I Lived to Tell It All Read online

  I think that’s another reason I felt so close to Hank Williams, even though I hadn’t even seen Nashville when he died. Hank had done more to make our music popular than anyone before him, including the legendary Jimmie Rodgers, who made the first country music record in the 1920s, and even Ernest Tubb, who was a household name in the 1940s and 1950s when he became the first country star to have a legitimate film career. As a kid in East Texas, I never would have dreamed that someday I’d work for Ernest on long tours of one-night shows.

  As for Hank, I suppose my grief for him was no greater than that of millions of other Americans, but it might have been. Most folks had only known Hank through his music. But I had also known him personally long before I ever moved to Nashville. There aren’t too many people who can even say they saw Hank Williams perform. But I did, and I even got the chance to perform with him.

  He came to KRIC when I was doing the afternoon radio show with Eddie and Pearl. He was booked to play the Blue Jean Club that night and wanted to promote his show. He talked a little bit on the air to Eddie, and then Eddie asked Hank to sing “Wedding Bells,” Hank’s latest single record.

  Hank accompanied himself on rhythm guitar, and I was supposed to play electric lead guitar behind the most popular country singer in the world.

  But I didn’t play a note.

  I was so intimidated at the sight of Hank Williams and the thought that I was in his presence that I was paralyzed with fear. I simply stood there and watched him arch his back and let that hurting voice coming from his skinny frame fill the room.

  The only thing I did with my guitar was hold it.

  Hank wore Western clothes on stage or off. That day was no exception. He didn’t change when he left the studio.

  After the one-hour show he visited with Pearl for a long time. I was still in shock and didn’t say a whole lot. I just stared. Pearl told him how much I admired him and his music, and that pleased an adoring fan who was fourteen. Time, alcohol, and drugs have not been kind to my memory. But my recollections of my afternoon with Hank Williams are as vivid as yesterday. And they will be forever.

  I came out of the service in November 1953 and went back to Beaumont. That’s where most of my people were, and that’s where I had done most of my singing before the military came into my life. I didn’t do much for about a year except play music in dives where I sang and drank the nights away. What I didn’t know about drinking before I went into the service I had learned by the time I got out. I was twenty-two years old, and for me liquor went with country music real naturally, especially inside those Texas honky-tonks. I’m not making excuses for drinking, I’m just saying I was always around drunks, and that’s when I began to drink regularly. A lot of folks say they have to be drunk to put up with drunks, and I was no different. I also think that all of us are the result of our surroundings, especially when we’re young.

  Booze was easy to come by. Folks were always wanting to buy a drink for me, and a lot of them got mad if I turned them down.

  They didn’t get mad very often.

  I took a day job as a disc jockey on KTRM in Beaumont about a year after my military discharge. I soon had a night show at the station and enjoyed the work more than any job I’d ever had outside of a nightclub. I used to talk over the air about the bars where I was scheduled to sing. That made for a lot of free plugs for my own shows, and that translated into money that club owners didn’t have to spend on advertising. They liked that, and I always had a lot of people at my shows.

  There has always been pretty strong word-of-mouth communication in the music business. I’ll give you an example. If a singer needs a lead guitar player, every guitar player around town seems to get word of it. That’s still true today, even in Nashville, where an estimated thirty thousand people work in the music industry.

  So I had no trouble finding out that Jack Starnes and H. W. “Pappy” Daily were looking for me in Beaumont. They owned Starday Records. (The “Star” was for Starnes and the “day” was for Daily.) They had heard about my singing, and they had heard a couple of acetates that had been played on the radio. (An acetate was a recording that was used to make duplicate recordings back in the days of pressed wax records.)

  I was told they wanted to sign me to a record deal, and I was overjoyed. They were the first people with ties to what to me was a major label to show any interest in my voice. Their distribution, at that time, didn’t go much beyond Texas, but I don’t guess I thought about that.

  But my first records for the label didn’t exactly shake the nation in February 1954.

  The first Starday “studio” was actually Jack’s living room, where he had tacked cardboard egg cartons on the walls to absorb sound. There was one microphone for the singer and all of the musicians. We cut our music live. That means we played it and it was recorded exactly as it was played. There was no such thing as overdubbing, where the vocal and instrumental tracks are electronically stacked on the recording, the way records are made today. In my early recording days, if one person on the session made a mistake, everyone had to play the song again or leave the mistake on the record.

  There was a single lightbulb in the center of the room and one “engineer,” a guy who turned the recording machine on and off. Today the engineer sits in a sound booth and is visible to the singer and musicians.

  When I did my first session for Starday, the engineer sat in another room. I couldn’t see him, and he couldn’t see me. I knew he wanted me to start singing when he flipped a switch that turned off the overhead light. I stood there waiting in the dark. When he turned the light back on, the musicians and I kicked off our song.

  Can you believe we were trying to make a product for radio airplay under such primitive circumstances? That’s how a lot of records were made back then. We just did the best we knew how. (My second session for Starday was inside a real studio.)

  The first session produced “No Money in This Deal” and “Here in My Heart,” two songs I wrote.

  I can’t imagine being as nervous today as I was when I cut my first two songs for Starday at age twenty-two. When anybody gets nervous they rely on their reflexes, and I was no exception. I simply did what I had been doing all along, singing like my musical influences—Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, and Lefty Frizzell.

  “Well,” Pappy said after hearing those interpretations of my songs, “you’ve sung like every successful male singer in the business. But the world has already got a Hank, Roy, and Lefty, and it’s satisfied with what it’s got. Do you think you could sing like George Jones? I’d like to hear how he sounds.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Those guys are who I like.”

  I was so naive that I actually didn’t realize that Pappy and Jack were trying to find someone with a different sound, his own sound. And so, inside that makeshift studio, I searched for the voice of George Jones.

  That was probably the birthplace of my own style. I still used Hank’s, Roy’s, and Lefty’s phrasing, but I used my own voice, which was considerably higher forty years ago than it is today.

  I remember hearing “No Money in This Deal” on the radio for the first time in 1954 over station KTLW in Pasadena, Texas. It was played by Tater Pete Hunter, a famous area disc jockey. I was standing beside him the first time the song went on the air. The song ended, and Tater must have put on another record because I remember talking to him.

  “Well,” I said, “how do you like my record? I want the honest truth.”

  “I don’t like it,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot better.”

  I’ve been asked if his honesty hurt me. The answer is no. I’ve always tried to be honest, and maybe that’s why I never resented honesty in others. Years later, when I missed hundreds of personal appearances because I was drunk, people around me tried to get me to lie.

  “Tell the press you were sick, or that your sister was ill, or that your bus broke down,” they said.

  “Hell no,” I said. “Tell them I was drunk.”
/>   Country music is the most honest music in the world, and I think the people who sing it should be honest. A country music fan is the most loyal creature on earth as long as you’re honest with him. I’m not proud of some of the things I’ve done, and I haven’t gone around talking about all of them. But if I was asked, and if I answered, I answered honestly.

  That’s one of the reasons I’m still working and playing some of the world’s largest concert halls today. I can’t tell you how thankful I am for those shows, their wonderful crowds, and the fact that they’re all a long way from Lola’s and Shorty’s.

  Chapter 4

  In 1954 I was playing Almadee’s, a Houston drive-in restaurant, and on a night off I went to the Princess Drive-In, another of the scores of drive-in restaurants that were so popular in Houston and other American cities in the 1950s.

  There was a spirited carhop there, and I had trouble taking my eyes off her. I began to flirt and asked her to come see me at Almadee’s. Not long after that I had a recording contract, but not before I married the carhop. The former Shirley Corley became the second Mrs. George Jones.

  I don’t remember much about the ceremony, including the date. I’ve never been good at remembering dates. But Shirley was my wife for fourteen years, during which time she gave me two sons, Jeffrey and Brian. And I gave her a lot of grief.

  Shirley and I might have been miscast from the start. Uncle Dub often said that she didn’t like having a husband who was an entertainer and that she was embarrassed because I sang in public. I don’t know. But I know she didn’t want to go with me years later when I moved to Nashville. She stayed in Nashville for three months, then returned to Texas, where she had friends. I’m sure it was hard for her, a young woman living in a strange city while her husband was on the road singing country songs. So she was less than supportive.

  Little did I know in 1955 that Shirley’s lack of support for my career would eventually break my heart. I remember coming in off the road several times, tired and lonely, only to find her gone. I interpreted that as a lack of concern for me and what I did for a living, and that made for problems.

  Shirley was a good woman and a good mother, but obviously we had our difficulties. She’s no longer alive, and I don’t intend to say anything unkind about her. I’ll tell you a few more things about her later.

  My 1955 recording of “Why Baby Why” was my biggest hit on Starday Records. It was a bigger hit for Webb Pierce and Red Sovine, who heard my version and recorded the song as a duet for Decca, a major label with national distribution. I’ve heard folks talk about all of my glory years on Starday Records. The fact is I was only on that label for two years. On March 9, 1957, “Don’t Stop the Music” started its climb to the number-ten slot on the Juke Box operators’ survey. That was my first tune recorded on Mercury, my record label until 1962.

  After “Why Baby Why” my single records were “What Am I Worth,” “You Gotta Be My Baby,” “Just One More,” and “Yearning,” a duet with Jeanette Hicks that was my last record for Starday. By the middle 1950s, I was starting to get established as a recording artist in Nashville. It would be a few more years before I’d move to Nashville and have my own band.

  My 1950s recordings were getting the majority of their airplay in Texas, so that’s mostly where I worked.

  I had a 1950 Packard and hired a painter to put my name on the side in big letters. He painted the titles to my hit songs on the fenders. I pulled up to my shows in those roadhouses driving that mobile advertisement.

  Pappy Daily became serious about promoting me and hired Gabe Tucker, program director at KIKK, Houston’s largest country music station, as promotions director for Starday. Gabe had been Ernest Tubb’s manager and a standup comedian on “The Eddy Arnold Show” on TV, so he had a lot of contacts in the recording industry. He became a big help to my early career, and we are friends to this day.

  Because of his position, Gabe had no trouble listing “Why Baby Why” as number one in the country market. He sent copies of the surveys listing my song as number one to every major radio station in the country. Program directors and disc jockeys from around the nation called him.

  “Houston is a pretty big market,” they would say. “If this George Jones guy is number one down there, he must be pretty good. So we’re going to chart his song in this market and see how it does.”

  Gabe taught me a lot of little things about promoting a record, and most of them didn’t interest me. For example, he often arranged for photographers to be present whenever I played a package show (a show with other artists).

  “Now after the show,” he would always remind me, “I’ll get the photographer to photograph you with these stars, and you be sure you stand to the photographer’s left. That way, when the picture is published, yours will be the first name mentioned in the caption.”

  I was content just to be in the pictures and never thought about where I should stand. I don’t think the other country acts were aware of the standing strategy. None ever said anything about where he or she stood except for Buck Owens.

  Gabe remembered one night backstage at the Houston Jamboree when Buck insisted on standing to the photographer’s immediate left and told Gabe he wouldn’t let anyone else hold that position.

  That left-side rule was a big thing with Gabe until one day when I was part of a group picture with Pappy Daily. I didn’t realize I had taken the place at the left of the line.

  “Move away from there!” Gabe shouted. “We can’t do this to poor old Pappy. He’s our bread and butter. You can’t have your name in the magazine before his.”

  Gabe began to run around the line, moving people all around, and the other acts must have been wondering what was happening.

  All of that seems ridiculous to me today.

  I’ve seen lots of acts fight over who gets top billing on a show and who gets to close the show. There was a time when closing the show was important to me because back in the days of big package shows, the closing act was commonly regarded as the most popular. Today I’m just as happy to open the show so that I can do my part and get on my touring bus to watch television and maybe, if I’m lucky, a good football game. I’ve even had arguments with a few promoters because I wanted to be offstage in time for a television show and they wanted me to stay because they thought I’d hold their crowd. It’s funny how some of the things that once meant so much to me in this business, and in life itself, don’t worry me now that I’ve got a few years behind me.

  A documentary was made about my life in 1990, and one of the people interviewed was Loretta Lynn. She told a story about an extended tour I did with Buck Owens in the 1960s. Buck and I argued each night about who would go on last and therefore get top billing.

  “Now, Buck,” I used to tell him, “you closed the show last night. Let me close tonight in this town, and you can close tomorrow night. We’ll take turns, and that will be fair.”

  He wouldn’t hear of it. Buck’s career was smoking hot, and I guess he wanted to milk it for all it was worth.

  “I’m the star,” he would say, “and I’m going to close the show.”

  So I fixed him. We were somewhere in Canada. I was introduced, was of course supposed to sing my songs, take an intermission, then let Buck come out as the final performer of the evening.

  It went exactly that way, except that when I was onstage I didn’t sing my songs. I sang only Buck’s. I did “Under Your Spell Again,” “Excuse Me (I Think I’ve Got a Heartache),” “Foolin’ Around,” “Under the Influence of Love,” and the rest of the few hits he had recorded. I didn’t leave one song for him to sing. I walked offstage and passed him in the wings.

  “You’re on,” I said.

  He wasn’t amused.

  Buck went out and did essentially the same show I had just done. The people didn’t know what to think, and Buck didn’t know what else to sing.

  In 1994 Faron Young said that Buck had never been overly fond of me. About a month later, Buck said that
our friction began because Faron paid him a hundred and twenty-five dollars nightly, which was twenty-five dollars more than he paid me, when we were featured acts on Faron’s touring show in the late 1950s.

  That extra twenty-five dollars was a lot of money back then, especially to a struggling country singer who was paying all of his own expenses. Faron and Buck argued that Buck was entitled to the additional money because he had to drive to Nashville from his home in Bakersfield, California, while I had to drive from mine in East Texas. They said his higher overhead justified additional pay.

  I thought the matter would be simplified if Buck would simply move east.

  Another night we played Charleston, South Carolina, with several other acts. Buck again insisted on closing the show.

  I put on some baggy Bermuda shorts and walked quietly to the back of the stage. Buck was lost in a tender ballad when I walked behind his band in those shorts. Only the audience could see me as I danced a jig. I looked like a banty rooster in bloomers, and no one onstage could figure out why the crowd was howling as Buck tried to sing his tune. Before Buck could look around, I was gone. The audience settled down, and I pulled the same stunt again.

  When Buck caught me he was angry once again.

  In December 1994 Buck contributed information for this book and laughed about our early disputes. He had many kind things to say about my music and career, and I appreciated that very much. Age has brought wisdom to both of us.

  Faron said I was resentful because Buck’s home in Bakersfield did not make him a part of the Nashville family. Faron said Buck became most angry with me, however, because I kept telling Faron that Buck was ugly and regularly called him “gizzard lip.”

  What can I say? I used to drink a lot, say a lot of things I shouldn’t have.