understand,” George cluelessly responded. “Those guys are who I like.”
Finding his own singing style may not have been his priority at the moment, yet George, elated to have a record out, visited local radio stations with copies of “No Money.” Dropping by KLTW in nearby Pasadena, Texas, he asked disc jockey “Tater” Pete Hunter to play it. Hunter obliged without comment. Off the air, George asked Hunter what he thought. Hunter wasn’t impressed. George, not offended, kept the comment in mind.
Starday wasn’t enough for Jack and Pappy. With weekly barn-dance stage and radio shows like the Opry and Hayride going strong around the country, on March 13, 1954, they launched the Grand Prize Houston Jamboree. Broadcast from City Auditorium over KNUZ radio and TV, the sponsor was Grand Prize Beer, a product of Houston’s Gulf Brewery, founded by industrialist Howard Hughes. Among the cast: Hank Locklin and the rest of the Starday roster—Blackie Crawford and the Cherokees, George, Arlie Duff, Sonny Burns, and Patsy Elshire. George’s exuberant performances made him one of the show’s more popular acts. When he wasn’t working honky-tonks and dance halls, he earned extra money accompanying other Starday singers, contributing a flat-picked acoustic solo on Duff’s recording of the traditional “Salty Dog.”
In May 1954, nineteen-year-old Houston-born John Bush Shinn III, later known as Johnny Bush, was living in San Antonio. He was visiting Houston to see his uncle, Smilin’ Jerry Jericho, the popular local singer Pappy recorded for Four Star in the late forties. More recently Jericho had recorded for Starday, and was en route to perform at the Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Festival in Meridian, Mississippi. Before they headed east, Jericho and his nephew stopped by City Auditorium, where Jericho was to play the Jamboree.
“I saw this young man who was literally tearin’ the crowd up. He would bounce out there and do about five lines of a song and just walk off. And people would just scream and holler and do everything but tear the seats up. I thought, ‘Who in the world is this?’ I’ve never seen anything like it. At that time, he was apin’ Lefty Frizzell and Jimmy Newman. He hadn’t quite gotten into his own yet, but it was phenomenal how he was goin’ over, and I said, ‘Man, this guy has got to go!’ He was knockin’ people out. He was getting standing ovations. He’d sing a few lines of a song, leave the microphone, run back into the wings, and they’d have to bring him back. He never would finish a song. He had ’em in the palm of his hand and he knew it.”
Backstage, Bush asked Tommy Hill, the Western Cherokees’ guitarist, about the young singer.
“That’s George Jones,” Hill replied. After the show, Bush accompanied Jericho to a gig at Cook’s Hoedown. “George come down after the show, and that’s when my uncle introduced me to him. He came down there and sat at a table with a friend, didn’t get up to sing.”
GEORGE FOUND A NEW BEST FRIEND AT THE JAMBOREE: GALVESTON NATIVE and Starday artist Clyde Burns Jr., known to all as Sonny. A year older than George, he first gained attention around Houston. He signed to Starday, and his energetic rendition of “Too Hot to Handle” did well enough for Starns and Daily to take a greater interest. With “Y’All Come” now yesterday’s hit, Sonny’s records began catching on regionally while George’s languished. Thinking Sonny’s stronger sales might boost George’s visibility, Pappy teamed them for harmony duets on “Heartbroken Me” and “Wrong About You.”
While their duet singles sputtered and died, the Burns-
Jones camaraderie did not. The bottle became common ground. “George didn’t need any encouragement on the drinking,” Starday and Jamboree artist Patsy Elshire told Andrew Brown. But the George-Sonny bond seemed to kick George’s boozing into overdrive. When he and Sonny began working together, George got a better perspective on the Houston club scene. As he drank harder, the results began reflecting George W. Jones at his worst: paranoid, aggressive, and belligerent. George’s diminutive stature and height of five foot seven didn’t prevent him from squaring off with anyone of any size he thought was getting on his case.
One night at Lola’s and Shorty’s, it nearly got him killed.
George was onstage with a fiddler when he spied a solitary man in the crowd. Being two car payments behind, he sensed the stranger’s reason for being there. On a break, George confronted the man, who admitted what George suspected: he was there to repossess the car. George proceeded to pound the shit out of him. Landing punch after punch, he didn’t see his adversary pull the razor that sliced through George’s leather jacket into his torso. He didn’t realize he was bleeding until two of his friends yanked the man off and pummeled him. George left in an ambulance; it took ninety stitches to close the lengthy wound.
With monthly support payments a priority and income from singing in joints anything but steady, George began spinning records fifty-five minutes a day over at KTRM in Beaumont. The radio station was as much frat house as radio station, where on-air pranks between staff were common. George, anything but a polished personality, habitually broke reel-to-reel tapes and mispronounced words when he read commercial scripts on the air. The job allowed him to advertise his upcoming local appearances. Johnny Bush, who heard him on KTRM, remembered him imitating Simon Crum, singer Ferlin Husky’s comedic hillbilly alter ego. “Between records, he would ape Simon Crum. He would do that laugh and you’d swear he was Simon.” George found another new buddy in the station’s top personality: beefy twenty-four-year-old Jiles Perry Richardson, from Sabine Pass, south of Beaumont. Like George, Richardson had lived in Multimax as a kid and knew his way around a guitar. During high school he parlayed a part-time KTRM announcing job into full-time employment.
Moving around East Texas and the Gulf Coast, with and without Sonny, George found honky-tonks had a different status depending on the area. In rural East Texas, there were never a ton of them. Texas music researcher Andrew Brown points out that in Baptist areas, cities and counties (including the Thicket) were dry. In other places, honky-tonks were relegated to the outskirts of town. One exception: Port Arthur, where the heavily Catholic (and Cajun) population meant bars and clubs weren’t pushed to the city limits. That also wasn’t a problem in Houston. George was playing at a honky-tonk known as Amma Dee’s on Canal Street in late August or early September 1954 when he stopped by a nearby Prince’s drive-in. In business since 1934, Prince’s was, and remains, a beloved local chain known for burgers—and carhops. He set eyes on one: eighteen-year-old Shirley Ann Corley of Tenaha, Texas, north of the Thicket.
Shirley came to Houston that summer to escape rural poverty. After her father, Bryan Corley, died in a railroad accident, her mother remarried to a man who farmed and did little else. After high school graduation, she headed for the city for the summer, expecting to return home and marry her steady boyfriend from high school. When that relationship fell apart, she signed on at Prince’s. George urged her to come see him at the club. They married on September 14. The flames of youthful romance initially blinded both as they entered what for George was his second square-peg-round-hole relationship. Throughout their fourteen-year marriage, Shirley could never fully accept her husband’s unyielding commitment to his career. She wasn’t pleased when he insisted they relocate from Houston to Beaumont, where cheaper housing was easily found. They moved into a one-story home at 2650½ Magnolia Street. Beaumont’s city directory listed him not as an entertainer or singer, but as an announcer at KTRM. Between that salary, income from the honky-tonks, and what he was paid for playing the Jamboree, he cobbled together a living.
Starday had a publicity shot of George that showed him with slicked-back hair, most of it covered by a white cowboy hat, wearing a light-colored embroidered western shirt. Every Starday act had such photos, even those whose records, like his, made few if any waves. The real turbulence involved Starday’s cofounders and their diverging perspectives about the company. Starns, ever the manager-promoter, felt as he did at the start: the label was a marketing tool for whatever act or acts he managed. Daily, supported by Pierce, who assumed the title of president and handled the business affairs from LA, sensed the label was set for growth. Starns and Neva were about to divorce. Starns, who’d had his ups and downs in the business, finally opted to abandon his music interests, selling his half of Starday to Pappy. His daughter told Starday authority Nate Gibson her father declared, “I’ve had enough of these hillbillies!” After the divorce, Starns remarried and began retailing mobile homes in the Deep South. Neva moved to Springfield, Missouri, home of the Ozark Jubilee, and continued to manage acts.
With Pappy and Pierce running Starday, Pappy still produced records around Houston. He had access to better recording facilities thanks to a backdoor investment in Bill Quinn’s Gold Star Studio in Houston, originally a homegrown operation similar to the Starns living room setup. George and other Starday acts recorded there. He remained popular on the Jamboree, yet record sales continued to lag, his vocals enthusiastic but still too imitative. He may have wanted his own voice, but he kept on invoking his heroes when he sang.
George became fast friends with Frankie Miller, a singer and Columbia recording artist from Victoria, Texas, who joined the Jamboree cast sometime in early 1955. George’s stage presence also impressed him. “The people really liked him from the first time I saw him. They used to encore him on that show. He’d sing some of the things he had out, but he would sing other songs, and man, they would just love him.” George kept the crowds laughing with self-deprecating wisecracks. Miller remembered the time George had a barber buzz his slicked down hair, returning to the haircut he sported in the marines. “He would come out with that flattop and say, ‘I got this flattop. You all can see my big ears now!’” Miller took special note of George’s physical approach to singing. “He would kind of bow his legs [and crane his neck] and kind of grit—sing through his teeth a lot, with his mouth almost shut.” Alcohol, Miller recalled, didn’t interfere with George’s performances at that point. “We worked at a lot of clubs together. He was always good. I never saw him when he couldn’t do a show. I’ve seen him so damn drunk almost that he couldn’t hardly walk. And he would get out onstage and sing like a damn mockingbird. No matter how much drink he had, he’d get that guitar and sing. Of course, after the show, down in the dressing room, he’d be drunker than hell, but he never missed a show when I was with him.”
For club work, George had a band: steel guitarist R.C. Martin, guitarist Donnie Broussard, drummer Lennie Benoit, and pianist Pee Wee Altenberry. They generally carried no bass unless Raymond Nallie, Luther’s brother, sat in. “If it had a Falstaff [beer] sign, we played there,” Martin recalled. “There was the Super 73 Club in Winnie. We never did play [in Beaumont] at Yvonne’s with him or the Blue Jean Club. Smaller clubs. There used to be a lot of them. Played in Louisiana. Just around that area there. Sundays, we played out in a drive-in theater on a flatbed truck. That was a job we had for quite a while with him. He often played four hours at a clip.”
Like most regional singers playing local clubs, George couldn’t pay his sidemen much. Martin remembered how the musicians wrangled a two-dollar raise when they played the Super 73 Club, thanks to Raymond Nallie. “George was payin’ us ten dollars, which was [union] scale,” Martin said. “He was makin’ pretty good money . . . about one hundred or a little better a night. When we drove up, Raymond was outside. He says, ‘Stop right here. Don’t go in. Don’t take a step in.’ We said, ‘What’s the matter?’ He said, ‘He’s gonna pay us twelve doll
ars a night, or we’re not gonna play.’ George come out and him and Raymond argued around for a while and he said, ‘Okay, I’ll pay you twelve dollars a night.’ And we went and played the job.”
George bought a used 1951 Packard to get to gigs, complete with his name and label painted below the chrome trim, along with BMT. TEX and a phone number. Luther Nallie rode with him on one job. “George came by to pick me up after he got that contract with Starday. He bought him a Packard from some used-car dealer and it was kind of a bright purple and he had all the way across in yellow letters, GEORGE JONES . . . STARDAY RECORDING ARTIST. He came by and picked me up in that thing. He thought that was really something.”
George in those days was still a man of the Thicket, holding on to the mind-sets and prejudices he grew up with.
“I was in San Antone on a show he did,” Frankie Miller remembered, “and a young black guy come back to the drinkin’ fountain! George said, ‘You can’t drink there! Get the hell away from there!’ Run his ass away from that drinkin’ fountain.” Over time, his views would evolve, not unlike those of Johnny Cash and other singers raised in the Deep South. “We were raised like that,” Johnny Bush commented, “and we had to get over it.”
His redemption on records came through an old Thicket pal and amateur poet: Darrell Edwards. Twelve years older than George, they knew each other in Saratoga. Edwards served in the Coast Guard, heard about George’s singing, and reconnected with him. The two would begin kicking ideas around. He gave George a wry, catchy number titled “Why, Baby, Why” with enough potential that it also impressed Pappy. George, who added some ideas of his own, got a cowriter credit. He took it to his next date at Gold Star in the summer of 1955. Some accounts indicate Sonny Burns was expected at the session—since Pappy saw “Why, Baby, Why” as a George-Sonny duet—and that George overdubbed vocal harmonies after Sonny, likely on a drunk, didn’t show.