Cowboy star Tex Ritter (1905–1974) introduced Stringbean on that last Opry show. “Since being on Hee Haw, his price has gone up and his pantaloons have gone down a little,” Tex quipped. He later recalled, “I had to bring him back for an encore. A lot of young people were screaming.”
Over the years, backstage, several of the show’s cast members had cautioned Stringbean about his habit of carrying large amounts of cash. At the Ryman that night, comic Oscar Sullivan’s wife spoke with Estelle about it.
“One time, I saw him with five or six thousand dollars,” recalled Opry star Bill Carlisle. “I told him someone might see it and hurt him or steal it.”
Bill Carlisle, Tex Ritter, Oscar Sullivan, Porter Wagoner, The Willis Brothers, Ben Smathers, Bill Anderson, Dolly Parton, Roy Acuff, and other members of the Opry cast gathered for the funeral on November 13, 1973. So did more than six hundred onlookers. The news media, understandably in a frenzy about the awful crime, were there in full force, asking the Opry stars about the man they mourned.
“He lived to make people laugh, and he did just that,” said Grandpa Jones.
“I never heard him say a cuss word,” remarked Bill Monroe, the man who had brought Stringbean to the Opry stage. “Everyone will miss him. He gave everybody a lot of laughs, you know.”
Stringbean and Estelle were buried in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. The graves of country greats Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas, Randy Hughes, and Jack Anglin are nearby. All of them had also died violently.
The sadness at the Opry continued for weeks after Stringbean’s death. On November 27, 1973, Hank Snow’s guitarist, James P. Widner, was robbed and murdered at the downtown Nashville Holiday Inn. On January 2, 1974, beloved Tex Ritter, the man who’d hosted Stringbean’s last Opry show, died of a heart attack.
By then, a massive police investigation into the Stringbean case was well under way. This was chronicled in Warren B. Causey’s 1975 book The Stringbean Murders. Two twenty-three-year-old cousins were eventually arrested, tried, and convicted. As it turned out, all Doug Brown and John Brown stole was a chainsaw, Stringbean’s gun collection, one of his costumes, and about $250 in cash. They overlooked the $3,182 that was in the bib pocket of the star’s overalls. After he shot Estelle, John Brown walked back to the house grinning, with her handbag in his hand. He’d overlooked the $2,150 she had tucked in her bra. Stringbean’s guns eventually tied the Browns to the murders.
At the trial, the testimony of Grandpa Jones was crucial. The prosecuting attorney laid a trap by almost casually asking Grandpa to identify Stringbean’s guns. The Browns’ attorney quickly snapped, “Mr. Jones, how do you know those are Stringbean’s guns?” The star’s response was practically a soliloquy for the jurors.
“Stringbean was my friend,” replied Grandpa, his voice welling with emotion. “Every Saturday night after the Opry, he would drive home. During the summer, he would get his fishing gear and head out to the lake. During the hunting season, he would go hunting. He would stay out Sunday and come home sometime on Monday.
“Now, one would think that someone who could perform so well on the banjer as well as Stringbean could, would have the mechanical ability to do all kinds of things with his hands, but Stringbean couldn’t. He could not clean his own guns.
“So, every Tuesday morning in the fall, I would go over to his cabin and sit with him on the front porch and clean his guns. See that shotgun there? It has a scar on the stock from a barbed wire fence. There is a chip in the handle of that pistol.
“I knew he could not take the guns apart and put them back together. And I knew if they weren’t clean, there might be a misfire or some kind of accident. I did not want to see Stringbean hurt, so I took it on myself to take care of those guns. I have cleaned them hundreds of times.
“You see, Stringbean was my friend.”
“It was one of those rare moments in the courtroom when everybody stops breathing,” wrote John C. McLemore, who covered the trial for The Nashville Banner. “There was absolute silence.
“We had seen a funny old man from television just wring the color out of one of Nashville’s top criminal lawyers. Every word was calculated to create high drama, and every word—including the country pronunciation of the word ‘banjo’—had hit home.
“It was a performance fit for the London stage. . . . But more than that, I knew I had seen a man who knew what it meant to have a friend and to be a friend.”
At another point in the trial, John Brown attempted an insanity defense. His father testified that as a child he’d pulled the wings off birds and cut the tails off cats. The ploy didn’t work. Both men were sentenced to life in prison. Both were denied parole in 1993.
In 1997, a reported $20,000 was discovered behind the mantel in Stringbean’s chimney. By then, the currency was so mouse-eaten and rotted that it was worthless. A year later, Stringbean’s best friend, Louis M. “Grandpa” Jones, passed away at age eighty-four.
Doug Brown died of natural causes in the penitentiary in 2003. Later that year, the Stringbean murders were profiled on the A&E cable network program City Confidential. John Brown, the gunman, was scheduled for a parole hearing in July 2008.
Stringbean’s pretaped appearances on Hee Haw continued to air for several months after his death. During the next twenty-five years of the program’s life, the camera would sometimes pan across the cornfield set, pausing silently in tribute at the spot where the lovable comic had stood.
Archie Campbell, his fellow Hee Haw cast member, summed up the feelings of many: “String was the greatest guy in the world. I never heard him say one mean thing about another human being. He was really fine.”
Cousin Wilbur concurred, stating, “Stringbean was a fine fellow. I never heard him say anything against nobody.”
When the new Opry House opened the year after Stringbean’s death, a dogwood tree was planted on its landscaped grounds with a marker identifying it as a memorial to the fallen star. The last song that Stringbean sang was “I’m Going to the Grand Ole Opry to Make Myself a Name.”
3
A Lesson in Leavin’
The Grand Ole Opry’s Dottie West was the envy of other female singers for her deeply emotional performances. But one of her most shattering was one she was quite ashamed of, and the performance wasn’t sung.
The glamorous star was a proud beauty, but there she was on national television, weeping openly on Entertainment Tonight in August 1990. The bank had foreclosed on her Nashville mansion and seized her Corvette and her possessions to satisfy her debts.
“It’s just devastating,” she said through tears during the broadcast. “I never thought it would come to this. I thought I could handle it. I thought I could pay. This was home. They can’t take my songs or my music away. They can’t do that. But they’ve hurt me deeply.”
The experience was humiliating. Just days later, Dottie was admitting how sorry she was that people had seen her so defeated.
“I was so embarrassed when the show came on,” she said. “When the TV crew got to the house, I was in the middle of packing, and they had just shown the house for the first time. I’d been crying. But it’s not like I’m crying every day.
“I’m not saying it’s been easy, but I’ll go on. I know how to make money, and I’ll make it. I’m a survivor. You can knock me down, but you better have a big rock to keep me there.
“So many of my friends have called and offered to help. I have too much pride for that.” She did accept duet partner Kenny Rogers’s gift of a Chrysler for transportation.
“These are just material things,” she added. “I don’t love things. I love people. I am going to be fine.”
Just a year later, Dottie West was dead at age fifty-eight following an automobile crash en route to the Opry. During her eventful life, she had overcome many adversities. But she was never able to erase that indignity she suffered late in her career.
Born Dorothy Marie Marsh on October 11, 1932, Dottie was raised on a farm near M
cMinnville, Tennessee, in a community called Frog Pond. She was the eldest of ten children and was expected to take on adult responsibilities at an early age. Despite the backbreaking farm labor, the family remained desperately poor. At one point, the only nourishment the Marshes had for three days were blackberries the children gathered in the woods.
“I knew that we were poor. There were times when I was even embarrassed about it. We were so poor that Mother would ask me to ask for some of the commodities at school. And I just had too much pride to do that. I would pass it on to my brother, and ask him if he would ask. I would help him carry the groceries, but I had too much pride to ask for a handout. I’ve always been very determined.
“I think I got it from my mother. She was also a real lady. I can remember one day I was whistling while Mama and I were making the beds. She was on one side, and I was on the other. And she told me, ‘Ladies don’t whistle. Don’t you ever let me hear you doing that again.’ To this day, when I start to whistle, I’ll think, ‘Oh, no.’
“The absolute, real country music—bluegrass—is what I first learned to play. I played the upright bass and the rhythm guitar. My dad played the mandolin and the fiddle. I wrote two songs when I was eleven years old.”
Music was one of the only good things her father, Hollis Marsh, ever gave her. Hollis drank, and he physically abused his daughter throughout her childhood.
“My dad was a mean drunk. I mean, when he was drinking, he would beat us. And that’s just inhuman. I try to forget about that part of my life.”
Dottie never spoke of this publicly during her lifetime, but by the time she was in her teens, he was regularly sexually molesting her as well. At fifteen, she miscarried a child by him. On her seventeenth birthday, he informed her that she was quitting school and moving with him to Detroit, where he could find work at Ford. She broke down, sobbing uncontrollably at school, and confessed all to her principal. Hollis Marsh was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to forty years in prison. While incarcerated, he killed a fellow inmate.
Mama Pelina Marsh moved herself and her children into McMinnville. After subsisting on welfare, both she and Dottie took jobs as waitresses. Dottie spent the rest of her high school years doing that as well as singing in her first country band, The Coonskins.
She earned a scholarship to attend Tennessee Tech in Cooke-ville, where she majored in music. She continued to work in restaurants and clerked in a flower shop to pay her way through school. She also joined The Tech Two-by-Fours, whose steel guitarist was Bill West. Dottie had met Bill her first day on campus, and they were married by the time she was a sophomore. After Bill graduated with his electrical engineering degree, he and Dottie and their two young sons, Morris and Kerry, moved to Cleveland, Ohio. Daughter Shelly was born there in 1958. Shelly would one day emulate her mother as a chart-topping country vocalist.
“There was a TV show called Landmark Jamboree in Cleveland, Ohio,” Dottie recalled. “Kathy Dearth [billed as “Kathy Dee”] was a singer on it, and so was I. When we would do a duet, they called us The Kay-Dots. Kathy had sugar diabetes. It was diagnosed when she was eleven years old, and they told her she might live to be thirty. She fooled ’em and lived a full life,” before dying in 1968 at age thirty-five.
“I came home for a vacation one time from Cleveland, back to Nashville. We would come home whenever we had two weeks off from the show and also Bill’s work as an electrical engineer. As we were leaving, we went back north on Dickerson Road, because the freeway wasn’t finished. This was in 1959. The Starday Records studio was on the way. And I just said, ‘Bill, just pull in right here. I’m going in there, and I hope they’ll listen to me.’ I took my guitar in there. I said, ‘I really am gonna make hit records. I am gonna be a singer in Nashville. And this is the only thing I have to show you. It’s a scrapbook of the TV show that I do.’ That’s the way it started. I auditioned live.
“[Producer] Tommy Hill said, ‘Come back with some money, and we will do this.’ So we went back to Cleveland, saved some money, borrowed some more, came back, and I went into the studio and made a record. It’s funny, looking back, I don’t even think I realized how tough it might be. When you’re building and you’re young, you’re not afraid. Especially if you’re dedicated and goin’ for it. I had no doubt that I could be a top singer. I don’t mean to sound self-centered with that. I’m talking about determination and ambition. I’m just not lazy. I will go for it. I will work.”
“Angel on Paper,” her first Starday single, got enough airplay in Nashville to earn her an invitation to appear as a guest on the Grand Ole Opry. She’d been listening to the show all her life and said, “That was when my dream was fulfilled.” To further her career, Bill quit his job, and the family moved to Nashville in 1961. A year later, she had her fourth child, Dale. Dottie wanted it all—motherhood, being a wife, having a career, stardom, being a homemaker, having friends. Living in a community of composers inspired her to add another role, songwriter.
“I didn’t start writing songs again until 1961, the year I moved back to Nashville. That was after I’d started spending time with writers. During the TV show [in Cleveland], I would get to work with Opry singers, because they would have some as the guest stars every week. I’d get to talkin’ with them and would have them out to my house and cook for them. And so through meeting Roger Miller, Red Sovine, Carl Smith and people like that, I started writing.
“Really, the first song I ever wrote was called ‘Is This Me.’ I finally got enough nerve to put it down on tape one night for [steel guitarist] Pete Drake. And sure enough, I couldn’t believe it, Jim Reeves recorded it.”
The song became a big hit for Opry star Reeves in early 1963. By then, Dottie had recorded for Atlantic as well as Starday. But she’d still scored no hits as a singer. Even so, Reeves producer Chet Atkins loved Dottie’s voice and signed her to RCA Records.
“Dottie really was the best female singer we had in this town,” Chet recalled fondly. “And everybody knew it. She sang with so much feeling and musical abandon. When she improvised on a melody, she usually improved it a hell of a lot, because she put so much feeling in it. She was an original.”
“I think I was most influenced by Patsy Cline,” Dottie said. “There was so much feeling there. At one time or another, she must have helped all of us girl singers who were starting out. Patsy was always giving her friends things [like] the scrapbook of clippings and mementos Patsy gave me weeks before she was killed. When I got home, I was leafing through it, and there was a check for $75 with a note saying, ‘I know you been having a hard time.’ It was the money I needed to pay the rent. She was the consummate singer, the consummate human being.”
The two women shared their deepest emotions and most private secrets. Like Dottie, Patsy Cline had been sexually abused by her father.
A year after Patsy’s death in a plane crash, Dottie was on the charts with her first top-ten hit, 1964’s duet with Jim Reeves, “Love Is No Excuse.” Her second single that year was her self-penned heartache ballad “Here Comes My Baby.” It became the first female country record to win a Grammy Award and led to her being invited to join the cast of the Grand Ole Opry.
“I met her in I think it was late 1963 or early 1964,” recalls her fellow Opry star Jeannie Seely. “I was living in Los Angeles at the time, and she had come there to do some shows. In fact, Dottie tried to encourage me to move to Nashville before I did. Our friendship is something that I just truly feel blessed with. We shared so many great times. She was like a sister to me. She was somebody I could call late at night after everybody else had gone to bed. She’d wake up and talk to me. She was wonderful, and I miss her.” Jeannie’s smoldering vocal style was influenced by the passion in Dottie’s recorded performances.
Dottie’s voice throbbed with heartache and yearning on such hits as “Would You Hold It Against Me” (1966), “Paper Mansions” (1967), “Country Girl” (1968), and “Forever Yours” (1970). She also recorded memorable duets with Do
n Gibson (1969’s “Rings of Gold”) and Jimmy Dean (1971’s “Slowly”). The Dean association, in particular, fired her ambitions.
“I’m never satisfied. I’m always trying to do better. I guess I’ve always loved a challenge. I remember that I was really nervous when I played the Landmark Hotel in Las Vegas with Jimmy Dean, with an orchestra, back in ’71. That’s when I met Elvis.
“I broke into Vegas a little bit at a time. I guess I was ready for it, psychologically. Next, I had to work downtown at The Golden Nugget, the country place. That’s where I met Barbara Mandrell the first time. Anyway, I took it one step at a time. I knew I wanted to build a show to where I could be a headliner.”
There were setbacks along the way. On April 21, 1967, Dottie was getting ready for an Opry appearance when she learned that her father had died in prison. Burying her conflicting emotions, she went ahead with her performance, telling no one.
In 1969, her home burned to the ground, and her marriage to Bill West ended. She married drummer Byron Metcalf in 1972. He was twelve years her junior. Dottie was afraid the fans would disapprove, but instead she acquired a sexy new image. Her second marriage ended in divorce in 1980.
In the meantime, her recorded performances became ever more saturated with soul. “Careless Hands” (1971), “Lonely Is” (1971), “Six Weeks Every Summer” (1971), “I’m Only a Woman” (1972), and “House of Love” (1974) were examples of the Nashville Sound at its finest. She discovered and boosted younger talents, such as Steve Wariner, Jeannie Seely, and Larry Gatlin, the last of whom can be heard singing background vocals on her aching recording of his song “Once You Were Mine.”
She was unusual in her time as a female country singer who also wrote. Dottie penned eight of her singles, including “Didn’t I,” “What’s Come Over My Baby,” “Mommy Can I Still Call Him Daddy,” and “Clinging to My Baby’s Hand.” In the 1970s, she was hired to write and sing a series of ad jingles for Coca-Cola. One of them, 1973’s “Country Sunshine,” became a big hit single and won her a Clio Award, the advertising world’s top honor.
Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain Page 3