I Lived to Tell It All Read online

  Jimmy Dickens loaned me a guitar because for some reason the Opry officials wouldn’t let me play my own. I don’t know why. I went onstage, sang my song, and could hear my heart pounding above the applause. I would have sung for those folks all night, except that I had been told I could only do one song. I thought about going back for an encore, but then I decided against it. I sure didn’t want to break any rules.

  I must have done something right. On August 25, 1956, I appeared on the Opry again, this time as its newest member. As a kid I had never thought I would even see the Opry, much less sing on it, much less be a member. And in time, the legends I’ve mentioned became not only my coperformers but my friends.

  My life and career were unfolding too fast, but I loved it.

  In the summer of 1956, nobody could have convinced me that country music wasn’t the world’s greatest business.

  Chapter 5

  All I heard was the whistle.

  Stonewall Jackson and I had worked a little club around Albuquerque, New Mexico, and had drunk some beer after the show. Someone hurled a bottle at him so hard that it whistled past his head.

  I had been drinking, and everyone always said I was a different man when I drank. Drinking made me aggressive, especially on behalf of my friends.

  I asked Stonewall what had happened, and he said someone tried to alter his head with thrown glass.

  “Who did that?” I yelled at no one. “Who’s the dumb son of a bitch that tried to hurt my buddy?”

  “I did!” said someone from the darkness.

  The voice took a human shape that got bigger as it approached. I soon was staring into the eyes of a cowboy towering above me. I must have weighed all of a hundred and forty pounds.

  “You ain’t got no right to be throwin’ bottles at my friend,” I said.

  I threw a punch that missed before I was clobbered with a roundhouse that knocked me out. I was later told I flipped over backward in midair.

  I landed facedown in a puddle that was about eight inches deep. Stonewall said he could see only the back of my head protruding from the water. He ran to me, but the cowboy and his buddies got there first. They began to kick me as I lay unconscious. The air was filled with fists and feet, and Stonewall said he feared I would drown as I lay there unaware of what was happening to me.

  Seeing that I was out of commission, and probably because they were tired of kicking, the cowboys turned on Stonewall. They beat him so severely that his eyes swelled shut. He couldn’t open them the next day.

  We both took a terrible whipping, and then the drunken good ole boys were gone. They probably thought they had left me for dead.

  Stonewall was able to shake me awake about the time the police arrived. I went into the men’s room to blot the blood and to take off the stage suit I was still wearing from our show. It was the only one I owned, and the following day I had to buy some street clothes to wear on our next show.

  That fight never made any headlines. Yet it could have been fatal if Stonewall hadn’t gotten my head out of the water. That wouldn’t have been much of a way to die, but my life back then wasn’t much of a way to live.

  I liked Stonewall a lot. I don’t get to see him much today because our schedules have taken different ways. But he was just an old country boy like me who came to town to try his luck. His luck unfolded faster than most’s.

  He was a sharecropper in Georgia when he drove to Nashville in a battered pickup truck. He parked outside Acuff-Rose Publications, the largest music publisher in town, and entered without an appointment.

  That was on a Wednesday.

  He played a tape for Wesley Rose, who immediately set up an audition for him for the Grand Ole Opry on Thursday. Stonewall sang live on the Opry on coast-to-coast radio on Friday.

  Stonewall called the old man who had held his share-cropping job open in case he didn’t make it in Nashville. “Go ahead and give my job to somebody,” he said. “I think I’ll stay up here and sing.”

  George Riddle, who became the first permanent member of my band in 1960, recently discussed the fight involving Stonewall and me and said that I seemed to get into at least one fight on every tour. He laughed and said that I came off the road with as many injuries as some folks who fought in the Vietnam War.

  In 1959 I was traveling in a car in the Northwest with Mel Tillis and some other entertainers. I had just gotten my arm out of a cast when Mel and I began to argue.

  “The next thing I knew here came a fist from over the backseat,” Mel said in early 1995. “I held George’s arm down as hard as I could over the top of the seat so he couldn’t swing at me again.”

  “ ‘Goddamnit, you’ve broken my same arm,’ George hollered at me,” Mel remembered. “And I had, I had broken his very same arm, and we had to take him back to the hospital to have it put in a cast all over again.”

  Mel said he thought I should have bought my own cast and put a zipper on it. He thought that would reduce my doctor bills.

  Back then, I seemed to get drunkest on my days off—the time I waited in a town for the show date to come up. I was somewhere in the Midwest in 1962 during a waiting spell that earned me another trip to the hospital. I was staying at a hotel with Red Sovine and his band, who were also on the show I was waiting to give.

  Pacing and restless, I got drunk inside the hotel. We had played as much cards as I could stand. So I cornered Red.

  “Red, I’m fixin’ to whip your ass,” I told him.

  Red always was the diplomat. He had been around drunk and rowdy behavior for years, and he knew exactly how to undo the situation.

  “George,” he said, “you don’t want to whip my ass. Anybody can do that.”

  I pondered that statement for a long time, then told him he was right. Red smiled and sat down. I smiled and staggered.

  Then I took out after Dale Potter, Red’s fiddle player. Dale ran into the bathroom and stayed there most of the day. Each time it got quiet for any length of time, I went over and kicked the bathroom door.

  “I ain’t forgot you, Dale!” I said. “You’ve got an ass-whipping coming.”

  I became real unpopular—not just with Dale, but with everybody in the room who wanted to pee. A lot of people were drinking beer. Guys were walking down the hall to other rooms because Dale wouldn’t let them in the bathroom, where he had barricaded himself.

  I kept drinking and waiting on Dale all day. Somebody said he made himself a pallet in the bathtub and went to sleep. When I decided he wasn’t coming out, I lost my head and broke my hand. In my drunkenness, I attacked a solid-steel steam radiator. I was madly beating the thing while beating my hand into something like hamburger meat. I shattered a lot of bones and wore another cast for a long time.

  Not long afterward I was playing the Chestnut Inn in Kansas City, Missouri. The place featured country music and strippers.

  The country singers performed for an hour, then the girls danced for an hour. I’d put my heart and soul into a ballad, but some drunk would eventually holler, “Bring on the girls!”

  One of the girls took a shine to me, but I didn’t pay her any attention. In fact, I pretty much ignored her for the entire week I was booked, except for the last night, when I got drunk.

  Her manager drove her and me to her place.

  He said he would wait in the living room and for us to go ahead and have our fun. He said she was a nice girl. He said she liked me a lot.

  He didn’t say she was his wife.

  She and I had just gotten into bed when the door burst open. It was her manager-husband. Over his head, he held a solid-steel chair.

  I was on my back, naked and defenseless. All I could do was throw up my arm, which he quickly broke with that chair. I barely got out of there with my clothes and my life. I went to a hospital and got my fix of molded plaster. Because of that ordeal, I held a microphone in one hand and my arm in a sling for the rest of that tour and several more that year.

  So much of country music, in those d
ays, was performed in rough roadhouses and taverns. There were package shows held in auditoriums, but the majority of shows were called “shows and dances.” Working folks who had labored all week came to drink, dance, and get rowdy in an effort to blow off a little steam. I could rise above it, unless I was drinking myself. In the late 1950s and early 1960s I didn’t drink every day, but on the days I drank, I drank a lot. Some of the environments where I played were so depressing I felt I had to have a drink to stand them.

  Stonewall and I played a prison somewhere in Texas as featured acts on a tour with Ernest Tubb. We traveled on Ernest’s bus, and that was a welcome change from the thousands of miles we had been logging in cars. It would be a few more years before I would get my first bus.

  Stonewall and I sang with Ernest’s Texas Troubadours as our backup musicians. That day we played that prison in Texas, we decided to walk around the grounds.

  I have never liked confinement.

  We talked to some of the men, and I noticed the desperation in their faces. I’d been in jail, but that was my first time behind penitentiary walls. Whoever I looked at was already looking at me. A prisoner approached Stonewall, who tried to make small talk.

  “How much time you got left?” Stonewall asked.

  “I been here for eighteen years and still got life to go,” the man said.

  After we left the prison, I thought about that man and his words. His remark chilled me to the bone. I had hated the prison, but knew I’d be leaving. That man hated it more and knew he’d never leave. I wanted to get that prison out of my mind. But I couldn’t. And so I began to write.

  I went one night where the lights were bright just

  To see what I could see.

  I met up with an old friend, who just thought the

  World of me.

  He bought me drinks and took me to every honky tonk

  In town.

  Then words were said and now he’s dead, I just had to

  Bring him down.

  Oh I’ve been here for eighteen years and still

  Got life to go, I’ve still got life to go. I’ve still got

  Life to go.

  I wrote “Life to Go” in late 1958, and it was released on June 8, 1959. It rose to number two on the Billboard chart and remained on the survey for twenty-three weeks as a hit for Stonewall Jackson. It became Stone-wall’s first number-one song on other country charts and was also recorded by Webb Pierce for an album.

  My writing that tune was one of the few times that a good thing resulted from a dreary experience from life on the road. Usually, I simply got drunk and did nothing creative when I got tired, blue, or just plain sick of the monotony.

  I wasn’t the only country singer playing one-night shows, then racing to repeat the same show in a different town the next night. And the boredom seemed to be overtaking all of us from Nashville, as country music was being taken on the road more than ever. A lot of entertainers vented themselves, I’m ashamed to say, not only by heavy drinking but by the juvenile act of tearing up hotel rooms.

  I was no exception.

  Johnny Cash has made no secret of the fact that he mixed his whiskey with amphetamines, pills that give you artificial energy. He talked about that in his life story, Man in Black. Touring country singers first began taking the pills as substitutes for sleep. Eventually, we took them because they made us feel good, because they were available, and because we were in the habit.

  Johnny has talked about getting high on those things and painting an entire hotel room black for want of something to do. Another time he released a bunch of live chickens inside a hotel. I’m glad that Johnny has been drug-free for many years and his reckless days are farther behind him than my own.

  Jimmy Dean, in 1994, remembered that he was not allowed to check into a hotel in the late 1950s in Canada because Johnny had destroyed a room there. The hotel had boycotted all entertainers, Jimmy recalled.

  We’d do anything back then to lift our spirits.

  Stonewall and some other guys even put me inside a coffin once and carried me backstage. They pretended to be pallbearers while I folded my hands across my chest and never moved. The stupid promoter thought he was going to have to cancel the show and refund ticket money because his act was dead. He thought the hillbillies he had hired to entertain had actually brought their dead buddy into the auditorium.

  Folks said the real show was watching him when I leaped from that coffin.

  One road-weary release came from tearing up a motel in 1962 with Johnny and Merle Kilgore, who is Hank Williams Jr.’s executive manager today. That’s a fitting job for Merle, who started in show business at age fourteen when he carried Hank Williams, Sr.’s guitar and ran errands for the legend. I first met Merle on the Louisiana Hayride.

  Merle tried his hand at recording and had a few hit records. But his biggest songs were “Ring of Fire,” which he and June Carter wrote for Johnny, and “Wolverton Mountain,” which he wrote with Claude King and which King recorded in 1962. “Wolverton Mountain” was a blockbuster record when Merle and I were featured acts on the touring Johnny Cash Show.

  We played Gary, Indiana, and I couldn’t get the song out of my head. I was drunk and kept singing the song over and over at the Holiday Inn after the concert. Merle and Johnny got so tired of hearing me that they hid.

  But I found their room. I begged Merle to help me get the song out of my head, and he urged me to record it. I don’t know how that would have helped me that night, but it would have given him additional royalties.

  The more I talked to Merle and Johnny the more I thought about the tour and how I didn’t like it. Saul Holiff was Johnny’s and my manager at the time. Because Johnny was the tour’s headline act, I took up my unhappiness with him. Johnny and I argued, and I accidentally broke a lamp. For some reason, I lifted the partially broken lamp and smashed it on the floor. Then it was really broken, and I somehow felt better. That’s the goofy way I used to think on some of my drinking days.

  “One broken lamp,” Johnny said dryly, like an accountant. “That will be forty-five dollars.”

  We all laughed at the obvious humor. Johnny had paid for destroyed motel property so often that he could pretty much assess damage on the spot. He’d been billed by Holiday Inns in the past and knew the price tag on each piece of their disposable property.

  “I’d never seen anybody trash a room before,” Merle recalled recently. “Johnny was totally cool because this was old hat to him. I didn’t know what was going to happen next.”

  I ran to the other side of the room and smashed another lamp.

  “Two lamps,” Johnny said coolly. “Ninety dollars.”

  I got caught up in the momentum of what I was doing. The next thing everybody knew I had pulled down the main curtain.

  “One curtain, that’ll be three hundred dollars,” Johnny said.

  I fumed at Johnny, telling him it shouldn’t cost that much.

  I ran into the bathroom and pulled the porcelain top off the commode. I hurled it into the bathtub, and the top shattered.

  “One commode top, one hundred seventy-five dollars,” Johnny said calmly. He was as laid-back as a sleepy auctioneer.

  Johnny lay there and watched me destroy the room all around him. He never raised his voice, and I never lowered mine. Then I walked out.

  On the final night of the tour, Merle, Johnny, and I were in Saul’s room to get our pay. I was the last in line.

  “Now, George,” Saul said, “before I pay you I want you to know that there are a few deductions here.”

  “What deductions?” I asked.

  “You remember that room in Gary, Indiana?” Saul asked. “One pair of drapes, three hundred dollars.”

  That’s exactly how much Johnny had predicted they would cost!

  “One commode top, one hundred seventy-five dollars,” Saul said, and the price was exactly right again, according to Johnny’s estimate!

  I stood there and watched my pay shrink before
my eyes.

  Saul itemized every expense to the penny, and each time his figures agreed with Johnny’s predictions. Until he got to the lamps.

  “Two lamps,” he said. “Forty-five dollars.”

  “You mean forty-five dollars each, don’t you?” I asked.

  “No,” Saul said. “This paper from the Holiday Inn just says two lamps for forty-five dollars.”

  “Those lamps were beautiful,” I said. “That’s a good buy. That’s a real good buy.”

  At that point I never complained again about the cost of my rampage.

  * * *

  By 1958 I was able to move Shirley and our two sons from Beaumont to Vidor, Texas. I bought a house on Lakeview Drive and then another on Hulet Drive. I left Shirley and the boys there when I went on the road and looked forward to each of my returns. Sometimes I came in drunk, and there was always hell to pay with Shirley. Another time I brought home George Riddle, and he wound up staying with us for a while.

  He would fly or drive with me to our show dates and then help me get back to Texas. George worked for me for about four years, during which he played rhythm guitar and sang high harmony on some of my biggest early records, including “She Thinks I Still Care,” “A Girl I Used to Know,” and “Not Exactly What I Had in Mind.”

  Shirley was glad when George started traveling with me. She thought that a constant companion would settle me down and that I wouldn’t get into mischief when I was out of her sight.

  Boy, was she wrong.

  I had met George while attending the Disc Jockey Convention, which eventually became the Country Music Association Convention, in 1960 inside Nashville’s Hermitage Hotel. George had gotten out of the service the day before and come to Nashville to try to break into the country music industry. He was walking down a hallway and recognized my voice. Without an invitation he walked into my room. There he saw George Jones flat on his back, strumming a guitar in the middle of a bed.