Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain

by Grand Ole Opry

  “I went to a concert Ray Charles had in Atlanta and got backstage to meet him. I’d just recorded my first record, ‘Never Had it So Good,’ and on the back side of that record was a song called ‘Let’s Go Get Stoned.’ Well, Ray heard that song and told me he was going to record it. He did. He wound up sellin’ a million with it.

  “This guy who was playing drums for me said, ‘Ray, you won’t believe this, but this guy sounds just like you.’ Ray turned around and shook my hand and said, ‘In all due respect, don’t sing like Ray. Learn to sing like Ronnie.’ At the time I thought, ‘He ought to be glad I wanna sing like him!’ What he was trying to say was, ‘Find your own style.’ He said, ‘Do you know how many years I sang like Nat King Cole until I could find out who I was?’”

  By this time, Ronnie had moved to Atlanta, where nightclub work was plentiful. One night at a party, he met Georgia native Joyce Reeves and was smitten. At a club on their first date, he impressed her by getting up onstage and singing the James Brown hit ballad “Try Me.” They slow-danced to “Misty.” They fell in love. Ronnie married Joyce on October 30, 1965. To this day, he calls her “the light of my life.”

  Ronnie’s “Never Had it So Good” became a hit on the R&B charts. Scepter Records expected him to travel to popularize the record, so he soon found himself on concert bills with the leading R&B stars of the day, including Sam & Dave, Maxine Brown, Little Anthony & The Imperials, Stevie Wonder, and James Brown. Joyce became his ever-present guide.

  “Joyce was doing a lot of the show booking,” Ronnie recalls. “She handled all the business, a bride of one year going in and out of the knife-wielding clubs of America’s toughest inner-city neighborhoods. She handled the telephone negotiations, executed the contracts, drove me in a van to the shows, set up my VOX organ faster than anyone I’d ever seen, and collected the performance money.”

  He adds, “She’s always taken care of me—my driver, booking agent, manager, and wife.”

  Joyce disagrees. “He doesn’t depend on me. I depend on him. He’s very strong. Beyond a doubt, the finest man I’ve ever met. It sounds trite, but he’s a nice guy and a gentleman.”

  The early years of their marriage were lean ones spent in Atlanta and then Memphis, where Ronnie was hired to perform as a sideman on recording sessions.

  “I worked on two albums with Elvis down there in Memphis. The big song ‘Kentucky Rain’ that Elvis did, I played piano and sang [high harmony] on that record with Elvis. At the time, I didn’t know Eddie Rabbitt. He was the writer.” Eddie later wrote Ronnie’s first number-one hit, “Pure Love.”

  Joyce and Ronnie’s happiest experience during the Memphis years was the birth of their son Todd, in 1970. One of the most unpleasant was a visit to their home by Internal Revenue Service agents in 1972. They burst into the Milsap home demanding payment for 1971 taxes, which Joyce had already paid. Ronnie was enraged.

  “They’re just bullies,” says Ronnie. “I’d rather have a sister working for the Mafia than a brother working in the IRS.”

  By 1972, the music scene in Memphis was fading. Ronnie was so down on his luck that he was considering leaving his profession.

  “There was a time in Memphis when I was thinking, ‘I better go back to college and go to law school. I better go to radio school, or do something, because this thing isn’t going to work out.’ I’d been trying it for seven years.

  “I was getting ready to go back to college. The [King of the Road Hotel] manager said, ‘I want you to move from Memphis, move up here to Nashville.’ That’s all I needed, man, was for somebody to give me a job.

  “But I wound up losing the house and everything in Memphis, because of managers that wind up taking everything an artist has. You find yourself signed to something. This guy and I had an agreement, and I was working at his nightclub. He had a management contract with me. He said, ‘As long as you’re working at my nightclub, you don’t pay me any commission.’ But once I got ready to move to Nashville, he said, ‘You owe me all this back commission.’ I said, ‘But you said I didn’t have to pay. . . .’ He said, ‘I don’t care what I said. I’m going by what it says in the print contract.’ We had to go to court. And I lost my house and everything. Came to Nashville $20,000 in debt.”

  Still, “I’ve always dreamed of living in this town. There’s just something about being here. I just really get a big thrill out of it somehow. I used to think, ‘Oh, if I could just be in Nashville’ when I was struggling along with a career that went nowhere for years. I truly love it and what people here have done for me.”

  The Milsaps arrived in Music City on December 26, 1972. Ronnie immediately went to work at the King of the Road, where he, Todd, and Joyce also lived for their first three months in town. Founded by Roger Miller (1936–1992), the King of the Road Hotel had a rooftop nightclub that was the place to be and be seen in those days. In no time, Ronnie Milsap’s soulful singing and well-honed showmanship were the talk of the music community. Faron Young, Ray Stevens, Porter Wagoner, Jack Greene, Charlie Rich, Jeannie Seely, Dottie West, Conway Twitty, and many other stars dropped by to hear the new Nashville sensation.

  Charley Pride’s manager Jack Johnson and song publisher Tom Collins went to bat for Ronnie on Music Row. Jack took a tape to RCA Records, which signed Ronnie in April 1973. “I Hate You” became his first top-ten hit later that year. In 1974, “Pure Love” became the first of Ronnie’s more than thirty-five number-one hits.

  Hits such as “Please Don’t Tell Me How the Story Ends,” “(I’d Be) A Legend in My Time,” and “Daydreams About Night Things” led to an invitation to join the cast of the Grand Ole Opry. Ronnie Milsap was inducted by Roy Acuff on February 6, 1976.

  “Some nights I tune into the Grand Ole Opry and think, ‘You know, all I ever really wanted was to be a country singer,’” Ronnie reflects. “I’m a huge radio fan. Why is that about blind people? They’re all radio crazy, and I’m worse than the rest of ’em. I collect old radios and have thousands of hours of old radio shows on tape. [On the road] I had a satellite dish, so I could listen to Nashville radio—the Opry—and feel like I was at home.”

  The Opry’s faith in him was well placed. “What Goes on When the Sun Goes Down,” “(I’m a) Stand By My Woman Man,” and “Let My Love Be Your Pillow” all became number-one hits later in the year he was inducted. To date, he has sold 25 million records and earned six Grammy Awards and eight Country Music Association honors.

  Ronnie and RCA usually agreed on which songs could be hits. One exception was 1980’s “Smoky Mountain Rain.” Ronnie believed in it, but the label did not. Ronnie prevailed, and it became yet another of his chart-topping performances.

  “When I first came to Nashville you could go over to a record company and hang out . . . just chat and hang out in somebody’s office. They would let you do that then.

  “One thing I’ll never forget is [in 1981] we had already finished an album, and they were shipping its single, called ‘It’s All I Can Do.’ They were literally stuffing the envelopes when I called [then-RCA boss] Jerry Bradley up and said, ‘I’ve got something that you’ve got to hear. It’s got to be on the album.’ The next morning I took him my cut of ‘(There’s) No Gettin’ Over Me.’ He listened and then turned around in his chair and got on the phone and stopped everything. And he let me put it out. I don’t think you could do anything like that in Nashville today. Everything is really preset. It is a very big business. It’s big money.”

  “(There’s) No Getting Over Me” not only topped the country hit parade, it became a giant pop hit as well.

  His enormous success as a hit maker enabled him to construct a full business complex on Music Row. Ronnie built his own studio, formed his own song-publishing company, and created enterprises to book and publicize his concerts.

  His shows are legendary. Ronnie Milsap thrills audiences with his fiery vocals and boundless energy. He has been known to fearlessly leap from pianos and walk precipitously close to the edges of stages.<
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  “I jump up on top of the piano,” he comments. “But I’m not trying to prove anything. All I’m trying to do is just have a good time. I feel perfectly normal with it.

  “I’m not serious about blindness. I’m so used to it. I don’t think about it too much. I’d like to see Joyce and Todd and some other things. But I have never taken any of that very seriously. Even though I don’t see her, I know Joyce is a very pretty woman.

  “If I were given a choice between having 20/20 vision and music, I’d have to say, I’d never give up my music.”

  28

  The Red-Headed Stranger

  Willie Nelson’s Grand Ole Opry career went up in smoke.

  On December 23, 1969, Willie was at a Christmas party at booking agent Lucky Moeller’s office on Music Row when he was summoned to the telephone and informed that his house was on fire. He rushed home to his farm in Ridgetop, Tennessee, a small, rural community north of Music City. His wife and children were safe, but he dashed into the smoking debris nevertheless. He was worried that the firefighters would find his stash of marijuana and turn it over to the police.

  “I wasn’t being brave,” he later observed dryly. “When I got there, it was burning pretty good. There were fire trucks, police cars, and a lot of other people. I ran in through the back door . . . down the hall to a closet, picked up my guitar and a bag of weed, and ran out the back door, giving the weed to a friend, who ran to the woods and hid it.”

  “It’s the only time I’ve ever seen Willie rattled,” observed his buddy and future duet partner Waylon Jennings (1937–2002).

  The fire consumed hundreds of unpublished Willie Nelson songs. Ironically, the last song he’d written at the house was the prophetically titled “What Can You Do to Me Now.” During that same year, Willie had wrecked five cars and his second marriage.

  The family moved into a small trailer on the Ridgetop property. Daughter Susie and son Billy chopped down a scrawny little pine tree, stuck it in one of Willie’s cowboy boots, and decorated it with ribbons and their father’s socks. And that’s what Willie woke to on Christmas Day. Soon after, Willie, his family, and his band moved to Bandera, Texas.

  “When that [fire] happened, I didn’t really have any reason left to stay here,” says Willie of his decision to leave Nashville. “I’d been wanting to go back to Texas anyway. I was tired of driving back and forth between Texas and Ridgetop. I’d worked every beer joint in the state of Texas by that time.”

  In 1969, he let his Opry membership lapse. The time he spent at the Ridgetop farm and in the cast of the Opry in the 1960s marked the only span in Willie’s life when he was “settled.” After the fire, the road became his home. It still is.

  “I sometimes pull over,” he says of his gypsy lifestyle. “But I am out here on the bus more than I am any other place. I love the bus. It’s my safe area, my halfway house. In Texas, even when I am off, I park it there in front of the house, and I spend as much time on it as I do inside my house.”

  Willie Nelson was born to wander. He has been on various stages performing for most of his life. Willie Hugh Nelson was born on April 30, 1933, in the small town of Abbott, Texas. His parents divorced, and he and his older sister Bobbie were raised by their grandparents. The household was highly musical. Both grandparents sang and played instruments. Bobbie practiced piano and learned to read music as a child. When he was six, Willie was given his first guitar.

  Grandfather Nelson died of pneumonia in 1939, which plunged the family into poverty. Bobbie and Willie had to pick cotton alongside their grandmother to make ends meet. Making music at home continued to be a joy and a respite from hard times. Willie began writing songs on his little guitar. At age eleven, he fashioned his own songbook, using a brown paper sack for its cover.

  Willie performed in a variety of bands, including one with his sister Bobbie and her husband, and eventually became a disc jockey. He married his first wife, Martha, in 1952, and a year later, after daughter Lana was born, the family moved to Fort Worth, where Willie worked at the radio station KCNC.

  “I had a daily children’s show from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. as the kids got ready for their naps,” Willie reminisced in his book The Facts of Life. “Every day I played ‘The Red Headed Stranger.’ Written by Carl Stutz and Edith Lindeman . . . this was by far my most requested song. I’d start off the show every day, ‘This is your old cotton-pickin’, snuff-dippin’, tobaccer-chewin’, stump-jumpin’, gravy-soppin’, coffee-pot-dodgin’, dumplin’-eatin’, frog-giggin’ hillbilly from Hill County, Willie Nelson.’”

  After a brief stint in San Diego, California, the family moved to Vancouver, Washington, in 1956. Willie talked his way into a disc jockey job at KVAN there and was soon one of the most popular broadcasters in the region. He sold thousands of copies of his self-financed debut single “No Place for Me”/“The Lumberjack.” Daughter Susie was born in 1957, the year Willie was fired for demanding a raise.

  Back in Fort Worth, Willie tried to quit show business and become a proper provider for his growing brood. He sold Bibles, vacuum cleaners, and encyclopedias door-to-door. He even taught Sunday school. But he was soon back to playing music in honky-tonks. His pastor dismissed him from teaching when he found out, even though Willie pointed out that many of the Sunday churchgoers were, in fact, out listening to him on Saturday nights. This event led to Willie turning his back on organized religion and toward a spiritual quest that resulted in his belief in karma and reincarnation.

  On the move again, he took the family to Houston. There, he took jobs playing in the Esquire Ballroom, spinning records on KCRT, and teaching guitar lessons. Son Billy came along in 1958, and the following year Willie began releasing tunes on D Records, starting with “Man with the Blues” and “What a Way to Live.” He also became friends with music entrepreneur Paul Buskirk. Perpetually strapped for cash, he sold Buskirk the rights to his songs “Family Bible” and “Night Life.” The latter appeared, and disappeared, on Rx Records, credited as being by “Paul Buskirk and His Little Men, featuring Hugh Nelson.” As for “Family Bible,” when it became a top-ten hit for Claude Gray in 1960, Willie didn’t earn a cent in royalties.

  But encouraged by that songwriting success, Willie decided to head to Nashville. His first contact in the city was Grand Ole Opry star Billy Walker (1929–2006).

  “I knew Willie in Texas,” Billy recalled. “I was on radio in Waco, Texas, and he came from Abbott, right outside of there. And sometimes he used to come and watch me perform live on the radio. Then I was a member of a show with Red Foley called Ozark Jubilee. And Willie came to Springfield [Missouri], and I was trying to get him a job up there. He was writing a song called ‘The Storm Within My Heart Has Just Begun.’ I told him I wanted him to finish it. I made him write me the song, which I recorded [in 1959] and which got in kind of the top twenty-five [in Texas].

  “I came to Nashville. Willie Nelson came to Nashville. And I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And he said, ‘Well, there’s nobody buyin’ songs in Fort Worth, so I came here to see what I could do.’ I said, ‘Well, where are you livin?’ And he said, ‘Out there in that old ’50 model gray Buick.’ And I said, ‘Well, get your gear and come on out to the house.’ So he lived out there with me for about three months, and in the course of livin’ with me, he wrote ‘Funny How Time Slips Away’ and several other songs that came to be standards.”

  Willie had been making a living playing music in Texas for years. But that wasn’t so easy to do in a music-industry town like Nashville.

  “There weren’t that many places to play! There were no clubs or anything. I could never understand why the music capital of the world had no places for the players to play other than the Grand Ole Opry and a few clubs in Printer’s Alley.

  “I was an artist when I got here. I’d been playing in clubs around Texas since I was twelve years old. So when I came here and didn’t perform, that was different for me. Just sitting around trying to be a songwriter was not really what
I wanted to do. As soon as I got to Nashville, I went immediately to Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge.”

  The now-legendary Lower Broadway beer joint was then the major hangout spot for Nashville’s small songwriting community. Its back door was opposite the Ryman Auditorium’s stage door, so Opry stars often dropped in for a brew between shows. Among the songwriters at Tootsie’s was Hank Cochran. Once he heard Willie’s songs, he urged Pamper Music to sign the newcomer. Hank told owners Hal Smith and Ray Price they could pay Willie the $50 a week they had planned to give Hank as a raise.

  “When Hank said I at last had a real job that paid a real salary for writing songs, I broke down and cried,” wrote Willie in his autobiography. “Martha cried, the kids cried, Hank cried. We were so happy. It was a real big deal for me—my first job as a professional songwriter.”

  “Hank Cochran was and still is one of the best song pluggers in this town,” says Willie. “He would pitch my songs; he would pitch Kris [Kristofferson’s] songs; it didn’t matter. Any time he had a good song or heard of a good song, he’d pitch it to somebody. It didn’t matter whether it was his song, or my song, or a stranger’s.

  “I ran into Faron Young right away [at Tootsie’s]. The next day, he recorded ‘Hello Walls’ and ‘Congratulations.’ Released ’em back-to-back on a single [in 1961]. ‘Hello Walls’ wasn’t premeditated at all. I was just out there at the little Pamper Music garage. Hank [Cochran] went to answer a phone call, and by the time he got back, I’d written ‘Hello Walls’ by myself. Sorry, Hank.”