Copyright © 2008 by The Grand Ole Opry®, Gaylord Entertainment
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First eBook Edition: October 2008
ISBN: 978-1-599951-84-3
Contents
1: Johnny and June
2: The Stringbean Murders
3: A Lesson in Leavin’
4: Barbara and Ken
5: Tribulation and Triumph
6: It’s All Relative
7: Fatherhood First
8: Garth and Trisha
9: Loretta and Doo
10: No-Show Jones
11: An Opry “Curse”
12: Gentleman Jim
13: Dolly’s Mystery Man
14: Marty’s Greatest Treasure
15: Vince and Amy
16: Funny Love
17: For the Rest of Mine
18: Small-Town Gals
19: It Takes Two
20: Some Memories Just Won’t Die
21: Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young, and Leave a Beautiful Memory
22: The Houston Cowboy and the Hollywood Star
23: Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’
24: A Woman’s Love
25: Broken Duets
26: Outlaw’s Prayer
27: Pure Love
28: The Red-Headed Stranger
29: Dating at the Opry
30: The Harmonica Wizard
31: Sure Love
32: Behind Every Great Man . . .
33: The Tragedy of Country Music’s King
Sources
ALSO BY THE GRAND OLE OPRY:
The Grand Ole Opry: The Making of an American Icon
Around the Opry Table: A Feast of Recipes and Stories from the Grand Ole Opry
AVAILABLE FROM CENTER STREET WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD.
The Grand Ole Opry has always had that special something that separates it from every other form of American entertainment: its people.
This book is dedicated to the dreamers who, for going on a century, have made their way to the Opry stage, aspiring to lend their voices to the Opry’s song. Country music’s home has been built upon their dreams, their performances, and their undying commitment.
This book is dedicated as well to those in the pews, cars, and living rooms around the world who have dropped by or tuned in over that same course of time, sharing in the Opry dream while laughing and clapping along.
Indeed, the Opry is set apart by its people. Good people.
AUTHOR’S DEDICATION
To my wife, Mary Bufwack, who is as big a
Grand Ole Opry fan as I am.
1
Johnny and June
The Cash family moved to County Road 3, Box 238, in Dyess, Arkansas’ Mississippi County in March 1935. Not long afterward, the family acquired its first battery-powered radio. Musical shows beamed from big cities like Memphis, Chicago, Cincinnati, and Nashville fascinated son Johnny—then known simply as J. R.—as did the radio dramas, serials, and comedies. Radio was theater of the mind, he would later recall.
“I scanned the radio dial when I was a little kid on the cotton farm in Arkansas,” he once said. “And it was the most wonderful, magical thing in the world to be able to turn that dial and hear different singers in different places.”
He vividly remembered how exciting Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry broadcast over WSM sounded to him. At the time, its brightest stars included banjo-whacking Uncle Dave Macon, fiddle virtuoso Arthur Smith, the close-harmony team of The Delmore Brothers, Pee Wee King’s uptown Golden West Cowboys band, and the show’s newest sensation, mountain singer Roy Acuff.
In 1938, when J. R. was six years old, the set began to pick up the sounds of The Carter Family broadcasting over XERA, one of the superpowerful Mexican-border stations. Country music’s founding family was from the mountains of Virginia and consisted of A. P. Carter, his wife Sara, who sang lead and played the autoharp, and sister-in-law Maybelle, who sang the tenor harmony and played lead guitar and was married to A. P.’s brother Ezra. If the sprit moved him, A. P. would chime in with a baritone vocal.
The family’s repertoire would become country music’s bedrock. “Keep on the Sunny Side,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “Wabash Cannonball,” “Hello Stranger,” “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” “I Never Will Marry,” and “Wildwood Flower” were all popularized by the trio. Its “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes” became the melody for three future country classics, “The Great Speckled Bird,” “The Wild Side of Life,” and “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.”
But little Johnny Cash knew only that those songs gripped him. For the rest of his life, he would turn to the Carter repertoire for inspiration.
“The simplicity of deliverance and the performance in those songs was like my life, you know? Things were pretty cut and dried, black and white, straight ahead. That’s the way The Carter Family came at you, right in the face. And it felt good. I loved that kind of music all my life. That kind of music has always been my cup of tea.”
MAYBELLE AND EZRA CARTER brought their three daughters—Helen, June, and Anita—to the Mexican border in 1939. Sara and A. P. brought their children Janette and Joe. The kids were expected to stand on their own, musically. Anita and Janette were the best singers. Helen and Joe were the best guitarists. But ten-year-old tomboy Valerie June Carter didn’t measure up in either department.
“Well, the Mexican border stations would have been an adventure for anybody,” June reflected years later. “It was for me. I’m a simple little girl that has always lived in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. Mother Maybelle, Uncle A. P., and Aunt Sara were very active on border radio. And then they offered us a job, if any of the children could sing. So my mother came home and within about a week’s time, I think, taught me to sing. Because I had no idea how to sing.
“Janette could sing. Helen and Anita could sing. I mean, they had kind of perfect pitch at the time. And I’m the one they’re looking at like I’m a snake, like they don’t know whether I could sing or not. But I did learn to play the autoharp, and I could play the tenor guitar. And so we went, as these little children.”
Even at seventy, June Carter could remember the commercials she wrote and recited for Kolorbak hair dye, Peruna tonic, and the other products she sold over the airwaves. The sister trio sang tunes like “Beautiful Brown Eyes” and “Chime Bells,” while June’s solo repertoire included such sprightly fare as Stephen Foster’s “Oh Susannah” or an autoharp instrumental on “Engine 143.” She also became a skillful comic.
“Uncle A. P. was the one who encouraged me. He would say, ‘Well, we could use a little comedy. You need to do some kind of joke.’” June also recalled being shocked at the size of her listening audience on XERA.
“The room was full of bushel baskets of mail, and I thought, ‘These are an awful lot of letters somebody’s got to answer.’ And I looked, and they were all to The Carter Family!”
Johnny Cash was listening intently. So were the children who became Buck Owens, Waylon Jennings, and Tom T. Hall.
But the homey “family” those boys were hearing wasn’t real. Sara had left A. P. in 1933, divorced him in 1936, and married
his cousin Coy Bayes in 1939. Although the couple continued to record and broadcast together, this strained situation would eventually tear the group apart. After the 1940 season on the Mexican border station, the group traveled to broadcast over WBT in Charlotte, North Carolina.
“We were working there live every morning, and it was kind of a strained situation,” June remembered. “My Uncle A. P. and Aunt Sara had been divorced, and Aunt Sara had remarried. And I think it was maybe painful for both of them.
“So we came back to the Valley for just a little bit [in 1943]. My father bought Helen an accordion. I kept playing autoharp. For my sister Anita he bought a big bass fiddle. Mother was playing guitar. And we decided, well, we would just continue on and see if we could do our own radio program.”
Mother Maybelle & The Carter Sisters were hired by station WRNL in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1944. Two years later, they graduated to the cast of the Old Dominion Barn Dance on the same city’s WRVA. In 1948, they moved to Knoxville for work on WNOX. There, they picked up guitarist Chet Atkins as a sideman.
“My father said, ‘He’s absolutely gonna be the best guitar player that’s ever been.’ So we had a vote—Mother, Helen, Anita, and Daddy and I—and we voted to ask Chet if he would come to be a part of our group. So we hired Chet Atkins.”
During a 1949 stint at KWTO in Springfield, Missouri, June Carter scored a major hit by teaming with comics Homer & Jethro on the delightful “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” At this point, the troupe was quite an attraction, boasting the silvery soprano of Anita, Maybelle and Chet’s dazzling instrumental work, the beauty of the three sisters, June’s comedic shenanigans, and creamy female harmony vocals on folk, pop, country, and gospel tunes. The act was invited to join the cast of the Grand Ole Opry in 1950.
“The Opry was a magic place that was my home,” June remarked. “I couldn’t do any wrong on that stage. It didn’t matter. I just did these corny old jokes, but I always felt loved there.”
As fate would have it, 1950 was also the year that Johnny Cash first visited the legendary show. He never forgot what he saw that night.
“We took our senior trip in 1950 from Dyess High School, and one of the stops was the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday night in Nashville,” Johnny recalled with a smile. “And I was sittin’ up in the balcony, in the middle of the left balcony of the Ryman Auditorium with my class, all in there together in two rows.
“And there she was, down onstage. Little Jimmy Dickens and June Carter, that’s all I remember. I said, ‘One of these days, I’m gonna get her autograph.’”
June always claimed that the then-eighteen-year-old Johnny also vowed, “Some day I’m going to marry that girl.” And maybe he did. At any rate, he graduated, joined the air force, married Vivian Liberto, and began his own music career in Memphis.
Mother Maybelle & The Carter Sisters became one of the Opry’s most popular and lucrative concert attractions. Anita had big hit duets with fellow Opry star Hank Snow in 1951. A year later, The Carters were chosen to travel to New York for the Opry’s network television debut, on The Kate Smith Show.
“I think it was a big deal, or it felt like it at the time. That was the very first time that I think anyone from the Grand Ole Opry had ever appeared on network television—Hank Williams and Roy Acuff and Helen, Anita, Mother and I, and Chet. Television was big. It had just started, so it was really interesting and unusual. We had been used to workin’ for five thousand people, but we hadn’t been on network TV doin’ it.”
They toured with Opry superstar Hank Williams, who swore he would never follow “those Carter broads.” So they always closed the shows.
“He was a sweet man,” June said wistfully. “I thought a lot of Hank, and he thought a lot of my family. But he was tortured and had a very bad kind of chemical problem. Anita and I tried hard to manage Hank. But we couldn’t. Hank could be funny. But when he was ‘using,’ it was so painful for my sisters and me.” Within a year of the TV appearance, Hank would be dead.
June married the handsome Grand Ole Opry star Carl Smith in 1952. The couple recorded the 1953 duets “Love Oh Crazy Love” and “Time’s a Wastin’.” Daughter Carlene was born in 1955, but the marriage soon unraveled.
“I was very happy being in the country-music business, but I was very unhappy in my personal life. I had gotten divorced, and it was a very painful thing for me.
“And so I kind of ran away. I was handled by Colonel Tom Parker at that time. And so I went on the road doing shows with Elvis, because it was something for me to hide behind.
“Elvis had a big crush on Anita, but then he got a crush on me. Elvis got a crush on whoever was handy. It was just his thing. He liked women. I decided I wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole. Lord only knows where he’d been. He was a sexy man who really thought he could have any woman that he saw. But he couldn’t, and I think that was a big shock to his ego.”
While on tour opening shows for Elvis, June was spotted by screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who alerted film director Elia Kazan to her talents. Kazan arranged for June to take acting lessons in New York in 1955–1956. She subsequently appeared in such TV dramas as Wagon Train, Bonanza, Jim Bowie, and Gunsmoke. She continued to commute to Nashville for Opry appearances.
MEANWHILE, SHORTLY AFTER MARRYING Vivian in 1954, Johnny approached Sun Records owner Sam Phillips about making records in Memphis. Sam auditioned Johnny toward the end of the year. Johnny and Vivian’s daughter Rosanne was born in 1955, and a month later “Cry, Cry, Cry” / “Hey Porter” was released as his debut single. It hit the charts in November. In February 1956, “Folsom Prison Blues” / “So Doggone Lonesome” entered the charts. It became his first top-ten hit. Shortly after the birth of his second daughter, Kathy, “I Walk the Line” began storming up the charts in the summer of 1956. Johnny figured it was time to come knocking on the Opry’s door.
“When I came to appear on the Grand Ole Opry the first time, I waited two hours out in the waiting room before the manager of the Opry [Jim Denny] finally said, ‘Come on in.’ He looked at my black clothes and long hair and sideburns and said, ‘What makes you think you belong on the Grand Ole Opry?’ So I said, ‘Well, I’ve got a record in the top-ten best sellers’—which was ‘Folsom Prison Blues’—I said, ‘I think they’d like to hear me.’”
Johnny Cash made his Grand Ole Opry debut on July 7, 1956. He was introduced, coincidentally, by Carl Smith, who called Johnny “the brightest rising star of country music.”
Reporter Ben A. Green wrote in The Nashville Banner newspaper, “He had a quiver in his voice, but it wasn’t stage fright. The haunting words of ‘I Walk the Line’ began to swell through the building. And a veritable tornado of applause rolled back. The boy had struck home, where the heart is, with his song that is Number 2 in the nation today. As his words filtered into the farthermost corners, many in the crowd were on their feet, cheering and clapping. They too had taken a new member into the family.”
Elvis Presley had just ended his nine-week stay at the top of the pop charts with “Heartbreak Hotel,” his first number-one hit. The newspaper article added, “He’ll be better than Presley because Johnny’s a true country singer, and Presley isn’t and never has been.” Even so, there was some unease backstage about the punch and rockabilly rhythm in the stark Johnny Cash sound.
There was something else backstage—or rather, someone. Just as he’d promised, he got June Carter’s autograph.
“The first time I went to the Grand Ole Opry, she asked me for some of my records. The next Saturday night, I brought them to her and got an autographed picture from her. Gave her my autographed records, two of ’em.”
In a photo taken not long after their Opry meeting, June looks ravishing, wearing a dress with a figure-flattering bodice featuring cap sleeves and a plunging V neckline. Her full skirt, fashionable accessories, and coiffed hair all look just perfect. Johnny, dressed in a white jacket with dark piping, kneels at her side, looking up at the camera with a shy expres
sion.
“The first time I ever saw him was backstage at the Grand Ole Opry,” June recalled. “He told me later that night that he knew he was going to marry me. The second time I met him, he was with Vivian, his wife, but he told me later that he knew then that ‘If there was any possibility that God would allow me to, I am still going to marry you some day.’ And I had never even worked with him!”
In his 1997 autobiography, Johnny reported that her response to his prediction was a laugh. “Well, good,” she wisecracked. “I can’t wait.”
June moved back to Nashville in 1957. She met and married Rip Nix, who later became a local police officer. Their daughter Rosey was born in 1958.
In 1961, the Cash family—which had welcomed two more daughters, Cindy and Tara—moved to California. Johnny, by then with Columbia Records, continued to record in Nashville and remained a frequent guest at the Opry.
He also continued to be smitten with June Carter. Well aware of the fact, his manager arranged for her to be a guest star at a Johnny Cash concert in Dallas on December 5, 1961. That night, Johnny asked her to join his road show. She agreed and became a member of the troupe on February 11, 1962, in Des Moines.
By the 1960s, Johnny Cash was deeply into substance abuse, downing amphetamines in massive quantities. Already an imposing “Man in Black,” his wild mood swings could make him utterly terrifying to June. She was afraid she was witnessing the Hank Williams tragedy all over again. Almost equally frightening to her was that she was falling in love with him.
“There is a depth to John that is spiritual as well as sexual,” she believed. “I think I felt like I was in a ‘Ring of Fire’ at the time.”
Cowritten by June and Merle Kilgore, “Ring of Fire” topped the charts in 1963, remained at number one for seven consecutive weeks, and became her biggest success as a songwriter.
One fall night in 1965, Johnny arrived at the Ryman Auditorium for an Opry show practically out of his mind. In a now-infamous incident, Johnny became enraged when he fumbled with the microphone. He dragged the mic stand across the front of the stage, smashing the footlights and showering those in the front row with broken glass.
Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain Page 1