I Lived to Tell It All Page 6

  Faron and I also mixed like oil and water for years and for no reason. If we were together, we were drinking. If we were drinking, we were fighting.

  He was doing a radio interview one time in a city where the mayor and his wife were present. Knowing that the honored guests and the radio audience could hear, I walked into the room and began using foul language. Faron, who happened to be sober, politely asked me to stop, but I persisted. He then confronted me, and we had a fistfight in front of his honor and the city’s first lady. That did wonders for our careers. You should have heard the radio announcer adlibbing in an effort to cover up the free-for-all from his listeners. He talked real fast, like an auctioneer with high blood pressure.

  Another time, Faron and I got into a fistfight and I fell on top of a floor furnace. Its grate was hot steel, which branded itself into my back and butt. I carried the marks from that one for a long time.

  Then there was the time that Faron, Little Jimmy Dickens, and I were doing a show up north and Faron and Jimmy began to argue. Jimmy is even smaller than Faron. Jimmy is smaller than everyone. Faron pushed him, and I took up for Jimmy.

  Faron and I began to shove each other, and it was only a few minutes until show time. Because we were drunk, we didn’t realize how loud we were shouting. We were standing backstage and the sound of three men yelling leaked into the auditorium, where the crowd had paid to see singers, not a tag team.

  “I’d give you two cents to whip his ass!” shouted a member of Faron’s band to me.

  “Where’s your money?” I yelled.

  “Now just a damn minute!” Faron said to his musician, who by then had placed two pennies into my hand.

  That was all I needed. I lowered my head and charged Faron, hitting him squarely in the chest with my skull. He went down like a sack of wet cement.

  We were wearing our stage clothes as we wrestled on the concrete backstage. Meanwhile, the show’s emcee was talking louder and louder to conceal the sounds of profanity and crashing. No telling what the audience thought.

  The fight was broken up, and Faron and I went onstage wearing clothes that had been torn full of holes during the wrestling match.

  Faron might have saved my life during our early careers. We were in a hotel room, where I was so drunk that I passed out in the shower. The water inside the stall began to rise. Faron soon noticed that it was leaking under the door and into the bedroom where he was sitting. He came into the bathroom and found me asleep sitting over the drain. My weight had stopped up the release of the water.

  The holes in the drain left imprints on my hip. It was covered with dots.

  A drunken Faron stared at those marks. Someone said he called the front desk and asked for a doctor right away.

  “Jones has the worst case of measles I’ve ever seen,” he reportedly said, “and they’re spreading from his ass.”

  Back to Gabe, who was responsible for getting me on the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport, the Deep South’s answer to the Grand Ole Opry. A lot of acts who became big Opry stars cut their teeth on the Hayride.

  The first night I played the Hayride I worked with Tibby Edwards, David Houston, Floyd Cramer, and a kid who had only a few records out. It represented a new music called rock ’n’ roll. He was shy and didn’t want to come out of his dressing room. He was surrounded by his people, who I guess were protecting him. So I spent very little time with Elvis Presley.

  I remember he was friendly, but, again, we didn’t really get to visit. I watched his show from the side. That was the first time I had ever seen anybody sing while shaking. I wondered what country music was coming to. But, of course, it wasn’t country at all and probably had no place on the Hayride in 1955. Within a year, rock ’n’ roll would be the most popular music in the nation, knocking country right out of the commercial spotlight.

  Pappy and Gabe quickly realized that the only way they could draw people to country concerts was to present large package shows with a half-dozen name acts. Putting only one or two country acts on a bill was an invitation to financial failure for country promoters.

  By 1956 rock ’n’ roll’s popularity was so far ahead of country’s that Pappy insisted I try recording rock. I didn’t want to do it, but I was young and wanted to please the powers that be in the music business. I would have done virtually anything to make it.

  Pappy wanted a rock star, but he didn’t want to jeopardize the little success I’d had as a country artist. I didn’t want anybody to even know I was going to try rock. So he and I agreed we would record me under a different name.

  In 1956, at Gold Star Studios in Houston, George Jones recorded under the name of Thumper Jones. The name came from Thumper the Rabbit, the character in Walt Disney’s Bambi.

  I was asked to write two rock songs and penned “Rock It” and “(Dadgummit) How Come It.” You won’t find those tunes today on any Dick Clark offering for the best of rock ’n’ roll, and I don’t think there is any danger of them being resurrected by the Rolling Stones.

  They say people will do anything for love, and I loved the music business enough in 1956 to record songs I wouldn’t sing today in my bathroom. It’s hard to find copies of those two songs. During the years, as I have encountered those records, I’ve used them for Frisbees.

  In the middle 1950s Gabe masterminded another promotional scheme that helped my Texas career tremendously. Veteran concert promoter A. V. Bamford came to town to discuss promoting a giant package show in Houston. Bamford was probably the most successful country concert promoter of the day and had earned a lot of credibility by promoting shows with Hank Williams. Bamford was the promoter of that January 1, 1953, date with Hank in Canton, Ohio, that Hank died on the way to.

  Nashville music publisher Buddy Killen was Hank’s bass player that day and remembers that Bamford came backstage minutes before the show to tell everyone in Hank’s band that their boss was dead.

  Killen said he told Bamford not to kid about something so serious. He said he looked into Bamford’s eyes and knew he was seeing the awful truth.

  When Bamford wanted Gabe to help promote that Houston show four years later, Gabe said he and the station would get behind it, but only if the station took 10 percent of the gate.

  “And,” Gabe insisted, “we’ll sponsor the Houston show if there is another show in San Antonio and if George Jones is the headline act.”

  Bamford accepted the proposition, and the San Antonio date in 1957 was one of the first times I was the headline act on a big package. It was advertised as “The George Jones Show” and featured Buck Owens, Webb Pierce, Ferlin Husky, Cowboy Copas, Skeeter Davis, and me.

  Tickets were $1.50.

  Gabe asked each star to pose with me, then published a picture book. Everyone knew Gabe was a big shot at Houston’s KIKK radio, and they all wanted to stay on his good side, so Gabe had no trouble getting them to do what he wanted.

  The show was a sellout, a second was scheduled, and that was a sellout also.

  Pappy Daily saw very quickly how beneficial the big live shows were to advancing my recording career. He wasn’t overly crazy about sending me to the fans on shows around the country, so he decided to bring the fans to me. He got the idea to start the Houston Jamboree, which would be similar to Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. He wanted the show to be held each Saturday night and wanted it broadcast over Houston radio. He figured that putting it on the air would attract country stars who wanted to get their music on the radio.

  Pappy Daily had gotten me to sign with Mercury Records by the time I first appeared on the Houston Jamboree. Another act on that label was Sonny Burns. Sonny and I had recorded some duets earlier, but none of them ever did much in terms of sales. Sonny, Gabe recently remembered, was Mercury’s priority artist.

  He insisted that Pappy give him some good songs, and Pappy obliged.

  Sonny refused to record the songs, claiming they were no more than shit, Gabe said in 1994. So I became Pappy’s second choice, and the songs were given to me.


  “White Lightning” was released on March 9, 1959, and spent twenty-two weeks on Billboard’s Top 40 country chart. It held the number-one slot for five. (The song was written by J. P. Richardson, whose stage name was “The Big Bopper.” He died in the plane crash with Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens on February 3, 1959, and I have been sorry ever since that he didn’t live to see his song go number one.)

  I recorded “White Lightning” in Nashville in Owen Bradley’s “Quonset Hut” studio. Pappy was the session’s executive producer, but he turned the session over to Buddy Killen, who later became the president of Tree Publishing, the world’s largest country music publishing house. Killen played upright bass on the record and even came up with the tune’s kickoff. (It was a bass solo for a few bars.) I don’t think I’ve ever heard another country song begin that way.

  Other players were legendary blind studio pianist Pig Robbins, with whom I record to this day, and guitarist Floyd Jenkins.

  I was drinking heavily throughout the session, and Killen later said we did eighty-three takes before we got one we could use. Killen said he wore the skin off his fingers playing that same opening and had to wear Band-Aids to cover raw blisters. Years later he said he could still remember the pain from playing that kickoff over and over on the stiff, woven-wire strings of an upright bass.

  The word “slug” is slurred in that record. That’s because I was drunk. But Killen said everyone was so tired of the song and all of the takes that he called the session to an end. If you listen to the original recording of “White Lightning,” you can hear me stumble over the word “slug.”

  Killen also directed the recording of “Who Shot Sam,” which I helped write. It came out in July of that same year and was on the survey for thirteen weeks.

  This means I spent a total of thirty-five weeks on the Billboard charts in 1959 after recording two songs that no one else wanted.

  “That was when Pappy Daily really began to concentrate on George Jones,” Gabe said. “And we determined that George Jones could smell a hit, and we decided to play our new songs for him first.”

  I wish they had decided to give me bigger advances against royalties.

  I made a lot of money for Pappy Daily, Starday, and Mercury. Basically I was a naive guy who was overly trusting of some people who proved to be untrustworthy. I was never paid royalties on a regular basis. It became very frustrating to me to hear my songs on the radio, see them listed high in the charts, and yet not have enough money to hire a band. I played with house bands throughout the 1950s. I sometimes had to perform with bands with which I’d never even rehearsed! I even played with some who played a song in one key while I struggled to sing in another! Then I would throw my guitar in the car and drive all night to some dumpy motel where I would try to get a few hours’ sleep before repeating the routine.

  I was drinking the whole time to soften the grind, and the booze kept me run-down. I drank to have a good time, but not always. Sometimes I did it simply to ease the boredom of life on the road alone.

  I came in drunk one Saturday morning after driving all night from a show somewhere. I went directly to the office of one of Pappy Daily’s assistants. I demanded that I be paid everything I was owed, but he couldn’t say exactly how much that was. And the only number he seemed to know was eleven.

  “Well, just how many records have we sold?” I demanded.

  “I’d say about eleven thousand,” the assistant said.

  “Well, how many advance orders do we have for our next release?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “About eleven hundred.”

  I got real sick of that real quickly.

  Someone said I was given nine hundred dollars, but I figured I had a lot more than that coming and I got rowdy. I wouldn’t leave his side. If he moved behind his desk, so did I. If he went to the men’s room, so did I. I threatened to whip him, and he took off out the back door.

  But not before calling the police.

  I was taken to jail, which had its temporary quarters in the fire station. I was let out after I sobered up, and I apologized to the assistant for acting up. But I never apologized about the money.

  One of the reasons I was suspicious about not getting my money is that I had seen how swindle had helped kill Lefty Frizzell. I first met Jack Starnes right after Lefty had left his management, claiming he was not paid all the royalties that were due him. He had recorded giant hits on Columbia Records, such as “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time,” “I Love You a Thousand Ways,” “Always Late,” and “Mom and Dad’s Waltz.” I’ve said many times that my three greatest musical influences were Roy Acuff, Hank Williams, and Lefty Frizzell.

  At one time Lefty had beautiful stage clothes, a new guitar, a new car, and a twin-engine airplane. Who ever heard of such prosperity for a country star in the early 1950s? All of that was mysteriously taken from him, and almost overnight. The man was the Elvis of his time on one day—and broke the next. There was no solid explanation about where his money went. He was basically a good old country boy who felt betrayed. He couldn’t handle the pain.

  His spirit broke after he realized he was financially broke. So he hid inside a shell of self-pity. He didn’t want to work or go out.

  Alice, his wife, became very religious, and he felt further from her than ever. She made him go to church, and he wound up dating some of the women there. He got caught, and he and Alice separated inside their own house. She made him live in the basement and locked the door that led to the upstairs.

  He needed a woman who would say, “Hold your head up, better days are coming.” He needed a woman like I found in Nancy, my current wife. Who knows? If Nancy hadn’t done for me what some wives have failed to do for their husbands, I might have wound up like Lefty—destitute and alone.

  Lefty lived in that basement with a bed and a stove and ate soup and other canned food. Can you imagine a man whose singing had touched millions having to live alone in such confinement? His drinking, which had been bad for years, grew worse.

  In his darkened room below the ground, the idol of millions became ill on July 19, 1975. An ambulance was called. En route to the hospital, he suffered a massive stroke according to medical records. He was admitted to Nashville Memorial Hospital, where doctors struggled to keep him alive.

  Lefty Frizzell, forty-seven, was dead by nightfall.

  The last time I saw Lefty alive was in his basement. It was about 9 A.M. He was hopelessly drunk, and so was I. He drank that vodka like it was Kool-Aid. Seeing him there in that awful state suddenly made me sober.

  My heart became as broken as his attitude. I wanted to reach out to him but didn’t know how. Other folks who claimed to be his friends had come by. Some brought him vodka, and I wondered what kind of friends they really were.

  I wanted to say so much to him, but ultimately I didn’t say much at all. We both knew he was on the bottom, and there was no point in talking about it out loud. That wouldn’t have helped a thing.

  I thought of all the mornings I had awakened at my sister Loyce’s house to the sounds of Lefty’s hits. She never played anyone’s records but his. I might be so hungover that I couldn’t hold anything down except fried potatoes and ketchup. Loyce made them for me whenever I wanted them. The food satisfied my hunger, the music satisfied my soul. Funny what we remember in this life.

  And when I remember Lefty I remember that voice, those hits, and a gentle spirit who also trusted folks who were untrustworthy.

  I honestly believe that helped to kill him.

  Gabe, Pappy, and I realized that my success as a country singer, no matter how big it became, would always be limited unless I appeared on the Grand Ole Opry. But it was hard for a Nashville-based singer to get a recording contract in the middle 1950s if he couldn’t assure a record-label executive that he could perform on the Opry, which had been the sounding board for country entertainers since its beginning in 1925. And long before I came along, the show was broadc
ast over the NBC radio network. An entertainer could get a hit record simply by singing the song once on the Opry.

  It isn’t hard to understand then that most artists wanted desperately to be on the Opry, and so did their record labels. Pappy Daily went to Nashville many times to court the decision-makers at the National Life and Accident Insurance Company, owner of the Opry, and at WSM, the fifty-thousand-watt station over which the Opry was broadcast.

  But nothing seemed to work. I wasn’t wanted at the Grand Ole Opry.

  Pappy sent Gabe to Nashville, and that didn’t work either, even though Gabe pulled every string he had. Not getting me immediately on the Opry was frustrating for Gabe. He was turned down by some of the same men who had asked him for favors on his Houston radio station.

  “I was practically at my wit’s end,” Gabe said. “That was one of the hardest shells I ever tried to crack.”

  Opry officials knew how much money an artist could make on the road if he was successful on the Opry. Therefore, the way I heard it, some of the Opry big shots wanted bribes before admitting a new singer. A lot of Nashville’s veteran music executives swear today that was the case in the middle 1950s, but I can’t say for sure. I never really tried to find out because it wouldn’t have made any difference. I wanted to make it on my talent, not on somebody’s pocketbook. If my singing wasn’t good enough to get me on the Opry, I didn’t want to go.

  I had too much respect for the artists who had gone ahead of me. The very thought of singing where Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, or Hank Williams had sung was overwhelming to me. I attached a respect to the Opry that bordered on reverence. The Opry was later called the Mother Church of Country Music. I agree with that description. I wasn’t going to pay my way into that church, and neither were Gabe or Pappy.

  Then, in 1956, for reasons I’ve never known, I got the call. I was asked to be a guest for one night on the Opry. Pappy and I drove on two-lane highways all the way from Houston to Nashville, a distance of 780 miles.

  I’d like to tell you a lot about that first night on the Opry, but I can’t remember. I think that’s because I was in a nervous fog. A country singer making it to the Opry in 1956 was like an athlete making it to the Olympics. I was simply too overjoyed to realize what I was doing. Thank God I had done it long enough elsewhere to do it without thinking.