Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  After explaining what had happened, Willie asked Johnny, “What are you gonna do?”

  Johnny said he was going to look for work in Houston, and once he found something, he’d send for Jean.

  Willie had fewer options. Charlie Fitch from Sarg Records had never called. His frustration had grown to the point where he left a box of song lyrics in his rent house when he finally took Dr. Parker’s advice to seek greener pastures.

  All Martha had wanted was for her husband to provide enough to live on and to be at home. Willie wanted to be that man, but he wanted to provide by playing music. He headed to the only other place where he knew he could satisfy both urges, to where his father and his second family lived. If he could get settled in Fort Worth and pick up work, Martha might not be so mad.

  Fort Worth, 1955

  FROM THE NEON American flag that flew above the Tarrant County Courthouse to its sordid underbelly, Fort Worth was a toddling town full of contradictions. It was never a fort, but a camp, and not a very organized one at that; the same year a military presence was established on a bluff above the Trinity River, in 1849, Fort Worth’s first Hell’s Half Acre, a strip of brothels, bars, and gambling joints that serviced the troops, sprang up adjacent to the camp, attracting the likes of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Eighty years later, another Hell’s Half Acre attracted the likes of Bonnie and Clyde. What was left of that version in 1955 looked good enough to a young man from down around Waco.

  Fort Worth had grown into the fourth-biggest city in Texas, although its proximity to Dallas, thirty miles east, forever sentenced the city to second-city status, imbuing its citizens with a peculiar character. Like San Antonio, “Foat Wuth” was a hide and horns town that proudly wore its Cowtown and “Where the West Begins” reputations like a giant rodeo belt buckle.

  The Stockyards on the North Side were a magnet for cowboys, ranchers, and farmers for hundreds of miles throughout West Texas, but Fort Worth’s wealth also was remarkable for a place of its size. Local resident Sid Richardson, an oilman who’d struck it rich in East Texas and West Texas, was the richest man in the world, with a net worth of $1 billion, according to Life magazine.

  The music that came out of Fort Worth reflected the city’s wide-open nature. Fort Worth was the “Cradle of Western Swing,” where Bob Wills and Milton Brown emerged from the Light Crust Doughboys to create the sound that came to be known as Western Swing. Bob Dunn, who played lap steel guitar with Milton Brown’s Musical Brownies, was widely recognized as the first player to supercharge the instrument, previously considered little more than a means to achieve mellowness, Hawaiian-style. Dunn played steel like a sax, riffing off the melody to lead the rest of the strings in the ensemble.

  While other forms of country music found favor in Fort Worth—every pedal steel player worth his salt knew the lead to Webb Pierce’s “Slowly”—Western Swing remained the preferred sound even after Milton Brown died in a car wreck on the Jacksboro Highway in 1936 with a sixteen-year-old girl by his side and Wills found a better home in Tulsa. Western Swing was really nothing more than an amalgam of popular American music—country, of course, swing, jazz, pop, Dixieland, and country blues—tailored for dancing, with a strong Texas flavor. Swing in Fort Worth wasn’t just a western thing, either. It was the hometown of big-band orchestra leader Paul Whiteman and numerous other swinging big-band musicians, and it was the frequent stomping ground for the rhythm-and-blues guitar swing of T-Bone Walker.

  Of all the honky-tonk, bar, and club clusters around the city, none rivaled the Jacksboro Highway, State Highway 199, which ran northwest from downtown toward rugged country and some of the biggest ranches in the state. There was something for everybody on “Jaxbeer Highway.” Though gambling was illegal, several casinos set back from the road did brisk business, equipped with roulette wheels and blackjack tables that conveniently folded into cabinets in the wall and with underground tunnels for quick getaways.

  The Jacksboro Highway was also a major stop for top-shelf acts riding the Chitlin’ Circuit for black entertainers throughout the South, most notably semiregulars Ike and Tina Turner, Ray Charles, and Jimmy Reed, local heroes such as Ray (“Linda Lu”) Sharpe, the Ron-Dels (“If You Really Want Me To I’ll Go”), featuring Delbert McClinton, Bruce (“Hey Baby”) Channel, and Trini Lopez and his brother Jesse, along with Candy Barr and exotic dancer colleagues such as Tammi True and Chris Colt and Her 45s.

  Sandwiched between the nicer neon-lit establishments were meaner spots, many of which draped chicken wire in front of the bandstand to keep flying beer bottles from hitting the hired entertainment whenever fights broke out. They carried nicknames like the Bloody Bucket and the County Dump that were well earned. “They called it County Dump because it was right next to the county dump,” said Paul English, a sometimes musician and full-time police character, the respected description of what others might call a hood, a thug, a gangster, or an underground figure. “It was on Handley Drive [on Fort Worth’s east side] all the way until it dead-ended. We played there for nine months. They couldn’t get anybody to play there because it was too rough. My brother and I picked up a trumpet player who didn’t want to go. I told him it wasn’t rough anymore—we carry guns. We all went out there, and that night there were two fights and one knifing.” The trumpet player didn’t come back.

  One joint was so nasty, the only person Paul English could persuade to take a gig with him was his cousin Arvel Walden. A two-piece band suited management just fine. All they needed was enough noise to cover up the sound of dice hitting the wall when craps games were going on in back. One night when Arvel took the evening off, the guy who took his place was stabbed.

  The patrons of these venues included a disproportionate number of characters, due in no small part to a protracted gangland war that erupted at the tail end of World War II and featured a cast that earned Fort Worth another reputation, as a little Chicago.

  They worked the rackets, running backroom gambling joints, prostitutes, whorehouses, numbers, and vending machines, and car lots were often their base, an easy front for laundering ill-gotten gains. But they weren’t hoodlums like the hoodlums over in Dallas, down in Houston, or on Galveston Island.

  “Fort Worth gangsters had families, everybody kind of worked together, they all knew each other’s family, they all needed one another, and of course the police over here were a little softer,” said Richard Davis, who worked as a card dealer at Pappy Kirkwood’s club. “There was more honor among thieves in Fort Worth. When those people started getting blowed up and killed, they deserved it. No one was killed without permission and it was usually for things like beating up on prostitutes or getting out of line with the law.”

  WILLIE Nelson came to this Fort Worth in search of someplace better than where he’d been. He put his salesmanship skills to use, picking up work selling Bibles, encyclopedias, Singer sewing machines, and Kirby vacuum cleaners, enough to bring Martha and Lana up from Waco. “Willie was a very good salesman,” his sister, Bobbie, said. But Willie had bigger ambitions than making Salesman of the Month. He talked his way into selling ads for KDNT, a small 250-watt radio station at 1440 on the AM dial, broadcasting from Denton, thirty miles north of Fort Worth, and, citing his experience on KHBR back in Hillsboro and KBOP in Pleasanton, hosting a country music program.

  A fellow announcer, Lee Woodward, a voice major at Arlington State College trained in classical music, noticed the redheaded kid. “He had these lively eyes behind this laid-back look that said, ‘I’m not gonna give you anything unless you ask.’ I thought, here was a guy straight off the farm. He sounded like it too.” On Saturdays, the kid went down the hall of the radio station to run the audio board while Woodward sang with members of the North Texas State College Lab Band, which was turning out musicians capable of joining the road bands of swing stars.

  Willie didn’t stay at KDNT long, because he hustled another radio gig in Fort Worth with a salary higher than the $40 a week he was making, minus the
expense of driving to and from Denton. KCNC was a low-wattage daytime station at 720 on the radio dial, run by a cranky fellow named Jim Speck, who gave Willie enough rope to hang himself with when he hired him. Willie Nelson’s Western Express came after Melody Time at the noon hour. After Western Express ended at three p.m., Gordon Fitzgerald’s prerecorded Disc n’ Date and Blues at Sundown concluded the station’s broadcasting day.

  Willie called Lee Woodward not long after he settled in at KCNC station, telling him about an opening for an announcer at the Fort Worth station. Lee auditioned and won the job. “That’s when I discovered the real Willie,” he said.

  “I saw him with his guitar in the studio booth where he did his show,” Lee Woodward said. “He would play his guitar and sing along to the records he was playing. He was singing songs. Every time he did it, the phones would light up. The management figured out real quick he must be doing something right, because nobody called when we were on KDNT together. He invented this niche.”

  The diminutive announcer with flaming red hair read his commercials live with his guitar strapped around his neck, strumming along to the ad copy. He sang and played at the live weekend remotes with Lee Woodward and Walt Jones from the furniture department at Leonard Brothers Department Store downtown, where he interviewed salespeople from various departments who were touting the Big Specials of the Day from ten to eleven in the morning. He strummed his way through remotes from the Bomber Grill at 10th and Houston and commercials for American Auto Salvage and Clardy automobile air-conditioners, the futuristic clear, horn-shaped pipes that spewed refrigerated air into one’s automobile from a compressor in the trunk, one of the precursors of the device that would ultimately tame and industrialize Texas.

  Every afternoon from one to one-thirty he played children’s songs, such as Tex Ritter’s “Blood in the Saddle,” in anticipation of nap time. No song was as popular for napping as “Red Headed Stranger,” a song written by Edith Lindeman and Carl Stutzby made popular by Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith, a family entertainer from Charlotte, North Carolina, who blazed trails as one of country music’s first television stars with The Arthur Smith Show, syndicated in forty-one markets throughout the southeast.

  Willie would play the song for his daughter, Lana, and say hi to her on the air. At home, she’d have him sing “Red Headed Stranger” to her at bedtime. Lana was her daddy’s girl. Smitten with the Disney movie The Alamo, she had an imaginary husband, Jim Bowie, the legendary Tennessee adventurer and Texas folk hero who died at the Alamo, and would have a place set for him at the supper table. After Jim “died” when she was four, she developed a huge attraction to Ernest Tubb. “He was my first crush,” she said. It was Daddy’s fault. “He was always singing, always playing his guitar and working on something,” Lana said. “I would ask him if he had any new songs and he’d sing them to me.”

  Willie liked clowning around the station. Lee Woodward remembered taping a commercial one Saturday afternoon while ensconced in a sound booth, when he heard a tapping noise from the other side of a curtain covering a window separating the sound booth from a larger recording room.

  “I reached up and pulled the curtain open,” Woodward said. “There was Willie. He’d fashioned a hangman’s noose and is standing up on this stool and has the noose tied to his member. He was a funny little guy, kinda quiet, with this mischievous look about him, always coming up with something to crack you up.”

  Several times Lee accompanied Willie on afternoon drives in his beat-up ’47 Ford two-door sedan to the Jacksboro Highway to visit clubs. “We’d walk into these joints with chicken wire around the bandstand and check them out when no one was around,” Lee said. “They were rough places, but Willie would act like he’d entered Valhalla. His eyes would get wide and he’d say, ‘One of these days, I’m going to be playing here.’ That’s what he was shooting for. That’s where he wanted to be.”

  Fort Worth was a hard city in that respect. The club business was controlled by the gangster element, the kind of folks who imparted life’s lessons without a flinch. He might have been a star in the imaginations of some radio listeners, and he was getting up close and personal with music and music people, but the clubs were another matter.

  Still, music was all around him. Less than a mile from the KCNC studios, in a red-brick building on a hill, a stern band director who hated jazz named G. A. Baxter was turning out a generation of high school students at I. M. Terrell High School who would reinterpret and redefine American soul and jazz music. IMT was the “colored” high school for African Americans in Fort Worth, which, like all other cities in the South, remained staunchly segregated down to the water fountains at the “Monkey Wards” (Montgomery Ward department store).

  The first notable out of this parallel universe, a slight, small-framed saxophonist named Ornette Coleman, was already on the path toward recording an album for Atlantic Records titled The Shape of Jazz to Come, which would set jazz and the greater arts scene in New York on their collective ears for decades. In his footsteps was another saxophonist who played in a full-bodied style, named Curtis Ousley, who would achieve fame as King Curtis, the honker behind Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Nat King Cole, Wilson Pickett, the Coasters, and Buddy Holly. The guitarist Cornell Dupree played behind many of the same Atlantic stars. Jazz legends Charles Moffett, John Carter, Prince Lasha, Dewey Redmond, Julius Hemphill, and Ronald Shannon Jackson all came out of the same school.

  Music knew no color lines, and good music wasn’t found just in Fort Worth. Thirty miles east in Dallas, Lefty Frizzell, Ray Price, Jim Reeves, Marty Robbins, and Billy Walker were recording monster country and western hits at Jim Beck’s homemade studio on Ross Avenue. Don Law of Columbia Records was taking all his acts, including Carl Smith, to Beck’s, who got a better sound on musicians than did the Decca studio in Nashville that Owen Bradley built. Beck, a disc jockey on KSKY, augmented the Ampex recorders in his studio with equipment he and his partner, Leo Teel, put together themselves. Audio buffs regarded him to be as forward-thinking as the engineers over at Texas Instruments who’d designed the first transistor radio in 1954, and as innovative as Les Paul, Robert Moog, and Rupert Neve would become in audio engineering technology. Had he lived, Dallas perhaps would have become the capital of country music, not Nashville. But in 1956, the fastidious Beck was cleaning his tape machines with carbon tetrachloride solvent when he passed out from the fumes and died of asphyxiation.

  Studio or no studio, Dallas was a music scene unto itself, and occasionally Willie would drive over to check out the action. “There was a big difference between Dallas and Fort Worth,” he said. “You noticed the change somewhere around Grand Prairie, it got a little more high-falutin’. Fort Worth was still a Cowtown and wanted to stay that way.”

  Willie and Joe Andrews, his old buddy from Bud Fletcher and the Texans, would sit in with Leo Teel and his band at Danceland at Corinth and Industrial, or with whoever was playing the Aragon or Bob Wills’ Ranch House, a three-thousand-seat ballroom that became Dewey Groom’s Longhorn Ballroom.

  On Saturday nights, Willie and Joe could check out the Big D Jamboree, the country “barn dance” staged inside the wrestling ring of the Sportatorium, a tin-sided sixty-three-hundred-seat arena at the corner of Cadiz and Industrial that also hosted wrestling and gospel shows. The “Home of the Hillbillies” had been a springboard for Lefty Frizzell, Ray Price, Charlene Arthur, and Billy Walker, among others.

  The Big D also played to the emerging rock-and-roll audience by featuring young rockabillies—hillbillies playing that newfangled rock and roll, which was really honky-tonk and swing music on speed. The Jamboree’s stars included Ronnie Dee, the “Blond Bomber” later known as Ronnie Dawson, as well as teen heartthrob Johnny Carroll, “Groovy” Joe Poovey, Sid King & His Five Strings, the Belew Twins, and Gene Vincent, who relocated to Dallas after his biggest hit, “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” and was managed by the Sportatorium’s Ed McLemore.

  The main drawing card every week w
as a major star from the Grand Ole Opry or its rival Louisiana Hayride, someone like Johnny Horton, Webb Pierce, Carl Perkins, Carl Smith, Roy Orbison, or Johnny Cash. After the broadcast, the act would go next door and play Dewey Groom’s Longhorn Ballroom, the “Number One Country Dancehall in Dallas,” for the rest of the night.

  When he couldn’t be at the Big D, Willie heard it on KRLD 1080 radio, whose nighttime signal covered most of Texas. “Johnny Hicks was the master of ceremonies, him and Hal Horton,” Willie said. “At one time or another, most everybody worked on the Big D Jamboree. I wanted to be on it. ’Course I wanted to be anywhere there was a crowd or an audience or somebody that would listen. You did for the exposure, to say you played the Big D Jamboree. It was something you could use, but there wasn’t a lot of money there.”

  The money was at joints like the Southern Club in a pasture off Greenville Avenue, Deb’s out on Highway 80 on the Grand Prairie strip, and the Top Rail and the Star Lite, out on 114 toward Grapevine, where Willie would sit in with the house bands in the hope of getting work.

  “The first thing I learned when he came down and sat in with me was not to play guitar when he sang,” said Leo Teel, who helped build Jim Beck’s studio and had recorded for Decca. “Lawsy me, he moved that meter around. I was used to playing on the one, two, three count. Willie would mess with that count. If you let him sit in, surrender your guitar ’cause he’ll move that beat around. When he plays guitar, he’ll wait till that last little moment to put a tag on it.”

  TV was broadening country music’s horizons more than Elvis and his wiggling hips. The Big D Jamboree was broadcast on KRLD-TV. The Ozark Jubilee, a barn dance in Springfield, Missouri, starring Red Foley and a cast that included long tall Porter Wagoner, the mustachioed Hawkshaw Hawkins, Arlie Duff, and instrumentalist Grady Martin and His Crossroad Boys, grabbed nationwide exposure when the ABC-TV network began airing the program from eight to nine p.m. on Saturday night. Tennessee Ernie Ford hosted his own variety show on NBC-TV, while the Grand Ole Opry launched its own filmed series sponsored by Falstaff Beer.