There was talk of canceling the Grand Ole Opry that weekend. Instead, new Opry manager Ott Devine greeted the crowd at the Ryman Auditorium with a spoken tribute to the fallen stars. The Jordanaires, who backed Patsy on all her hits, closed the tribute segment with an emotional “How Great Thou Art.” The rest of the cast joined in, many of the Opry stars sobbing in song. And then the show was to go on as normal. People in the audience were still sniffling and holding handkerchiefs when Minnie Pearl bravely took the stage to do her comedy. Despite the aching hearts, she got the folks laughing. Announcer Ralph Emery recalls that Minnie had tears streaming down her face as she came off the stage. “She had wept virtually throughout her comedy routine, and the audience never knew,” says Ralph in admiration.
JUST THREE WEEKS LATER, former Opry singer Texas Ruby perished in a trailer fire while her husband, fiddler Curly Fox, was playing on a Friday-night Opry show. Her name lived on in the 1980 Waylon Jennings hit “I Ain’t Living Long Like This,” wherein a woman was so rough, she “made Texas Ruby look like Sandra Dee.”
The brassy, sassy Texas Ruby was born Ruby Agnes Owens in Wise County, Texas, on June 4, 1908. She grew up to be a strong, hefty gal with a deep, almost masculine alto voice that could bellow through even the rowdiest crowd noise. In 1930, she accompanied her father and brothers on a cattle drive to Fort Worth. There, she was heard singing by an executive from the Kansas City radio station KMBC. He offered the husky-voiced brunette a job. Because of her booming vocal style, Ruby was billed as “The Sophie Tucker of the Feminine Folk Singers.” She soon teamed up with singer-songwriter Zeke Clements (1911–1994), who brought her to the Grand Ole Opry in 1933.
She and Zeke traveled to Los Angeles in 1936. Walt Disney was desperately seeking singing voices for his mining little people in his history-making full-length cartoon Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Zeke wound up as the yodeling voice of Bashful. Ruby got inebriated and missed her audition. Her hard drinking eventually wore Zeke Clements out.
In 1937, she hooked up with Tennessee trick fiddler Curly Fox (1910–1995). They married two years later. They were an Opry team from 1944 to 1948. After stints in Texas and California, the two returned to Nashville in 1962. Curly resumed his Opry entertaining, but Ruby made only occasional appearances. They recorded a comeback LP in Music City in early 1963.
On March 29, 1963, Curly Fox arrived home after his Opry performance to find firefighters battling the flames that engulfed their mobile home. Ruby, fifty-four, died. In all likelihood, she nodded off or passed out while holding a cigarette and lit her bed on fire. She was the sixth Opry personality to die that month. People began to talk of there being an Opry “curse.”
“A lot of people seem to think our industry is cursed by a jinx,” said Opry star Bill Anderson. Ralph Emery also recalls this kind of hex talk at the time. There was no curse, of course—just a lot of broken hearts.
“I thought about not going back to the Opry,” recalls Jean Shepard about that painful time in her life. “One day, this line of cars pulled up in the driveway. Jack DeWitt and the powers-that-be from the Opry came out to see me. They really wanted me to come back. I had always been onstage with Hawk. We were a team. It was rough walking in the backstage of the Ryman that first time.”
12
Gentleman Jim
There was no such phrase when he was alive, but Jim Reeves was a “control freak.” By the time of his early death, he was his own manager and song publisher. He built his own recording studio in his home. He invested his money in real estate and radio stations to lock in financial security. He guided himself to the status of an international music icon. He built himself into a pop-crossover star by pioneering the then-new “countrypolitan” style that became known as the Nashville Sound.
He trusted no one, except perhaps his wife, Mary. Because he didn’t like depending on others, he learned to fly—and that would prove to be his downfall.
One explanation for his uptight personality might be found in his childhood spent in suffocating poverty. Born in East Texas on August 20, 1923, James Travis Reeves was the youngest of nine children. Nine months after his birth, his sharecropper father Tom died of brain cancer. Mother Mary Beulah collapsed, physically and emotionally. She never really recovered, so Jim was mostly raised by his older brothers and sisters.
The children planted and harvested cotton. Their garden provided almost all of their food. The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 only worsened the family’s dire circumstances.
The East Texas oil boom of the early 1930s saved them. Oldest brother Beuford Reeves went to work for the United Gas Company and bought his mother and siblings a house in DeBarry, Texas, when Jim Reeves was nine years old. It was around this time that the youngster found the two passions of his life, baseball and music. By his early teens, he’d become proficient on the guitar and was an ace right-handed pitcher who threw a mean curveball.
Following his graduation from Carthage High School, Jim was offered a baseball scholarship to the University of Texas in Austin. Strapped for cash, he didn’t even last a week in the state capital. A bout of rheumatic fever during childhood had damaged his heart, so he was classified as 4-F during World War II. He signed up to play minor-league ball for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1942.
In 1946, the pitcher fell in love with a Marshall County High student named Mary White. They met at a dance.
“Jim came into the dance by himself, and he was looking around to see if there was anybody there he knew,” Mary recalled. “I had a date with a guy that had gone to school with Jim. . . . Well, he joined up with my date and me, we were introduced, and during the course of the evening, Jim and I danced together. While we were dancing, he asked me for a date. I accepted.
“We danced so long the boy I was with got mad at me. I never did see him anymore, so that ended that romance. I don’t blame him, though, ’cause I did act ugly.”
Jim injured his leg the following summer, and that ended his baseball career. Even though he had neither prospects nor a job, he impulsively proposed. Jim and Mary Reeves were wed on September 3, 1947. It turned out to be the first of several wise career moves, for Mary would become invaluable to his entertainment future.
Jim tried out for spring training in 1948 but failed. He took a job at radio station KGRI in Henderson, Texas. As was common at small-town stations, his job required him to wear many hats. He read the news, called local baseball and football games, operated the control board as his own engineer, and spun records as a disc jockey. With his naturally smooth, resonant, deep voice, he was soon a regional celebrity.
His first recordings were made on KGRI’s tape machine, for he realized that his radio work could be a stepping stone to a music career. He joined a small country band and began playing in clubs around East Texas. In 1949, Jim Reeves and his group recorded his debut single, “My Heart’s Like a Welcome Mat,” for Houston’s fledgling Macy Records label. He later recalled that the session cost him his life savings at the time. The pleasant ditty became his calling card for bigger and better show bookings.
Even so, it was Mary’s bookkeeping job that was bankrolling the couple. So it took a real leap of faith for her to quit it to accompany Jim to Shreveport, Louisiana, to audition for an announcing job at the powerhouse KWKH. Program director Horace Logan said he liked Jim but had no openings.
Returning to scrambling for radio jobs at backwater East Texas stations, Jim had his back to the wall. Fortunately, Tom Perryman at KSIJ, in Gladeville, was a fan of “My Heart’s Like a Welcome Mat” as well as of the singer’s live performances. In 1952, he persuaded Abbott Records executive Fabor Robison to catch a Jim Reeves show at the now-legendary Reo Palm Isle Ballroom, in Longview, Texas. Jim was signed to the label on the spot. Although the company launched his career, he would soon come to despise Fabor Robison.
KWKH offered him a job that same year. After his second audition for the station, he was hired as both a disc jockey and as one of the four announcers on
the nationally broadcast Louisiana Hayride Saturday-night barn dance. Horace Logan said in his memoir that Jim was first invited to sing on the program when Hank Williams was too drunk to perform. But most other accounts disagree. In fact, when Jim Reeves had “Mexican Joe” as his first hit record, in 1953, he was initially given the humiliating assignment of introducing cast member Billy Walker to sing a competing version of the song on Hayride broadcasts.
That all changed when the Jim Reeves version of the jaunty “Mexican Joe” became a number-one record on May 9, 1953. It remained at the top of the country charts for nine weeks, ensuring Jim’s transition from announcer to singing star on the Louisiana Hayride. On May 23, 1953, he was invited to sing his smash hit on the nationally broadcast portion of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. He reportedly brought down the house at the Ryman Auditorium.
Meanwhile, the California-based Fabor Robison was reveling in Jim’s first national hit. To the surprise of Jim Reeves, the executive had no intention of sharing the hit’s proceeds with its singer.
“Deep in the sludge . . . skulks the memory of Fabor Robison,” writes Jim Reeves biographer Michael Streissguth. “Performers who worked under his umbrella complained of lost royalties, missing concert payments and sexual harassment, as well as Robison’s brow-beating, violent style. He was known to brandish a revolver and would flout any wishes but his own. Cunning just dripped from his greased-back hair onto his beige summer suits.”
The executive openly bribed radio stations with payola. He stole his artists’ touring income. He controlled when, where, and what they recorded. To Jim’s dismay, the novelty “Mexican Joe” was followed by the even more frivolous “Bimbo” and “Penny Candy,” both of which became big hits in 1954.
Fabor Robison put Jim on the road on the West Coast with his label mates, The Browns, then experiencing their first hit with “Looking Back to See.” Maxine Brown remembers the experience bitterly.
“God, how we hated that SOB,” she says of Robison. “Since it was on his side of the continent, Fabor came along to manage everything—and collect all the money. He met with everybody on the tour and told us he would pay for all our road expenses. When the tour was over, he continued, he would pay us the money we had coming from the dates. We should have smelled a rat right then.
“Jim Reeves’s wife, Mary, was a godsend. She helped sell tickets, counted heads in the crowd to make sure we got our fair percentage of ticket sales, and generally kept our spirits up. She suffered right beside Jim through those long and lean first years, and I don’t think anyone ever heard her complain. If there is a synonym for courage, it surely is Mary Reeves.”
Maxine’s brother Jim Ed Brown developed pneumonia from the dreadful working conditions. Everyone on the tour was malnourished. Robison accused The Browns of being lazy and ungrateful, fired the singers, and refused to pay them. Jim and Mary Reeves gave the green kids enough money to get them to the next town. Next, Jim and the rest of the performers went to Robison and threatened to quit the tour if The Browns weren’t hired back.
When the tour was finally over, the demoralized cast met in Jim and Mary’s living room in Shreveport. Fabor Robison arrived, criticized all the artists, and started handing out money. To The Browns’ shock, they were given just $234.
“Instead of apologizing, Fabor was getting meaner and madder, as if we were the lowest scum he’d ever come across,” recalls Maxine. “At last, Jim Reeves stood up, holding the paltry bills in his clenched fist, and called Fabor a lowdown sneak and cheater. They got into a cussing match and pretty soon some punches were flying. Jim went into his bedroom, got his gun, and pointed it right at Fabor. We just knew he was going to kill him. Mary knew it too, but she was able to convince Jim that the sorry SOB wasn’t worth it—but not until he fired one shot at Fabor and missed. We were all wishing he’d go ahead and kill the bastard.”
Meanwhile, back at the Hayride, a mother ushered her daughter into Horace Logan’s office and accused Jim Reeves of impregnating the girl. Horace knew the girl slept around with a lot of the Hayride musicians. He gathered the entire Hayride staff in the auditorium and confronted the mother and daughter in front of them all. Jim loved children, and he and Mary had been trying to conceive. They were unable to, because Jim was sterile and could produce a doctor’s statement to prove it. So the potential paternity suit ended then and there. Mary evidently learned to accept her husband’s infidelities.
“Jim Reeves was one good-looking hunk of a man,” says Maxine Brown, “and to tell the truth he’d always had his share of road honeys.”
“Jim had an eye for the ladies,” confirmed Jim’s confidant Buddy Killen. “Women always seem to be drawn to entertainers, making it easy to have casual encounters. It’s important, of course, to keep one’s sense of humor about these dalliances, something that Jim was particularly good at.”
At the time, there wasn’t much humor to be found in his professional life. Things finally reached the boiling point between Jim Reeves and Fabor Robison at what turned out to be the star’s last recording session for Abbott Records, in January 1955 in Los Angeles. This time, it was Fabor who was waving around a pistol while ranting at the musicians. When he put it down, Jim grabbed it and took hold of Fabor’s collar.
“You got six or eight songs of mine on the shelf,” Jim hissed at Fabor. “I’m gonna sign a contract tonight and give you those songs, royalty free. You’re also going to sign a contract releasing me from your record company, or I’m gonna shove this damn pistol down your neck.”
Finally free of Fabor, Jim Reeves signed with Nashville’s RCA Records in March 1955. Several of his early contacts in the city reported that he seemed mistrustful of the music business. Tree Publishing executive Buddy Killen attended Jim’s first RCA session, bringing along some contracts allowing his firm to publish the singer’s songwriting efforts.
“Mr. Reeves, I really appreciate you placing your songs with Tree,” said Buddy.
“I might as well place them with you as anybody else,” snapped Jim. “You’re not going to pay me anyway.” Buddy reported that he felt stung by the suggestion that he’d cheat anyone.
At that same session, when songwriter Cy Coben made a suggestion about how Jim might approach a lyric, the singer snarled, “Don’t tell me how to sing,” and never recorded one of Cy Coben’s works again. Producer/guitarist Chet Atkins recalled that Jim seemed to mistrust him as a record producer. Apparently, the experiences with Fabor Robison had left some scars.
Even so, Jim Reeves advanced rapidly in Music City. On October 22, 1955, he became a member of the Grand Ole Opry cast. Jim and Mary moved to Nashville that fall, initially living in a humble trailer park.
By then, Jim’s folksy composition “Yonder Comes a Sucker” had emerged as the hit from that first RCA session. It also became Tree’s first chart topper as a publishing company. The number was still very much in the mode of his up-tempo Abbott hits. Fabor had relentlessly forced Jim to sing high and fast. The singer had to fight for every ballad he wanted to record.
Producer Chet Atkins now encouraged him to lower his vocal register and sing slow songs. Furthermore, he recognized that Jim’s years of radio work had made him a master of microphone techniques. Over the audio engineer’s objections, Chet allowed Jim to move his lips to within kissing distance of the mic, creating an extraordinarily warm and intimate baritone purr. In early 1957, this paid off with the caressing ballad sound of “Am I Losing You,” which was Jim’s finest songwriting effort.
Back in the studio to record a follow-up, Chet surrounded Jim with a small, hushed instrumental combo featuring his lightly chiming guitar, tinkling Floyd Cramer piano droplets, and lovely choral harmonies. The result, the gorgeous “Four Walls,” has stood the test of time as one of the definitive Nashville Sound ballads.
In April 1957, Jim Reeves became the first Nashville star to headline a European tour. Although confined to U.S. military bases in Germany, it was still a beachhead for country music oversea
s.
Maxine Brown remembers the tour as being unorganized and chaotic, with misplaced luggage, bungled hotel reservations, and chronically late transportation. Still, everyone enjoyed it, despite Jim’s constant complaining. His mood brightened when he learned that back home, “Four Walls” was a titanic number-one country smash, his biggest-selling record to date and a crossover hit on the pop charts.
“Four Walls” led to a rash of network television appearances, his own variety radio series on ABC, an eight-week run as the host of the national TV series Country Music Jubilee, and offers to play Las Vegas showrooms. But success had a darker side for Jim Reeves. He became haunted by fears of failure. His mood swings became erratic. In the middle of performances, he would suddenly lash out at band members, right in front of audiences. He berated and belittled Mary at gatherings in their home. Even Chet Atkins was not above an icy rebuke in the studio. The star’s soothing singing style had gotten him the nickname “Gentleman Jim.” Privately, he was anything but.
Buddy Killen, who cowrote songs with Jim Reeves and became one of the singer’s best friends, recalled that Jim “had real bouts with depression.” In time, he sought help from a psychiatrist.
“Jim was victimized by the roller-coaster mood swings that often haunt creative or talented people,” Buddy said. “He’d be laughing one minute and moaning the blues the next. . . . Other times, he’d make a cutting remark about someone.”
His temperamental outbreaks weren’t seen by everyone. And there are many who testify to his kindness and generosity. On the road, he always took care of his band before paying himself. There are many accounts of his love for children. Many associates remained fiercely loyal to him, despite the outbursts.
He brought conductor/arranger Bill Walker to Nashville. He launched the careers of producers Ray Baker and Bud Logan. He brought Dottie West to Chet Atkins’s attention, which resulted in her being signed by RCA. He went to bat for The Browns, also securing them an RCA contract and an escape from Fabor Robison.
Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain Page 14