I Lived to Tell It All Read online

  Not much remains of the places where we lived when I was growing up. The old houses have fallen down, and their remains were sold for the price of used lumber. Someone walking through the thick woods of East Texas today who happened on the spot of one of my homes would have no idea that nine people once made a living and had a life there. A visitor might rest against a certain oak and wonder out loud about seven names, faded by time, that were carved in its trunk long ago.

  Chapter 3

  His name was Jake Marino, he’s dead, and he’s just one of the dozens of musicians I played with when I was hustling jobs in the bars around Beaumont. I had gone to Beaumont as a teenager with my dad as he followed the logging and other common labor trails.

  On this particular night, Jake and I were playing Lola’s and Shorty’s, a roadside rough house on Beaumont’s Pine Street where customers routinely danced as couples, drank in groups, and clobbered each other one blow at a time. Some folks occasionally looked twice at someone lying on the floor to see if he was passed out—or knocked out.

  At Lola’s and Shorty’s, if you didn’t have a gun, you were given one as you walked through the door. Not really, but that statement comes close to describing the atmosphere inside the rural Texas honky-tonks of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

  Jake and I were on break between sets. There was no backstage area, so there was no getting away from the crowd. We stood eye level to the people when playing or when on break. We therefore became part of the group as drunks rushed to us to slur their words and breathe their booze while accidentally spitting into our faces. By the end of the night, the cigarette smoke was often so thick that, from the front, I couldn’t always see people in the back. Even during cool weather the room was warm from so many dancing bodies pressed so closely together.

  On this particular night I kept seeing one man. And I hadn’t seen him before.

  From working Lola’s and Shorty’s and other lawless joints, I learned to look over my shoulder at the people behind me while somehow looking at the people in front of me. I had mastered the art of silent self-protection.

  The guy in question was walking among everybody but still somehow seemed to be alone. Curious, I approached him, and found out what I had suspected was true. He was there to repossess my car because I was two payments behind on the note, held by a credit company in Beaumont. The firm had sent him, a stranger, because I would have recognized one of the regular collectors.

  “Are you here to take my car?” I asked him pointblank.

  “Yep,” he said. “I am. You’re behind on your payments.”

  “What’s it to you?” I asked. “You don’t even work for the company that holds the note.”

  He tried to explain, and one thing led to another. In seconds I was on top of him. I was hitting him hard, and that accelerated the flow of blood.

  Mine.

  Consumed with beating him, I hadn’t felt him stab me. Perhaps he used a straight razor because the blade was sharp enough to penetrate my heavy leather coat, even though it was the type of thick Western wear you don’t often see today.

  My buddy Willie saw him cut me, and my buddy Newt pulled the guy off me after busting his jaw. I lay on the ground, waiting for an ambulance to rock me over patchy two-lane highways to the hospital. The bottles and tubes above my head inside the swaying vehicle moved with every seam in the concrete. From my cot I stared at the ceiling, not knowing how much blood I had lost and perhaps just drunk enough not to care. I didn’t realize how close I had come to leaving my life on the parking lot at Lola’s and Shorty’s.

  Being cut that severely left a strange sensation. On one hand, I could feel the warmth of my blood seeping into the thick bandages. Outside my body, though, the blood quickly became room temperature and felt cold pressed by the bandage against my skin. The ambulance attendant kept telling me I was going to be fine, but I knew he said that to every patient, no matter how badly injured.

  That incident was a long time ago. But one never forgets the feeling when he truly wonders if he is going to die. And on that cot I had fleeting thoughts that the inside of that battered ambulance would be the last thing I’d ever see.

  Ninety stitches were required to stop the bleeding from a slash whose scar wraps around my waist to this day. For that night, I had all I ever wanted of fistfights, ambulances, booze, and bleeding. Little did I know I had not nearly gotten it all behind me.

  I was about twenty years old when I was stabbed. But I began singing in those hell-bent-for-leather dives when I was about fourteen. One of my first playing partners was Dalton Henderson, and we performed days at KTXJ in Jasper, Texas, fifty-eight miles north of Beaumont. We worked nights in joints for a couple of bucks, then he and I stayed with his parents.

  Dalton was a big part of my personal history in another way. The first time I ever got drunk I did so with Dalton and some other boys whose names I can’t remember. I don’t remember a whole lot about the ordeal because it was so long ago and because I got so loaded. We were riding in an old car and someone opened a bottle of whiskey. I remember being about two or three miles outside of Jasper in a pasture and throwing up. I was so drunk that I didn’t notice I was standing in cow shit. I fell in it.

  I remember trying to stand up and falling back down several times—literally “falling down drunk.” The other boys and I were covered with cow shit when the highway patrol got us. That deal earned me four days as the guest of Jasper County. I don’t remember what kind of county clothes I wore in jail, but I’ll bet I was glad to get them. They weren’t spotted with cow shit.

  Shortly before I worked with Dalton I played with the Reily Trio, made up of a brother, his wife, and his sister. That was at KFDM in Beaumont, where we did a live show at 5:30 A.M. That job didn’t last very long because I couldn’t stand getting up that early and because the Reilys left Beaumont to play in the band of Lefty Frizzell, the country music legend who had big hits on Starday Records before I later joined the label.

  Those morning radio shows were totally unlike anything you’d hear today. The entertainers performed live and acknowledged letters and the people who wrote them. Many listeners mailed song requests because they couldn’t call the station. There weren’t any telephones in rural East Texas in 1945. An announcer read the news along with farm-to-market reports about the price of grain or livestock. He also read obituaries of those who had died the previous day and told what funeral homes were handling their services. Predawn radio that reached the Texas countryside was not just a source of entertainment. Back then it was the listeners’ link to the world.

  And it made local celebrities out of the musicians who played over its airwaves. When I was fourteen, there were no bigger stars to me than the husband-and-wife radio duo Eddie and Pearl.

  Along with their broadcast they also performed live at drive-in restaurants where people ate in their cars while listening to Eddie strum a guitar and blow a harmonica as Pearl played upright bass. I had recently bought a new flattop guitar and mounted an electric pickup inside. A buddy and I were sitting in his car listening to the music and watching people eat when he decided he would ask Eddie if I could play with him and Pearl.

  Eddie said it was okay, and I tuned my guitar to his during one of his breaks. He told me what he was going to play, and I must have impressed him because I knew everything he did, which was mostly Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb songs. I had listened to him regularly over KRIC in Beaumont.

  I had also gone to hear them a few times earlier at the Playground Park, an amusement park for children. The price of admission was ten cents. I remember because the price of a movie was nine cents plus two cents for tax.

  The first time I played with Eddie and Pearl I didn’t sing a note. I only played lead guitar. Later, when Eddie found out I could sing, he let me take the vocal part every now and then. Playing with people who played on the radio was a big deal to me. A real big deal. Soon I was working with them four nights a week in dance halls, plus one hour a day,
five days a week on the radio, and playing the amusement park with them on weekends. That schedule paid me $17.50 a week plus room and board. I lived with other folks a lot as a teenage musician. And with Eddie and Pearl I probably worked more and earned less than at any other time in my life. I even remember our schedule being extended to playing six nights a week. I don’t remember my pay going up.

  We’d do three or four long sets each night, fighting to be heard above the drunks who were often fighting each other.

  Doing that night after night took its toll on me. I can imagine how tiring it was to Eddie, who was older and had a fondness for whiskey. A lot of booze and little sleep will wear a man down quickly.

  Eddie must have been real tired one night after we played the Bayou Club, about ten miles outside of Beaumont in the oil development country. He drove around a horseshoe curve that was low in the middle and had a bridge on it. It had rained a lot that night, and the road was under water. Eddie couldn’t see the road, and I guess that’s why he didn’t follow it. It turned, but Eddie went straight—right into the bayou.

  “Eddie, you’re going into the river!” Pearl hollered. “You’re going into the river!”

  Eddie was drunk and kept driving until the water forced the car to stop. Water was over my feet inside the car and over my knees when I stepped out. Eddie went to sleep inside the car with water in his lap while Pearl walked back to the Bayou Club to get someone with a chain.

  Once on higher ground the car started and Pearl drove us home. Eddie continued his nap. By the time we got home Eddie was awake and Pearl was mad. She went straight to the bedroom and wouldn’t fix anything to eat as she usually did after a show.

  So Eddie decided to feed himself. It wasn’t long before Pearl charged back into the kitchen.

  “What are you eating?” she wanted to know.

  “I’m eating this here potted meat!” he shouted. “I’m hungrier than hell!”

  And he kept chomping.

  “That ain’t potted meat!” Pearl yelled. “It’s dog food!”

  He’d been too drunk to notice that he’d eaten half of the dog food in the house.

  I learned a lot from Eddie and Pearl and still have a soft spot in my heart for them. It wasn’t easy for a married couple without straight jobs to make it as musicians on the radio when they didn’t have hit records. Eddie had his faults, but he scuffled enough work to keep them alive.

  I probably can’t say enough about how rough-and-tumble those old beer joints and taverns really were. I remember after I left Eddie and Pearl I played with a guy who sang Ernest Tubbs songs. We ventured over to the Port of Houston on old Highway 90 from Beaumont.

  Ships came into that port, and they were filled with non-English-speaking people. It was hard to communicate with them while they were sober and impossible when they were drunk.

  The club owner literally strung up chicken wire to keep my buddy and me from getting killed from flying beer bottles. A customer might bump another while he was dancing and a fight would explode. Somebody would hit someone who had hit someone else, and soon there would be an outright brawl.

  My buddy and I just kept playing because that’s what the owner told us to do. Meanwhile, the all-out fight continued.

  Bottles sometimes hit the chicken wire and shattered on the concrete floor. People danced on broken glass. At the end of a slow night the janitor swept up the pieces. At the end of a good night he shoveled them.

  I went back to work with Eddie and Pearl and was playing the Playland Park when I noticed a young woman with her parents. She was Dorothy Bonvillion, and she became the first Mrs. George Jones. I talked to Dorothy and her folks after the show, and they invited me to their house for supper.

  My mama had to sign legal papers for me to get married because I was only seventeen. I had no money and no job, and Dorothy’s parents had no patience about that situation. They insisted that we move in with them and that I go to work with Dorothy’s daddy. He made me a house painter.

  I didn’t want to paint houses. In fact, I didn’t want to do anything for a living that didn’t involve music. But that didn’t pay enough to support Dorothy, me, and the baby that was soon on the way. I took a job at a bottling company driving a truck, but that didn’t satisfy me either. Dorothy’s folks treated me like I was a little kid, and the constant pressure of being under their watchful eyes was too much. I wanted to get away.

  So Dorothy and I lived in an apartment for a spell but had to move back in with her parents because we couldn’t afford the rent.

  Due to the pressure from her parents, little money, and our youth, our marriage was probably doomed from the start. Dorothy and I were divorced even before Susan, my first child, was born.

  The judge wanted to know how much I earned, and I estimated about seventy dollars a month. He ordered half of that for child support. I missed my first month’s payment, and by the time I was two months behind I was put in jail. On the fifth night my sister Loyce and her husband bailed me out.

  I still had no money, and that meant I’d be going back to jail, where there isn’t too much financial opportunity. I had no reason to believe I could ever make the child support payment and no reason to think I wouldn’t land right back in jail, where I could do no one any good.

  So I joined the marines.

  It was steady work. I could make a financial allotment for my dependents, and, best of all, I could get out of Texas and the troubles that seemed to follow me there. I was eighteen years old.

  I was stationed in San Jose, California, where I met Cottonseed Clark, a nightclub musician and radio personality who let me sit in with his show one night. I did a Webb Pierce song, and Cotton ate it up. He offered me a job for twenty-five dollars every Saturday night. That’s the most I had ever been guaranteed to earn for one night’s singing.

  I had duty every other weekend, and I had to finagle my way out of it so I could earn my twenty-five dollars. If I could have worked every Saturday night I would have earned one hundred dollars a month, far more than my military pay.

  People have asked what I remember most about the service, and I don’t answer with talk about guns or six-mile hikes and the like. The most vivid memory I have is coming in at four o’clock in the morning on New Year’s Day, 1953, after playing a show. I lay down in the darkness, and the entire barracks was silent except for one voice. It belonged to the guy in the bunk next to mine.

  “Hey,” he said. “Your buddy is dead.”

  I didn’t know who he was talking to or what he was talking about.

  “Hank Williams,” he said. “Hank Williams is dead.”

  He showed me the front page of the newspaper with a headline that screamed that country music’s greatest singer-songwriter had been found dead in the back of a car on the way to a show in Canton, Ohio. That sounded as far away to me as Europe, and I couldn’t believe that someone who was so close to my heart had died in such a distant land. Music was the biggest part of my life, and Hank Williams had been my biggest musical influence. By that thinking you could say he was the biggest part of my life at that time. That’s how personally I took him and his songs. And the composer of the tunes that would live for ages was dead at twenty-nine.

  I lay there and bawled.

  To this day I’m always complaining about the lack of good songs available to recording artists. Nashville has more songwriters writing weaker songs than at any other time. I’ve heard Merle Haggard, Faron Young, and veteran writers such as Jerry Chestnut and Hank Cochran say the same thing. The songs that reach number one today sell one or two million copies but are forgotten in less than a year. Nobody, including me, gets to record songs that are so good their popularity will stand the test of time.

  Today I passed you on the street

  And my heart fell at your feet

  I can’t help it if I’m still in love with you.

  Somebody else stood by your side.

  And he looked so satisfied.

  I can’t he
lp it if I’m still in love with you.

  “I Can’t Help It” was a hit for Hank Williams forty-four years ago. Its lyrics couldn’t be more simple—or more profound. There’s no telling how many hundreds of artists have cut that song. Today a song goes number one for the artist who records it, and no one else ever cuts the tune. No one else wants to. They’d rather write their own rush job, publish it, make a fortune from the popularity of today’s country music, then write more musical mush to repeat the cycle.

  But the songs of Hank, Lefty, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, and a few others will live forever. Not a year goes by when one of those songwriters doesn’t get a new recording or two of one of his timeless compositions.

  When Hank died, I had no idea that his tragic passing would be the first of several among country stars I’d eventually get close to.

  I met Johnny Horton, who died in a car wreck, and became good friends with Patsy Cline and Jim Reeves, who died in plane crashes in 1963 and 1964. Jack Anglin, of Johnny and Jack fame, was killed while driving to Patsy’s funeral. He was also a friend of mine. I had a hard time with the death of Marty Robbins in 1982 when he was taken as a relatively young man by a heart attack.

  Country music today is an international industry. But when I came to Nashville in the late 1950s it was a struggling business where everybody in it knew everybody in it. We were a family. And most of us were trying for that first “real big” record. Back then, our music was so unpopular in the wake of rock ’n’ roll that you could record a song that sold only twenty thousand copies and see it go to number one on the country charts. Most of the record-buying public regarded us as hillbillies. Our music was still called hillbilly music in a lot of circles.

  Even in Nashville there were folks who looked down on those of us on Sixteenth Avenue South, where we recorded three-chord songs that were played on tiny AM stations scattered mostly in the rural South. And because we were not a part of polite society, and because we were struggling to take our backwoods music to town, we bonded. People get close to each other when they’re working for the same cause.