The Raychecks’ Polka Band played in the SPJST Halls, the VFW Halls, all the Bohemian dance halls around West, Waco, and Ross. The Bohemians would drink beer and have a hell of a time. The old men would be back in another room playing dominoes, and the kids and the women would be out there dancing. Many of our songs sounded like a Mexican Hat Dance—da da, da da, da da, da da da da da da da. All them drunk Bohemians pounding the floor with their feet, and me on the stage whacking away at my guitar.
Grandmother Nelson started to relent about my career when she discovered I could pick up $8 or $10 a night playing the guitar. It would take me all week to make that much money working in the fields. So Mama Nelson reluctantly let me do it because we needed the money.
For my part, since I had already fucked up more ways than God would let me get by with and wasn’t even ten years old yet, I had in mind that the sky was the limit. You couldn’t go to hell more than once, could you?
My mother Myrle had been on the West Coast, working her way through the Pacific Northwest. She had married another husband and divorced him, too. He couldn’t keep up with her.
My mother and I are just alike.
I never saw my mother when she wasn’t having a good time, laughing, telling jokes. She loved to cook. After I got my own band and went on the road, Mother loved for me to bring the whole band to her house in Yakima, Washington, where she finally settled down. The Northwest meant something strong to my mother. It was about as far as she could go from Searcy County, Arkansas, without jumping in the ocean.
In later years, we’d play Yakima, Spokane, Seattle, and we’d always go to Mother’s house and have dinner. Bring everybody, was my mother’s outlook. Take all the buses and line them up out there, and everybody get off. It didn’t matter whether it was me or Kris or whoever it was—she always loved Ray Price above nearly everybody—Mother would stay up all night and cook and drink and carry on.
When she married her third and last husband, Ken—they came to see Bobbie and Mama and me in Abbott when I was about ten to tell us the news—Mother found something that made her happy and at peace with her wanderlust.
I guess I was in my twenties or thirties when I got this letter from my mother:
Dear Willie,
I fully realize that no wealth or position can endure, unless built upon truth and justice. Therefore I will engage in no transaction which does not benefit all whom it affects.
I will succeed by attracting to myself the forces I wish to use and the cooperation of other people. I will induce others to serve me, because of my willingness to serve others.
I will eliminate hatred, envy, jealousy, selfishness and cynicism by developing love for all humanity because I know that a negative attitude toward others can never bring me success. I will cause others to believe in me because I will believe in them and in my self.
I will sign my name to this formula, commit it to memory, repeat it aloud once a day with full faith that it will gradually influence my thoughts and actions so that I will become a self reliant and successful person.
Myrle M. Harvey
Rt. 8 Box 291 D
Yakima, Washington 98908
And, God love her, that’s the person she was.
Funny How Time Slips Away
Well, hello there, my it’s been a long, long time.
“How’m I doin’?” Oh, I guess that I’m doin fine.
It’s been so long now and it seems that it was only yesterday
Gee, ain’t it funny how time slips away.
How’s your new love, I hope that he’s doin’ fine.
Heard you told him that you’d love him till the end of time.
Now, that’s the same thing that you told me, seems like just the other day.
Gee, ain’t it funny how time slips away.
Gotta go now, guess I’ll see you around,
Don’t know when tho’, never know when I’ll be back in town.
But remember what I tell you, that in time you’re gonna pay,
And it’s surprising how time slips away.
CHAPTER FOUR
I started writing poems when I was five years old. I called them poems because I hadn’t yet learned to communicate the melodies I was hearing inside of me. My poems were songs without melodies.
After I learned to play the guitar, at the age of six, I thought of the songs I composed as poems with melodies. I’m not sure whether I’m a poet or a songwriter. But I do think the first poems I wrote would have turned out to be songs had I known how to set down their melodies.
I was a serious songwriter by the age of eight. One day when I was about eleven, already a veteran of the Bohemian polka band circuit, I was thumbing through a stack of songbooks when the idea struck me that I should have a songbook of my own. Jimmie Rodgers had a songbook. Hank Williams had a songbook. Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael had songbooks. Roy Acuff had a songbook. Obviously there should be a Willie Nelson songbook. This, I decided, would be my brochure. I would hand it out to show people what I had written.
I chose the straighforward title Songs by Willie Nelson, which I artfully printed on the front cover. For the back side of the songbook, I drew a lariat intertwined with the words “Howdy, Pard.” Then I drew eight little cowboy hats on the cardboard and bound the book together with string. Once it was finished, I realized this was not meant for the public. I just wanted to keep it on the table with the songbooks by Jimmie Rodgers and the others I admired.
I haven’t seen the songbook but a couple of times in forty years and yet I remember every lyric to every song in it as if I had written them yesterday. Ain’t it funny how time slips away?
Looking at the songbook now, I see that at the age of eleven I was already a show-business kind of guy, a kid from Abbott claiming to be from the big town—Waco.
CHAPTER FIVE
A few years ago Waylon Jennings was pissed off at me over something or other. Flying down to Austin one day, Waylon wrote a song that went “It don’t matter who lives in Austin, hoss, Bob Wills is still the king.” Waylon sang it in public for the first time at the Austin Opera House before a crowd that had jammed in there shoulder to shoulder so tight that even the fire marshal couldn’t get out. The crowd screamed with surprise when they heard it because they assumed Waylon was putting me down on my own turf. But the truth is, it was just a little jab because Waylon knew I agreed. Bob Wills is still the king.
Back in Abbott when I was thirteen years old, playing in the band that Bobbie’s husband Bud Fletcher had put together, I actually went in pardners with Bud to book the great Bob Wills for a gig at the Oak Lodge, a beer joint with a dance floor over on Lake Whitney. It was the biggest thrill of my life to that point.
Bob Wills was such a big star that he looked like he was made out of wax. He was almost like an animation. Watching him move around, I thought: This guy ain’t real. He had a presence about him. He had an aura so strong it just stunned people. I doubt very seriously if Bob was aware how much that had to do with his popularity. Everyone knows he wasn’t a great fiddle player and he wasn’t a great singer. But he did command respect, no argument about that. It was because of his charisma, his natural ability to take control. When he pointed at you, you played. Bob Wills was more than his music is what I’m saying. Elvis was the same. You had to see him in person to understand his magnetic pull. John the Baptist had the same pull. John the Baptist could sit in one spot for seven days and attract thousands of people.
The main thing is to attract people. I do it. I always thought that’s what a musician was supposed to do—try to draw a crowd to hear you play. I started out thinking I want to draw attention to myself, and it was inevitable that it happened because of the power of my creative imagination.
Bob Wills taught me how to be a bandleader and how to be a star. He would hit the bandstand at 8 P.M. and stay for four hours without a break. One song would end, he’d count four and hit another one. There was no time wasted between songs. I learned from him to k
eep the people moving and dancing. That way, you don’t lose their attention, plus your amplifiers drown out whatever the drunks might yell. The more you keep the music going, the smoother the evening will be.
Another thing he taught me was people came and paid their money to hear what they wanted to hear. Even if Bob had a mediocre band that night, the people knew his records and his radio shows and they heard what they thought Bob Wills sounded like. Whether he had a good night or a bad night, every night was a good night.
Western swing was just about the only kind of country music you could hear in the state of Texas until Hank Williams came along. Western swing was jazz, any way you want to look at it. It was jazz riffs inside a country lyric with a 4/4 beat behind it. That was the Bob Wills beat that made everybody get up off their ass and dance all night long.
There were probably a dozen road bands in Texas playing western swing when I was a kid. They all played Bob Wills songs. There was Adolph Hoffner, Easy Adams, Texas Tophand, Dewey Groom, Hoyle Nicks, Spade Cooley—he was California western swing—Olie Rasmussen and the Nebraska Cornhuskers with Teddy Wiles on feature vocals. They all copied Bob Wills. The bandleaders used the same structure as Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. If Bob was carrying two fiddles, everybody else got two fiddles. If he had three, they’d go hire another fiddle player.
Bob sometimes carried a girl singer with him—like Ramona Reed or Laura Lee McBride—who could sing upbeat songs, not ballads, and yodel. He hired only female yodelers. Every musician’s eye was on him because when he pointed his fiddle bow at you, you’d better be ready to jump in and do something. Bob allowed his musicians to take individual breaks and do their stuff. He tried to make stars out of everybody on the bandstand. He mentioned their names on records—like “Take it away, Leon,” which made Leon McAuliffe famous. Bob didn’t do many lead vocals. He’d stand there and smoke his cigar and wear his big white hat while Tommy Duncan sang, but everybody knew Bob was directing the band.
When you learned a Bob Wills song, you also learned the exact arrangements because they were so good. They were head arrangements of jazz riffs which the musicians would put together and add three- and four-part harmonies. The arrangements didn’t change. They were group things that maybe Elton Shamblin or Tiny Moore or Johnny Gimble had as much to do with as Bob. He knew he wasn’t the best musician, but he knew he was the best bandleader and could turn out the best sound. I tried to steal all the licks I could from his good musicians. I still do Bob’s “Bubbles in My Beer” and “Stay a Little Longer.”
There are a lot of old guys doing Bob’s tunes nowadays. But young guys do them, too. Like Ray Benson and Asleep at the Wheel. They do Bob Wills songs exactly like Bob did. It’s like going back forty years in time for me to hear Asleep at the Wheel.
When Bob went on the Grand Ole Opry he was already a huge star in Texas but not so much in Nashville. Nashville musicians in those days were mostly bluegrass. The Opry told Bob he couldn’t use his drums, so he refused to appear. Finally they said he could use his drums. Then Bob went onstage with his cigar in his mouth. They told him not to smoke on the stage, and he walked off again. So far as I know, that was his one and only appearance on the Opry.
How western swing started was men like Milton Brown using jazz and blues musicians to play the songs they had written. It came out western swing. Before Bob Wills became popular, the big men were Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jack Teagarden, Duke Ellington. White people used to go hear the black blues. Whites were the only ones who could afford to go to the clubs where the black blues musicians worked—and of course most of the clubs were segregated, anyhow. A white could go to a black club if he had the guts to buy a ticket, but a black couldn’t go to a white club unless he wanted his head busted.
Poor Bob wasn’t any better at business than I am. He had several managers and agents and bookers and thieves hanging around. He was too good-hearted ever to accumulate much. When you’re the leader of a ten- or twelve-piece band, you have a lot of families to support. If Bob didn’t work, a whole bunch of people didn’t eat. There was always someone who needed money and Bob would always give it to them. He had more important things to think about than money. Bob finally died broke. I don’t think it really bothered him to go out like that. He saw plenty of money in his life, but he didn’t try to take it with him.
Probably he intends to come back and get it.
A musician always has periods of being between gigs, which means out of work. You’ve got to be very imaginative during times of no gigs. Up in Fort Worth in the fifties it wasn’t all that uncommon for musicians to become gamblers or burglars or pimps or used car salesmen between shows. But there was no way to make a living out of crime in Abbott. They didn’t allow crime in Abbott.
So one day I got one of my brilliant business ideas. I went to Frank Clements, who still cuts hair in Abbott to this day, and sugggested I set up a shoe-shine franchise in his barbershop. My gimmick was I would sing the song of the customer’s choice after I polished his boots or shoes.
The way I figured it, my fame as an entertainer would spread, because downtown Abbott and the barbershop were on the Interurban line that ran from Dallas to Waco. The Interurban was a great thing, an electric train that carried people up and down Texas and back and forth between cities like Dallas and Fort Worth before the government started paving the country with interstate highways after World War II. As much as I love hopping into my car and driving fast and feeling free, the old Interurban was a cheap, easy way to travel. Go to Switzerland today and you’ll find the country crisscrossed with electric trains like our old Interurban.
The Interurban Station in Abbott was close to the cotton gin as well as the barbershop, the cafe, the churches and the elementary school. I thought people would come pouring off the Interurban to do business and be drawn like flies to honey by the sound of my voice and the sharp crack of my shoe-shine rag.
After the first day’s operation of Booger Red’s Shine n’ Sing, I went to Mr. Clements to collect my share of the gate.
He gave me fifty cents.
“This ain’t right,” I said. “You must owe me at least two dollars.”
“Willie, I didn’t even make two dollars today my own self,” Mr. Clements said.
I closed up shop and went to work baling hay.
But Bud Fletcher, who was tall and good-looking and slicker than bacon grease, started talking club owners into hiring our band on a fairly steady basis. We would play any kind of music the club wanted, whether we knew how or not. Sometimes we didn’t succeed and were never invited back. Usually, though, we were a hit. If we didn’t know the music they requested, we would fake it. It wasn’t that hard. Bud didn’t know hardly any music at all, but Bobbie knew nearly everything from “Stardust” to “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” and I was learning more music every day.
Bobbie and I had been well grounded in music by our grandparents. Dad and Mom Nelson told us how the fiddle and the mandolin and the guitar had always dominated the old folk music gatherings like sewing bees or barn raisings or picnics. The oldest country music recordings I heard were fiddle bands like Sid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, and the Fiddling John Carson group. When solo vocalists started making records, they didn’t seem to care much about instrumentation. They were backed by just a guitar or two and maybe a fiddle. It wasn’t until the 1930s that you heard a full band playing on a country record.
Musicians moved from the country to the cities and took their country music with them but wrote songs about city life. When they returned to the country, they brought their experience of Memphis blues or New Orleans ragtime and jazz or maybe the wild mix of music styles of Dallas’s famous Deep Ellum Street.
It never occurred to my grandparents that music could make money. Except for minstrels or traveling medicine shows, music was played for fun and for spiritual purposes. The radio and the recording industry changed all that.
No single person did more to make country music popular all
over America than Ralph Peer of RCA Victor. Peer was a New Yorker, but he took portable recording machines into the South and set up studios in hotel rooms. Peer was the first to record Fiddling John Carson, who surprised RCA Victor by selling a lot of records and showing there was a big audience for country music. Peer set up his studio in Bristol on the Tennessee-Virginia border and invited country performers to audition. Over a period of what might be the four most important days in country music history, Peer made the first recordings of both the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers.
Jimmie Rodgers was the original country superstar. He died of tuberculosis the year I was born. But even before Jimmie Rodgers, a fellow who called himself Vernon Dalhart picked up a national audience on RCA Victor. Dalhart grew up in East Texas as Marion Slaughter and went to New York City to record for Edison as an opera singer. He convinced RCA Victor to let him make what was then known as a “hillbilly” record. Slaughter chose a stage name by combining two Texas towns—Vernon and Dalhart—and cut the two songs “Wreck of the Old 97” and “The Prisoner’s Song.” That record sold an unbelievable six million copies. Vernon Dalhart went on recording for every new record company that popped up, singing under twenty or thirty different names.
The big radio stations started “barn-dance” programs on WSB in Atlanta, WLS in Chicago, WBAP in Fort Worth, and WSM in Nashville, where the Grand Ole Opry began in 1925. Most of it was live music in the early days, before the radio stations and record companies realized they weren’t competitors but were, instead, in bed together. By the time I started living with my ear against our Philco, the giant X radio stations were in full swing just across the border in Mexico. These stations, which all had X in their call letters, were 150,000 watts. Their signals reached all over the United States and much of Canada. The X stations broadcast country and gospel music along with a crowd of evangelist preachers. You could tune in any time of night and hear the Carter Family, the Chuck Wagon Gang, or the Stamps Quartet.
Willie Page 6