TV brought Paul Buskirk—whom Willie had seen play at the Round Up in Dallas—into sharper focus. Buskirk played banjo weekdays at WBAP-TV, Channel 5, on a local variety program called Jones Place. Neal Jones’s presentation of “Comedy, Humor, Philosophy” aired from noon to 12:45 p.m. but started fifteen minutes earlier in 1955, when it was presented “in living COLOR.” That allowed Willie enough time to watch and listen to Buskirk before going on the air with his Western Express show. A renowned stringed instrumentalist from Parkersburg, West Virginia, Buskirk was equally proficient on mandolin, guitar, and dobro, as well as banjo, and possessed a broad knowledge of all different kinds of music like no one Willie Hugh Nelson had ever met, and that included Alfred and Nancy Nelson.
Back home in the Appalachian hills, Buskirk was frequently compared to Bill Monroe. He grew up under the tutelage of the famed bluegrass duo Johnny and Jack. He followed the Callahan Brothers to Texas, where they all became radio stars as the Blue Ridge Mountain Folk, broadcasting radio shows aired in Texas and Kansas while recording for Decca, the crème de la crème of country music record labels. Buskirk had played with everyone from Roy Acuff and Chet Atkins to jazz drummer Art Blakey. He was knocking around the same country joints in Fort Worth, Dallas, Waco, and San Antonio as Willie was when they first met.
Buskirk introduced Willie to the singer in his band, a scrawny, scruffily handsome young man named Freddy Powers. He’d come from Seminole, Texas, a hardpan, sparsely inhabited piece of flat, dry scrub. Paul told Freddy that Willie was writing some interesting pop songs and shared their interest in Western Swing and swing in general. “There was a lot of swing going on because of Bob Wills and Hank Thompson,” Freddy said. “Playing the nightclubs, we had to play it all because of them. Paul turned me on to Django [Reinhardt]. He had the whole Django catalog. Swing musicians and jazz musicians considered him a hero.”
Freddy could tell Paul was mentoring Willie too. If someone wanted to talk music or theory or exotic sounds, Paul loved engaging them. He’d quickly gleaned the small kid from down around Waco was hungry to learn, and Paul was glad to assist. “Paul had the connections that Willie didn’t,” Powers explained. “Paul helped him because he had a lot of respect for Willie.”
Paul occasionally joined Willie and his guitarist Oliver English and drummer Tommy Roznosky on Willie’s Western Express radio show on KCNC in Fort Worth. Freddy Powers visited Willie in the studio several times, often plugging the latest Paul Buskirk 45 on Lin Records, the small label out of Gainesville near the Oklahoma line. He saw what Buskirk saw, and heard what Buskirk heard. “I was pretty much impressed with his songs,” Freddy said.
Paul cut a track on a song Willie had written called “Heartaches of a Fool,” with Freddy singing vocals, at Jim Beck’s, but the recording was never released. At least his songs were good enough for someone else to record.
In his own quiet way, Oliver English, Willie’s lead guitar on the radio, was as much an influence as Paul Buskirk. He was the grandson of a champion fiddler and had worked most of the joints a musician could work in Fort Worth, including Rosa’s and Stella’s on East Belknap, where Freddy Powers used to sit in, the Crystal Springs Pavillion, the Casino Ballroom on Lake Worth (“a job everyone hated to play because you had to wear monkey suits”), Jimmy’s Westland Club out on Highway 80 West toward Weatherford, and all the joints up and down the Jacksboro Highway and the Mansfield Highway, where the featured entertainment was “Live Band Tonight.”
After the clubs closed, Oliver would sit in at the New Jim Hotel downtown, the “colored” hotel where black touring musicians stayed when they were playing in North Texas. “You had to be careful and know the right people or they’d roll you,” Oliver said. “You wanted to have some black friends.” The reward was getting to play with some of the finest road bands, black or white, on earth.
Oliver learned to play a little bit of everything and a whole lot of Western Swing, usually doing four sets a night from eight until midnight, except at the Westland Club, where they went till sunrise. “We didn’t make much money,” he said. “Nobody did. A musician in it for the money was in the wrong business.”
For Oliver, music was its own reward. “When I was at the Westland Club, from eight to twelve, we’d play country. From twelve to four in the morning, we’d play jazz. Everybody back then liked Django Reinhardt and the Hot Club of France. I idolized him when I was a little kid.” Oliver turned Willie on to Django. Willie helped Oliver whenever he could. “If Willie had ten dollars, he’d give someone five if they needed it. He didn’t have anything, but he’d give you half of what he had.”
Willie was learning a lot and making enough at sales to move Martha and Lana out of Ira and Lorraine’s house into their own rent house out toward Arlington. But he still wasn’t satisfied. What Willie really wanted, Oliver realized, was to be understood and not get too distracted. If someone offered him a shot of whiskey, he’d drink it and keep drinking until the bottle was gone, which led to nights when he didn’t come home. He took his first knowing drag off a marijuana cigarette behind a building on East Belknap. “I didn’t realize it until then that I’d already smoked marijuana before as a kid with my cousin who had asthma,” he said. “The doctor had given him some cigarettes and while we were fishing out on the creek bank, he brought out one of these asthma cigarettes, and I took a couple of puffs. That smell stayed with me for the years later when I first ran into what was really pot.” A lot of musician friends smoked. “I was smoking for six months before I realized I was getting high.”
But the presence of family kept him out of serious trouble. Between Martha and Lana, Ira’s family, and Bobbie Lee’s family, who moved to Fort Worth along with Mamma Nelson to live with Aunt Rosie and Uncle Ernest in White Settlement, there were plenty of kinfolk with an eye on him.
SISTER Bobbie thought she had lost her way. She had divorced Bud Fletcher, and after Bud’s influential parents went to court early in 1955, they won custody of Randy, Freddy, and Michael Fletcher, leading Bobbie to suffer a nervous breakdown. When she recovered and regained custody of her boys, she headed to Fort Worth to find work and raise her sons. “I thought I couldn’t play music anymore. It was sad,” she said. She found a job in a TV repair shop and enrolled at Brantley Business College to learn secretarial skills. “I had to find a way to raise my children and make as much money as I could,” she said.
When she completed secretarial school, she went to the Texas Employment Commission. “I was the only person at the employment agency who was a pianist and a stenographer,” she said. The Shield Company called to ask if she would work as a stenographer in the organ department and be trained to teach the new Hammond electric organ. Bobbie needed no persuading. “I could go back into music,” she said. “I played pump organ but this was a different thing. Me and my boys started going to Edge Park Methodist Church. They bought a little spinet organ from Hammond. I started playing for the church. Willie and his father and his wife went to Metropolitan Baptist Church. That’s where Willie taught Sunday School until they told him he couldn’t. He had to choose between playing music in bars or teaching Sunday School. He chose to play music.”
Bobbie’s job for Hammond Organ led to evening demonstrations at the El Chico Mexican restaurant and Wyatt’s Cafeteria. “They trained me to play organs there and all the grocery stores [Buddie’s], the Stock Show, Home Show, Boat Show,” she said. “I was the person on the little carousel going around and around, talking to people about how easy [playing organ] is to do. I sold organs. I taught organ. There were three teachers, and I wound up teaching the other teachers. And I’m the organist at Edge Park Methodist Church. They had their own sanctuary by this time. I sold them the big concert model.”
Just as Bobbie was getting settled, her brother came down with a bad case of itchy feet. If Fort Worth was the first place where his career showed potential, it was also the first place where he learned hard lessons about making a living playing music. He’d been raised
to play music. But the truth was, the few dollars he made were earned because he sold beer and sometimes provided cover for gambling. No one was paying attention to all the songs he was writing. He risked getting beat up for not smiling when he was informed there wasn’t any money to pay him at the end of the night, or getting his head split open behind a beer joint just for saying something nice to a pretty young lady from the bandstand.
Even with Martha waitressing, it was still tough making ends meet. He had grown sick of old man Speck barging into the control room whenever he heard a record being played that he didn’t like, knocking the tone arm off the turntable, picking up the offensive record, smashing it to pieces, and stomping out of the room. An asshole like Jim Speck was all the convincing he needed to conclude KCNC was a dead-end gig. And Martha coming down hard on him for staying out and paying no mind to her or their daughter was just bacon grease poured on the fire.
For Willie, a change of scene might make it all better.
Vancouver, Washington, 1956
MYRLE NEVER LEFT Willie’s life. She came back to Texas often to visit her children as they were growing up, but never stayed long, always heading west again. Ever since his discharge from the air force, Myrle had encouraged her son to come play music in Oregon, where she’d put down roots in Eugene and married her third husband, Ken Harvey. Several times, he had obliged her.
With Myrle’s help and encouragement, while Willie was working at KCNC in Fort Worth, he sent a demo tape to Grandpappy Smith, the man to see when it came to country and western music in Eugene, Oregon. Grandpappy owned the Melody Ranch dance hall and was bandleader of the Western Valley Boys, the Melody Ranch house band, and hosted a show on KASH radio. He also had a small recording empire going on, with two record labels, Orbit Sound (for country acts) and Willamette Records, and a song publishing company, Myrtle Mountain Publishing.
The demo reel began with an introduction from Willie and the promise that if Grandpappy didn’t like the songs, he had fifty more. The first song was “One Time,” followed by “When I’ve Sang My Last Hillbilly Song,” “Just a Million Years,” “Maybe You’ll Know,” and “Born to Be Blue.” Willie was still singing “The Storm Has Just Begun” when the tape ran out.
Grandpappy liked the demo well enough to book Willie at the Melody Ranch in May 1955. Grandpappy’s twelve-year-old son, Leon Smith, played lead guitar behind him on the dates. Grandpappy liked Willie, but not enough to offer a recording contract or more bookings.
When Willie left Fort Worth, he didn’t go to Oregon but instead headed for sunny San Diego. California was a land of opportunity, he had heard, and San Diego’s climate was close to ideal, with warm days in the winter and summer nights cool enough you could sleep outside. Willie’s cowboy movie heroes Gene and Roy were in Southern California—Gene Autry was one of the biggest developers of land between Los Angeles and San Diego.
Westward movement had grown in number and desperation during the Dust Bowl drought that decimated much of North Texas and the Great Plains during the 1930s, and a quest for prosperity following World War II prompted the next great migration wave, which Willie joined. San Diego sounded good to him. He felt confident he could get work playing music and possibly score a disc jockey job; Charlie Williams, the DJ he replaced at KCNC in Fort Worth, found work on a country radio station in Los Angeles, just up the road from San Diego.
Willie hit walls from the moment he arrived. The most imposing barrier was the Musicians Union. You couldn’t play music in California without joining the Musicians Union, and you couldn’t join the union without paying for your membership. Without gigs, he didn’t have the means to scrape together the fee, and no radio station was looking for new talent.
Broke, busted, and running out of options, he finally accepted his mother’s invitation to come stay with her in Portland, Oregon. She had moved there and was tending bar at a local tavern in nearby St. Helen’s. The idea of a roof over his head felt pretty good. Even better, his mother knew the lay of the local country music scene and all the good dance bands in the area. Willie hustled a job as a plumber’s helper to bring home a paycheck and started looking for real work.
If there was a stereotypical character of the Northwest, it was the lumberjack, the big tough physical man of the woodlands, trained to fell as many tall trees as he could to render into timber. Many of the people who worked in the woods came from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and across the South.
But though the Pacific Northwest was about as far removed as it could be from where country music was manufactured and marketed and still be in the United States, its clubs and dance halls were jammed and jumping with customers with money to burn from the logging, railroad, shipbuilding, and shipping industries, abundant fruit orchards and grain farms, several large military bases, and general construction.
The stars performing in the dance halls and clubs were touring artists and regional talent, including T. Texas Tyler from the Lone Star state, Rusty Draper, Bud Isaacs, Rose Maddox, and a popular Pullayup, Washington, disc jockey named Buck Owens. Records were being made and played in the Northwest too. One local hero from Spokane named Charlie Ryan had scored a monster hit with his Timberline Riders two years before Willie arrived, a bopped-up cover version of Arkie Shibley’s “Hot Rod Race” song about car racing, retitled “Hot Rod Lincoln.”
Portland was the largest city in the northwest, with a population of 412,100 in 1957 and almost a million souls living in the metropolitan area. Hundreds of taverns in and beyond the city functioned as community hangouts, many featuring country music. The lush scenery, the volcanic soil that produced bountiful crops, and the bright lights of the big city had spoken to the roaming gal from Arkansas and Texas with a wild streak a mile long. Now they were speaking to her son. “Well, it rained a lot, but I didn’t really mind that,” he said. “I enjoyed the greenery and the fruit. It was apple country and fruit country.”
Martha got waitress work at Fran’s Café in Portland, and Myrle tipped Willie to a job at a radio station in Vancouver, Washington, fifteen miles from downtown Portland. Vancouver was a good town for a country music radio station. It was Portland’s smaller, more rural sibling, much like Fort Worth was to Dallas, less than one-fourth the size of Oregon’s largest city, although locals liked to point out that Fort Vancouver, from which Vancouver had sprung, was the oldest European settlement in the Pacific Northwest, established as a fur trading post and headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Willie’s friendly, authentic drawl, his experience at KBOP, KDNT, and KCNC, and his increasingly effective ability to sell himself, as he’d learned to do peddling Bibles, encyclopedias, and vacuum cleaners, scored him a shift on KVAN AM 910. KVAN’s “instant radio in Ear-O-Phonic Sound . . . first in the metropolitan Portland/Vancouver area” station already boasted an all-star cast of disc jockeys, including Shorty the Hired Hand, Cactus Ken DuBord, who fronted his own band, the Trail Riders, and Pat Mason, a promoter of Grand Ole Opry package shows, who ran Wagon Wheel Park, a big dance hall outside Camas, Washington, east of Vancouver, where touring country acts frequently played.
The station’s new boy was touted as a very big deal in newspaper print ads.
A photograph depicted Willie looking suave, wearing a striped shirt and a convincing smile. Opposite the photo was a cartoon drawing of a donkey standing on its hind legs holding a guitar and looking at Willie’s image, asking, “Who, Him?”
“Why, he’s yer cotton-pickin’, snuff-dippin’, tobaccer-chewin’, stump-jumpin’, gravy-soppin’, coffee-pot-dodgin’, dumplin’-eatin’, frog-giggin’, hillbilly from Hill County, Texas . . .
“WILLIE NELSON!
“Just rode into town to take over his own show on KVAN . . . an’ this young fella fits right in, here at the station with the sense of humor. See that pan-handled description up there? Them’s his very own words! Willie’s got wit, warmth and wow . . . and once you hear ‘Western Express’ you’ll agree!
“He’s no ne
wcomer to radio though. Been entertaining folks since he was sweet 15 . . . and for the past 3½ years, he’s been a big name in Ft. Worth on station KCNC. But now he’s moved ‘kit ’n kaboodle’ to Portland. An’ ya know what? He likes rain!
“You’ll like him . . . an’ you’ll get your ‘enjoys’ listening to Texas Willie Nelson on ‘Western Express,’ 2:30 to 3:30 Monday through Saturday on KVAN.
“KVAN 910 on your dial.
“The station with the sense of humor.”
Unlike at KCNC, he stuck to playing records without singing and picking along with them. He selected the music he played during his show by relying on personal taste and street sense. “I grabbed some records I wanted to play—and they were all good records—and went into the studio and surprised myself,” Willie explained of his programming methodology. “No one was telling me what to do.”
When he wasn’t on the air, he sought out businesses and promoters throughout the greater Portland-Vancouver area to sell them airtime on his Western Express show and other KVAN programs. He was selling Willie Nelson too.
Willie played to the image he’d created for himself, making personal appearances dressed in fringed buckskin and moccasins and wearing a holster around his hips with two pistols (the guns were plugged), an outfit influenced by the hugely popular Walt Disney version of Davy Crockett as played by fellow Texan Fess Parker.
Once he could float enough credit, he embellished the image by driving around in a red Cadillac convertible. He bought a cut proud palomino from the radio station’s engineer Leo Erickson and joined the Sheriff’s Posse so he could ride in parades on his steed. It sure beat the cow he used to ride in Abbott.
Willie Nelson Page 8