Country Music

[Professor Knowall]

By the early 1970’s, Hank Williams Jr become a consistent country hit maker whose warm, bluesy delivery sounded nothing like his dad’s. The bad news was he sounded just like everybody else - and particularly like George Jones and Merle Haggard. Nor had he exorcised his demons. Despite becoming a father to a son, Shelton Hank Williams in 1972 (yeah - y‘all know him, having just celebrated his 50th birthday - another Williams of outrageous talent and the usual family vices) Hank Jr abused alcohol and pills , married, womanised and divorced and even attempted suicide at age 25. Finally, convinced that his audience came to hear the reincarnation of Hank Williams, the one true son of the rural South, Hank Jr dropped out of the business temporarily, to concentrate on making himself unique

Rick Marschall analyzes the pressures on Williams in The Encyclopedia of Country and Western Music - "To a creative artist, being accepted for wrong reasons is usually more frustrating than finding no acceptance at all. And such was the challenge to a very young Hank Jr. as he developed”. Indeed, many of the songs Williams wrote into his twenties, after severing ties with his mother Audrey, still dealt with his father - either directly or indirectly - and this is the perfect example. For all that Hank Jr was all for seeking his own voice, not just an imitator of his famous father, it seems Hank Jr was still haunted by the legend though - or more likely because - he had no personal memories of, being too young at age 3 when Hank Snr died at age 29. This reached # 12 in 1973, not one of his bigger hits of the time, it one that‘s so much a part of Hank Jr’s story -
“… They say Hank sung a real good song and I’ll say; ‘He did.’ / Because he opened up his heart and He poured out the soul /
that most of the singers always keep hid / yes he did / Long as I live I’m gonna regret / I can’t remember him singing me to bed /
They say he is the greatest one yet / I don’t know / But I wouldn’t be surprised at all, if that ain’t so …” -


Through the early 1970‘s, Williams threw himself into songwriting with a vengeance, trying to piece his life together through the words of his songs. Just like his revered father - and seemingly consciously following his example - Hank Jr’s songs became increasingly personal. But at the same time, both his drug and alcohol abuse he had started at age 18 steadily worsened, along with his depression - one feeding the other in an ever worsening spiral down. His personal life became progressively more complicated, culminating in attempting suicide by overdosing on pills in 1974. He survived after his stomach contents were pumped out at hospital. Hank Jr later recalled - “There was a doctor, he told me - “You’ve been taught to look like, act like, and be like Hank Williams your whole life. He died at 29. And you’re going to beat him‘. Those were his exact words. And he said, “I want you to start saying ‘the hell with that, you go do your thing and you kiss that other stuff goodbye“. That was some pretty good advice”.

Following the attempt, (though not before recording another cover album of his father’s songs, but this time less imitative and more his own style than in the past), Hank Jr moved from drug drenched Nashville to Cullman, Alabama, rethought his life in and out of music and refocusing both his creative energy and his troubled personal life, recorded his first truly original work, the album “Hank Williams Jr and Friends” that featured Waylon Jennings, the Tucker Band’s Toy Caldwell, Charlie Daniels and others who weren’t in the traditional country camp. Upon moving to Alabama. Williams wanted a contemporary reaffirmation of the old kind of music that had powered southern honky tonks in the 1950’s. He achieved this with a fusion of blues/country, R&B/country and rock/R&B. He was one of the first to experiment with that sound - his 1975 album “Hank Williams Junior and Friends” is considered a watershed recording in the Outlaw style, following the path pioneered by Waylon Jennings.

Though the now 26 y.o. Hank Jr wasn't scoring as many big hits in 1975 as he had in the early 1970’s, having lost a large portion of his old countrypolitan fans while building - but still slowly a new fan base, his music had finally become truly original and focused. ’Stoned at the Jukebox‘, from the “Hank Williams Junior and Friends” album was Hank’s most searing work to date, but released as a single, it just scraped into the Top 20, at # 19 in 1975. Notice how he still brings a reference to his father into the song - ‘I Can’t Help It If I’m Still In Love With You’ was one of Hank Snr’s honky Tonk classics -
“… Lord, there's a cold heart gone and I'm stoned at the jukebox / Playin' I can't help it if I'm still in love with you /
Cause that's the kind of songs it takes to get all this ole hurtin' out / Lord, I love that hurtin' music, cause I am hurtin', too…” -


‘The Living Proof’, another single release from the “Hank Williams Junior and Friends” album, is the most personal song Hank Jr has ever written so far, setting out his issues in the form of a prayer, first observing he seems to be living out the very words of the songs he sings - and those old songs of daddy -
“… I'm gonna quit singin' all these sad songs / 'Cause I can't stand the pain / Oh, the life I sing about now /
And the one I live is the same / When I sing them old songs of daddy's / Seems like every one comes true /
Lord, please help me / Do I have to be the living proof …”
Then not for the first time, he refers to his old problem of having those who only compare him (unfavourably of course) to his father, but at least now he‘s attracting younger fans who likes his own music -
Why just the other night after the show / An old drunk came up to me / He says "You ain't as good as your daddy, boy /
And you never will be / Then a young girl in old blue jeans / Says, "I'm your biggest fan …"
Having recently had a near death experience (the 1974 suicide attempt) and with continuing battles with alcohol, drugs and depression, Hank Jr declares he’s not wanting to die yet and name-checks 3 greats who were all dead by age 35 - foundational country blues legend, Jimmie Rodgers (posts # 120-122), the greatest of all, his own father (205-214) and rockabilly and ballad great Johnny Horton (# 296-308) -
“… Remember Jimmie and Hank and Johnny / They were in the summer of life /
When you called them away, Lord / I don't wanna pay that price …”
Then, highly ironical with hindsight, his prayer that his son, Shelton Hank Williams, stays away from music - not only did Shelton become Hank III, but Hank Jr went on to have 2 more children to his second wife and one more to his third wife - and they also all became professional country musicians and / or songwriters -
“… Don't let my son ever touch a guitar / May he never sing the blues / Let him be free /
Don't make him be more living proof …”
Finally, Hank Jr’s most personal lines, a plea that he doesn’t want to be a dead legend like his dad, he confesses he’s needed help at times, but although he’s now materially well off, he’s doing it rough, feeling lonely (his marriage was now in ruins) and without a place that feels like a home -
“… I don't wanna be a legend / I just wanna be a man / But Lord, You know sometimes /
I've needed a helpin' hand / And it ain't been so easy lately / I've had to go it all alone /
But I've always had anything I ever wanted / except a home …” -
‘The Living Proof’, like the best country songs, told a real story, but the public at the time weren’t buying it - it barely made the Top 40, topping out at # 38 in early 1976. It took a few years longer for Williams to build a mass fan base for his new music direction -


Ironically, just as “Hank Williams and Friends” was giving a needed boost to Hank Jr’s career, establishing Hank Jr as the third major outlaw after Waylon and Willie, he was nearly killed in an accident. In August 1975, while mountain climbing at Montana’s Ajax Peak, he slipped and fell off the mountain, tumbling down nearly 200 metres, incurring multiple fractures and deep lacerations, including a badly fractured skull that very nearly claimed his life. Rescued by a team of 6 and a helicopter, he endured multiple reconstructive surgeries to his face and skull. His mother Audrey died only months after the accident, bankrupt, after years of struggling with addiction to alcohol and various drugs. It took a long time for Hank Jr to recover - over a year - but once he did, Hank Jr continued meshing together blues, country, and rock as a genre all his own. Already a talented multi-instrumentalist, his ability to play a range of instruments put him in a unique position to make the most out of his new musical path.

Although Hank Jr was very successful serving as a musical impersonator of his father during the first part of his career, it wasn’t until he changed course with his music style did he catapult from stardom into superstardom. In addition to changing how he played music, he also changed his appearance. After his near-fatal accident and his series of reconstructive surgeries, due to the disfigurement and scarring, he sported a beard, wore a cowboy hat and sunglasses. This became his signature look. When he returned to performing, in 1976, he was also determined as never before to distinguish himself beyond his father’s legacy - though it still took a few years to break through the ceiling, with one of the greatest drinking songs of all time, but it’s so much more than that - it‘s Hank Jr’s manifesto to the music world.

OK, ‘Family Tradition’, along with Bobby Helm’s ‘Fraulein’, ranks to this day as one of favourite honky tonk drinking songs. But the lyrics offer still more, as Hank Jr proudly and loudly proclaims his place amongst the Outlaw musicians and declares his full independence from his fathers music - but still pays respect to his father’s legacy. And all the while he is reminding his listeners that if he behaves badly, well, it’s just carrying on the William’s family tradition - when this song was released in 1979, Hank Jr turned 30. His hellraising daddy died of morphine and alcohol at age 29.

The song starts with his Outlaw proclamation with a defiant defence of his musical “change in direction” -
“Country music singers / Have always been a real close family / But lately some of my kinfolks / Have disowned a few others and me / I guess it's because / I kinda changed my direction / Lord, I guess I went and broke their family tradition …”
Then comes the rollicking “drinking” chorus -
“… They get on me and want to know / Hank, why do you drink? / Hank, why do you roll smoke? /
Why must you live out the songs that you wrote? / Over and over / Everybody makes my prediction /
So if I get stoned, I'm just carrying on / An old family tradition …”.
The second verse pays tribute to fathers legacy, as Hank Jr had done in song so many times before, as we have seen - but this time he declares his own music “… ain’t exactly the same …” and asks his listeners to consider his position (as the son of the legend) -
“… I am very proud / Of my daddy's name / Although his kind of blues / And mine ain't exactly the same / Stop and think it over / Put yourself in my unique position / If I get stoned and sing all night long / It's a family tradition …”.
And I can’t pass over the last verse, with some very funny lines, that relates to his personal battles with whiskey and women -
“… Lordy, I have loved some ladies / And I have loved Jim Beam / And they both tried to kill me in 1973 / When that doctor asked me / "Son, how did you get in this condition?" / I said, "Hey, Sawbones / I'm just carrying on an ole family tradition".
So grab your best Tennessee whiskey and after a few good swigs, you might join in loudly at the chorus -

’Family Tradition’ can be seen as the exclamation mark for a series of songs we’ve seen over the last 2 days, starting with 1964’s ‘Standing In The Shadows’, 1973’s ‘Hank’ and 1975’s ‘Living Proof’. It peaked at # 4, his first top 5 hit since the Countrypolitan ’Last Love Song’ in 1973, showing Hank Jr had, at last, fully won over a new, younger market for his Outlaw music.

When Hank was once asked how he writes songs, he answered - “Well, I got a good woman at home” - which became the first line of this 1979 hit. The rest was written within 10 minutes (just as his father famously wrote his classic songs). ‘Whiskey Bent And Hell Bound’, the title track to Hank’s second album of 1979 is a waltzing honky tonker about what he gets up to whenever his “good woman” isn’t around. Turns out he just chills out with a cold beer and listens to country music - that is until someone puts Hank Williams on. As soon as he hears ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’, he goes full on black suit Spiderman, starts drinking whiskey and hooking up with random angels (being polite here) in honky tonks. The song shows off Hank’s classic country vocals - and, appropriately (and typically), he uses them to reference his father -
“… Don’t you play "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry” / Cause I’ll get all balled up inside / And I’ll get whiskey bent and hell bound ...”. It’s easy to imagine Hank Jr singing this song from a dusty old bar, explaining in a vulnerable moment, as he does, that “… Hank’s old songs always make me feel low down...” -

’Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound’ went up to # 2, his most successful hit since the Countrypolitan ’Eleven Roses’ in 1972 - and it did even better in Canada, going all the way to # 1. Despite just missing the coveted # 1 poSition in the U.S., the success of ‘Family Tradition’ and ‘Whiskey Bent And Hell Bound’, cementing Hank Jr‘s prominent place in Outlaw music, set Hank Jr up nicely for his massive success in the 1980’s - that’s reserved for tomorrow.

 

[Professor Knowall]

We left Hank Williams Jr yesterday in 1979 with the country music world finally catching on to his musical change in direction he started back in 1975. His 1979 “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound”, his first million-selling album along with the publication of his autobiography, Living Proof, in the the early 1980s, he catapulted to full-on superstar status, with a string of major hits and top selling albums.

“Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound” is the mother of Williams Jr.'s outlaw records and it rocks harder than anything in his catalog. Williams and band weigh in with one of his most notorious macho outlaw tomes, ’Women I've Never Had‘, the second single released from the album (and not the sort of single that a mainstream would release in todays more restrictive climate - yet in 1980 it was a # 5 hit). It's as sexist as hell - unapologetically so, as Hank Jr had reached the stage in his career (in an era that allowed freedom of expression) where he didn’t shirk from controversy. It's an in-your-face up yours to political correctness and modern feminism as it existed 40 years ago - and though I’ve mentioned Hank Jr’s meshing of country, blues and rock, here Hank Jr is accompanied by a straight out. Ew Orleans jazz sound, horns and all - the perfect accompaniment for the theme of the song

Hank Jr outlines things he likes, listing playing music and having good times, hearing “trains rollin' down the line”, being happy, not sad, “a little smoke and a lot of wine”, getting high and calling old friends, riding his horses and shooting his gun. He declares he’s “into basics and I don't like fads”, hence revealing his innate conservatism that soon became much more in evidence. He also proclaims he means no harm, despite some wild ways - “… I don't mean to ever do anybody no wrong / I was just born the son of a singer of songs / I do things that make some people mad …”. But most of all, he keeps repeating what apparently is his biggest desire - having new sweet young things, and I pose the question - is Hank Jr singing here on behalf of most males, exposing our dirty little secret desire (actually, let’s face it, it’s hardly a secret, it’s pretty much the truth)? -

Hank Jr was married for the second time when this song came out, and had daughters born in the years prior and after its 1980 release. But the marriage didn’t survive his womanising, Hank Jr taking a young model, Mary Jane, for his third wife in 1991 - though this third marriage lasted 31 years until Mary Janes’ death in March 2022. As for the song‘s theme being hopelessly dated - well maybe so (if you ignore the basic truth in the song and focus on PC), but the versions of this on YouTube have over 4 millions downloads combined over the past decade.

From the mid-seventies, when Waylon Jenning’s Outlaw music and wicked ways had served as an example of what was possible for Hank Jr, they had become good friends and their collaboration became one of the oddest premises for a song in his Hank Jr’s catalogue - though the theme was very familiar. Originally, the song was included on Hank Jr.'s 1979 album “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound” (hence its inclusion in today’s segment). The track was later reissued on Jennings' 1983 album “Waylon and Company”, which consisted almost entirely of duets, and was released as the album's second single. A music video was made to promote the single, a rarity for country music at the time. The song was a moderately successful hit, reaching # 15 . ‘The Conversation‘ is exactly what the title says it is - Hank Jr and Waylon (Hank Jr’s senior by 12 years) got together to record what was basically just a fairly straightforward conversation - the subject being Hank Jr’s favourite - his legendary father.

“Hank, let’s talk about your daddy…”, Waylon starts off. The rest of the song is a back-and-forth between the two, with the agreement they won’t talk about the elder Williams’ “…habits…”, only “…the music and the man…”. The song was partly about dispelling myths that surrounded Hank Sr, with Waylon asking - “… Now Hank you just got to tell me / did your daddy really write all them songs, did he …”, to which Hank Jr dismissively replies - “… That don't deserve no answer hoss / let's light up and just move along …”. Along the way they take a little dig at the country music establishment that turned its back on him while he was alive, only to laud him after his death - “…Well back then they called him crazy now days they call him a saint / Now the ones that called him crazy are still ridin' on his name…”. it even reveals his father’s firing from the Opry caused the late singer his greatest heartache. The song hit # 15 on the charts. Of Hank Snr, they conclude in reverence - “…Still the most wanted outlaw in the land”. -


Hank Jr has kicked a lot of habits in his time. This 1980 softboi ballad, one of Hank Jr’s more understated performances, disproves the oft repeated lie that his songs in this period were all about partying, womanising and having too good a time. From the “Habits Old And New“ album, ‘Old Habits’ got to # 6 in 1980. In the lyrics, Williams laments that even though he has beaten some formidable odds and opponents over the years, losing the love of his life was something that he would never be able to fully recover from. He reflects on how he’s given up smoking and drugs, but he just can’t seem to give up on the love of this one particular woman. He managed to quit smoking by sucking on Life Saver sweets, but unsurprisingly this method doesn’t work when he tries it for his broken heart. He sings of trying to find someone new but having grown so used to his past flame made giving his heart to someone else too difficult -


Though never released as a single, ‘Dinosaur‘, an acutely self-aware cut off the 1980 “Habits Old And New“ album, is one of the best Hank Jr songs. The lyrics are classic, specifically viewing the current’s musical and politically fastidious situation. As mentioned above (‘Women I Never Had’), Hank Jr doesn’t mind rubbing people the wrong way, and the lyrics in this song are proof. He discloses all the things that don’t sit right with him, bemoaning the influx of “high heel sneakers”, “gay guitar pickers” and (the then disco queen) Donna Summer music at his favourite bar. Struggling under the flashing lights and blaring disco, he admits he doesn’t really belong there anymore - “… I’m a dinosaur / I should’ve died out a long time ago…”.

’Dinosaur depicts a representation of blue collar workers being pushed out of their favourite bars by wealthy corporate suits, yuppies and dinkies - and Hank Jr really despises it - you can feel the agony of the singer who simply wants to grab a basic beer or whiskey, kick back and listen to some classic blues and country music, not disco crap being pumped down one’s throat amongst flashing lights - this has don’t belong the old workingman’s bar or pub. The line about gay guitar pickers made some people think that the singer was homophobic. Things were changing and his peculiar brand of outlaw Southern country rock was beginning to sound more reactionary than revolutionary. However, upon a closer look, it is only about a person who was resistant to change - hence, calling himself a dinosaur that should’ve died out - but a dinosaur so many can relate to, even though few will have the courage to admit it -
“… You're singin' a song about makin' love to your drummer / Well gay guitar-pickers don't turn me on /
And we don't all get into Donna Summer / Do you happen to know any old Hank Williams song? …” -
(yep - he even dropped his father’s name into this song too!) -

I find it interesting ‘Dinosaur’, which would never get released or have any mainstream radio air-play with todays strict censorship, has attracted some 38 million combined YouTube downloads in the last 12 years - despite it never being a hit or even released as a single 42 years ago in 1980.

Hank Jr owes his love for blues to Sam “Lightnin” Hopkins, an African-American blues great who taught Williams Jr, as a child and as part of his extraordinary musical education (outlined 2 days back), how to play the blues guitar. Hopkins also turned Hank Jr on to blues phrasing and rhythms. Remarkably, Hank Williams Snr also had a similar education as a child from Rufus Payne, another African-American blues singer, so the blues were ingrained in the Williams family. The phrasing became ingrained in Hank’s country music style, and he became a “blues man”, so it’s no wonder Hank Jr penned ‘The Blues Man’, another from the 1980 “Habits Old And New“ album. The song talks about a singer who has undergone too many lows and made many mistakes, drinkin’ and druggin’ and speaks of a woman who helps him through his difficult time by showering him with love and helping him to turn his life around - surely an autobiographical tribute to his then wife -

Alan Jackson covered ‘The Blues Man’. in 1999. Dolly Parton and George Jones also couldn’t resist the song, doing their versions too.

So that’s todays lot done as we leave Hank Jr in 1980, riding high - but tomorrow will see him riding higher still as we progress into the 1980’s as his career peaks.

 

[Professor Knowall]

The 1970‘s had been a troubled decade for the USA - first and foremost there was the trauma of the Vietnam war, which lingered for some time even after the final Total American withdrawal in 1974, and the subsequent defeat of the South Vietnam republic that the USA had previously. Asked at the cost of 55,000 lives. Then followed, with the election of the weak and incompetent Jimmy Carter as President, an era of high inflation, economic recession, high unemployment amidst out of control crime in the slums of the major cities, while also enduring a series of humiliations abroad, including their embassy staff in Iran being taken hostage by government backed agents disguised as “students”. This all resulted in a massive one-side landslide election win for Ronald Reagan in 1980, who soon turned everything around - a booming economy, a crackdown on crime, a much strengthened military, a new assertiveness abroad, forcing the Soviet Union on the defensive. Reagan’s success also signalled thae ascendency of a new conservatism movement sweeping through the country - which didn’t suit everyone, like avowed left of centre Democrat, Willie Nelson, but was perfect for Hank Williams Jr.

The 1980’s saw Hank Jr unashamedly embrace the shift to the new conservatism, which, without abandoning - even ramping up even further - the good times, party hard, raising cain themes, he now also included conservative themes of patriotism, macho, proudly Southern, blue-collar values (in cultural affiliation if not in fact) and the virtues of rural living in his lyrics. This only increased his popularity in blue collar and rural areas - and pretty much everywhere in the South, which was going through an era of sustained economic growth, outstripping the North, resulting in an era of Southern pride. So, with that introduction done (which explains some of Hank Jrs’s music to come), let’s get back to the music.

’Texas Women’ is a simple rollicking ode to the alluring and enduring charm of the female gender from the Lone Star state. Released as a single from his 1981 album ‘Rowdy’, it turned out to be an important career moment in Hank Jr’s recording career. From 1979 his records began to hit the Top 10 regularly as never before, but ‘Texas Women’ returned him to the # 1 slot for the first time in almost a decade, becoming Hank’s jr first Outlaw era # 1. As you can imagine, this folk-country sounding ditty was an immensely popular song for half the Texan population - nor could the other half dare to disagree. From personal experience of those real friendly jeans clad Texan women from the great Texan dance-halls and various bars and honky tonks, I ain’t disagreeing with any of the lyrics - though I’d never say it to any woman outside Texas -


Just in case you haven’t already cottoned on (about a 1% chance of that if you’ve read much of the history here), country music is an integral part of the Southern identity. With economic growth and prosperity in the southern”sunbelt” - in stark contrast to the previously prosperous Northern industrial belt starting to turn into a rust belt as industry was shipped off to cheap labour countries, this fostered a round of southern pride in the previously despised, down-trodden, poverty ravaged South. In the 1980’s a whole sub-genre of “southern pride” songs resulted (I’ve read university dissertations of country music’s role in southern pride, which have included numerous mentions of Hank Williams Jr, but I won’t bore anyone any more than I already have with all the details here). Hank Jr was at the forefront of this with 1981’s ’Dixie On My Mind’, which he took all the way to # 1. In the song, Hank Jr attempted to give the hustle and bustle of life in New York City a fair shot, but he ended up feeling more unhappy and frustrated than ever. The worst part is that he can no longer go back home to Dixie, due to being “busted” -
“… Oh, the things you know that I miss most of all / Is the freedom of the rivers and the pines /
They don't do much huntin' and fishin' up here, ya know / But I have met a few squirrels and one porcupine …” -


Hank Jr.'s 1981 album “The Pressure Is On“, his third album from 1981 alone, continued his streak of winners that began back in 1975 with “Hank Williams, Jr & Friends”. Hank Jr concentrated more on his songwriting here and nailed 2 of his most famous compositions, both of which were Top 5 singles that flew in the face of a Nashville establishment that, while it had co-opted the outlaw movement from 1976’s “Wanted: The Outlaws” album, couldn't quite get with Hank Jr, despite the fact he sold tons of records and had a host of young fans the Music Row think tanks should have been happy to cultivate. But Hank Jr wasn't interested in any sort of compromise - he'd had enough during his lifetime. The two tracks that garnered the most airplay and notice from this set are ’A Country Boy Can Survive’, with its own rural redneck anthem of rugged individualism and ’All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down)’, a regretful (in a light hearted way) tale of the aging and settling of the outlaw generation from Waylon to Kristofferson to Willie.

A song reminiscent in theme of the Australian glam-rock group Skyhooks 1975 hit ‘All My Friends Are Getting Married’, Hank Jr’s ’All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down)’ was his 3rd consecutive # 1 hit in 1981 alone - and coined Hank Jr’s signature phrase. When he wrote it, he was probably feeling lonely as he sings of how he misses raising kane with his friends as they all have settled down. Some are with their families and would rather spend their time at home than grab a drink and run wild. He realizes their lifestyles have changed and they can no longer keep up with his wild ways. He name drops a few greats - George Jones is finally going straight (from alcohol and cocaine), former addict Waylon's staying home with his beloved Jessi Colter a whole lot more, Kris Kristofferson is off making movies in L.A and Johnny Cash isn’t what he was back in 1968. (but funnily, David Allan Coe isn't mentioned.) Hell raiser Hank Jr has had just about enough of it too, like a sulky teenager who thinks everyone over the age of 40 who doesn’t want to get drunk on a weeknight is boooring and texts them all to say he needs new friends!! -


’A Country Boy Can Survive’ from 1982 is one of Hank’s signature songs and, particularly in the rural areas of the South, his most well known hit. Although it “only” topped out at # 2 in 1982, subsequent sales have made it his most successful single. The song promotes the self-reliance of country boys as it also signifies the changes of the American lifestyle and civilization as a negative result of the increasing urbanization. It’s simultaneously hopeless and hopeful. It acknowledges that yes, disasters of all sorts are coming (the Mississippi drying up, the stock market crashing, the world ending) ... but the country boys are going to survive, because they know how to do a whole lot of things city folk can’t (which in general, is quite true). Hank Jr.’s celebration of rural American life and ideals, poured gas on a white-hot career to the point that Keep in mind the song was released as “Urban Cowboy“ inspired music was doing everything it could to polish up country for suburban audiences. The song was a riposting response to that -
“… 'Cause you can't starve us out and you can't make us run / 'Cause we're them old boys raised on shotguns /
We say grace, and we say ma'am / If you ain't into that, we don't give a damn /
We're from North California and South Alabam' / And little towns all around this land /
And we can skin a buck, and run a trotline / And a country boy can survive -

Hank Jr released anorther version of this country anthem with George Jones and Chad Brock in 1999, and in 2001- following the September 11 attacks the song charted again under the title ‘America Will Survive‘, changing the premise of the original a bit, as the singer’s friend from New York City who was “killed by a man with a switchblade knife” was transformed into one of the victims of the tragedy.

There’s another son from the 1981 “The Pressure is On” album that must be included here - for although never released as a single, the bluesy and moody ‘Weatherman’ is for me, one of Hank Jr’s best. From the (unusually metaphorical) lyrics, it appears that the singer was going through a hard time and was tired of it all. Therefore, he hoped good times lay ahead. But it’s Hank Jr’s soulful bluesy delivery, along with his guitar accompaniment that really makes this song -
“… I've had too many highs and too many lows / Too many storms and tornadoes /
I need some blue skies and sunshine / I need a good outlook tonight …” -


In the calendar year 1981, as well as having the 3 consecutive # 1 hit singles, Hank Jr had an extraordinary 9 albums on the Top Albums chart simultaneously. He had by now, against the odds, well and truly stepped out of his legendary father’s immense shadow and now stood out on his own as a great singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and country music giant. And he wasn’t finished yet, so there’s more to come - tomorrow.

 

[Professor Knowall]

Throughout the 1980’s, Hank Williams Jr was one of the most popular - and controversial - figures in country music. Following his image makeover, he appealed primarily to young and rowdy crowds, particularly in the South, with his hell-raising anthems and jingoistic ballads. Though he had established his own distinctive style, he continued to name-check and pay tribute to his legendary father, and these salutes became as much a part of his act as his redneck rockers. Both the wild music and the party-ready atmosphere of his concerts made Hank Jr. an immensely popular musician and helped him cross over into the rock & roll audience. But as can be seen from today’s music selection, Hank Jr delivered in a variety of musical styles, but always with his own very distinct touch.

Today’s music starts in 1982 with another simple - and somewhat humorous - southern pride (as explained yesterday) song with the rocker ’If Heaven Ain’t A Lot Like Dixie‘, from the album “High Notes”. The album also contains a # 1 hit cover of his father's 1947 ’Honky Tonkin' as well as an intriguing version of the Beatles' ’Norwegian Wood’. the album is a typically entertaining early-’80s record from Hank Jr, featuring a handful of excellent redneck country-rockers such as ’Whiskey on Ice’, ’The South's Gonna Rattle Again’ (In which Hank Jr name-drops a load of the top country artists of the day) as well as ’If Heaven Ain’t A Lot Like Dixie‘, another rocking ode to the virtues of the South -
“… If heaven ain't a lot like Dixie, / I'd just as soon stay home / If they don't have a Grand Ole Opry /
like they do in Tennessee, / Just send me to hell or New York City / it would be about the same to me /
I've got wild honey trees and crazy little weeds / growin' around my shack, / These dusty roads ain't streets of gold /
but I'm a happy right where I'm at / All these pretty little southern belles are a country boy's dream /
They ain't got wings or halos / but they're sure looking good to me …”-


In 1983 Hank teamed up with fellow outlaw Waylon Jennings (again) and also the 69 y.o. Great Texan honky Tonk pioneer, Ernest Tubb (see posts # 161-165) for ‘Leave Them Boys Alone’ – a song thumbing its nose at doubters of the outlaws’ hard-talking music. It also takes aims at the development of country-pop and its growing popularity. The lyrics of the song, much like Hank Jr’s' ‘Family Tradition’ echo the sentiment the outlaw singers and their current escapades were predated by the hard living, hard core honky-tonkers of the 1950’s such as Hank Williams Sr and Ernest Tubb, prior to the music being fairly taken over by the Nashville Sound in the 1960’s. This peaked at # 6 in the U.S. and # 7 in Canada -
“Now they say, Hank Jr. has strayed away / Of all them songs that put his daddy in an early grave /
But his daddy would be proud, if he could see Bocephus now / Why don't you leave that boy alone, let him sing his song …” -

This was Ernest Tubb’s first Top 20 appearance since 14 years prior in 1969. It was also his last recording as the hard living old honky tinker died the following year at age 70.

On to 1984 and Hank Jr came up with a sequel of sorts to his big 1981 hit ‘All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down)‘ with ’All My Rowdy Friends (Are Coming Over Tonight)’. apparently, though everyone in his social circle had settled down, these same folks are now coming by his place out in the woods for a raging, rocking party. Actually, it’s the music video made for the song that’s probably the best part of it and essential viewing - and not (just) for the 1980’s babes (thank God for the 1980’s). Amongst his rowdy friends at the party are artists such as Outlaws Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, along with a host of others including Little Jimmy Dickens, Paul Williams, Mickey Gilley, Cheech and Chong (emerging from the back of a smoke filled limousine), George Thorogood, Mel Tillis (# 648-657), Bobby Bare (# 464-468), Kris Kristofferson wearing a Hank Snr shirt (posts # 661-667), Ernest Tubb (# 161-165), Grandpa Jones washing the window, Porter Wagoner (# 430-432), Jim Varney and from the Oak Ridge Boys, William Lee Golden and Duane Allen. Most famously, George Jones is shown hilariously arriving driving a lawnmower, a reminder of the time he drove a lawnmower 14 km’s from an isolated farmhouse to a liquor store while he was supposed to be abstaining, his wife having taken the car keys (see first paragraph of post # 408).

At the end of the video, homage is paid to Hank Williams Snr with Hank Jr waving to a ghostly Cadillac that flew up into the night sky. The touching music video, each illustrating a piece of an artist’s personality, won the ACM Video of the Year in 1984 as well as the ACM as well as in 1985 with the CMA. In 2014 it was voted "The #1 Country Video of All Time" by CMT. Hank Jr had 3 of the Top 10 on that list. The song itself also earned plenty of attention on its own, earning him 2 Grammy nominations - for Best Country Song and Best Male Vocal Performance -
“I got ketchup on my blue jeans, I just burnt my hand / Lord, it's hard to be a bachelor man /
I got girls that can cook, I got girls that can clean / I got girls that can do anything in between …” -

While the song originally released in 1984 and, helped by the iconic video, snuck into the Top 10, its real legacy comes from the time it spent as the opening theme to ABC’s Monday Night Football. ‘All My Rowdy Friends Are Here on Monday Night‘, as that version is known, was the Monday Night Football theme for 22 years from 1989 until 2011 when Williams Jr compared President Obama’s golf match with Republican conservative House Speaker John Boehner to Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu. However in 2017, the song was reinstated with a new version that featured the combined performance of Hank Jr, Florida Georgia Line and Jason Derulo. Its long association with MNF makes ’All My Rowdy Friends ...’ one of Hank Jr‘s best-known hits.

‘I’m For Love’ was solely written by Hank Jr, who documents that while different people and different organizations were against this or that, he was fine simply being with the person he cared about. The song was the lead single from his 1985 album, “Five-O”, which remains one of his most enduring albums to this day. Hank Jr has a clear message in this song - He’s tired of being told what people are against, so he wants to explain what he’s for. He knows the “Banker’s against the farmer / The farmer’s against the wall / The doctor is against me smoking / And the devil is against us all“, but that’s not what he’s focusing - instead, he’s concerned with 2 things: love and happiness. The sentiment was popular enough to land ‘I’m for Love‘ at the # 1 spot in 1985. And what was Hank Jr himself against? - well here he spells it out -
“… I'm against cats in the house …” and “… I'm against fishing in the rain …” -


So by now, you know about Hank Jr’s country side. You know about his blues side and also about his rock side. But in this, a major pivot for Hank Jr, we find his jazz side. In 1985, many were surprised to see “Bocephus” cover this evergreen, classic 1929 swing cover ’Ain't Misbehavin'‘, from Fats Waller. No-one expected Hank Jr to come out with a prohibition-era jazz standard, but he made it work, proving he could croon with the best - giving an impressive performance of the song that earned him yet another # 1 single in 1986. Maybe Hank Jr was counting on that element of surprise when he released his cover. Whatever his reasons for recording this song, Hank Jr's gamble worked, proving he had the vocal chops and the patience to pull it off. As more validation, the # 1 hit earning another Grammy nomination for Best Male Vocal Performance and respect from a different set of fans -


Of course, Hank Jr, despite his success with a 1929 jazz standard, wasn't done being wild and rowdy, not had his run of big hits finished - so there’ll be more tomorrow.

 

[Professor Knowall]

PBy the mid 1980’s, not had Hank Williams Jr long stepped out of his father’s shadow, he was now the biggest name in country music. In a lot (though as we have seen, by no means all) of Hank Williams Jr’s music, he celebrated smoking, drinking, getting stoned, womanizing and boasting about it all and lauded, rather than disparaged, rural America. At a time when so much of what came from Music City was looking for polish and commercial appeal to attract the suburban market, he snarled and stared through dark sunglasses, with a thick beard that hid the scars from his near-fatal fall in 1975, aiming his music squarely at the traditional rural and blue collar base country music market - and anyone who identified with the South.

But Hank Jr’s total song catalog is, as we’ve seen over the fast few days, quite diverse, encompassing several sub-genres of country, but also the blues, soul, rock and even jazz (e.g ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ from yesterday), showing his depth of knowledge about music of all sorts. He could croon or simply recite country lyrics while playing acoustic or electric guitars and fiddle - or belt out a hard rocker or sing the blues as good as anyone. He was known for endless covers and hearty banter on stage, and occasionally for going too far. There are several songs beyond politically incorrect by the grim censorious 21st century standards - not that I care about a singer’s politics (Hank Jr being the opposite of Willie Nelson when it comes to politics and I find American politics mostly plain crazy from both sides). Anyway, let’s get straight into the music, starting from 1986.

So by the time of 1986's # 1 “Montana Cafe” album - the third of 6 consecutive # 1 albums from 1984 to 1989, Hank Jr. had established himself as a singular hitmaker, long out of his father's shadow. This allowed “Bocephus“ to loosen up his outlaw image a bit, making it a positive album with plenty of upbeat hits, including ’Country State of Mind’, ’Mind Your Own Business‘, featuring Willie Nelson and Reba McEntire, and what would become Hank Jr’s s signature song, ’My Name Is Bocephus’. There’s nothing Jr likes to sing about more than Hank Jr (well, apart from his father), so naturally here he has what’s basically his own theme song. Of course, it was his dad, Hank Williams Sr, who gave his son the nickname “Bocephus” - named after Grand Ole Opry comedian Rod Brasfield's ventriloquist dummy - and in this low-down-and-dirty slice of blues, he’s on the lookout for love and looking back on all the lessons he learned from those that came before him -
“… Not everybody loves me but those that do will fight / Right to the end they're guitar friends from legendary Saturday nights /
I learned something from Lynyrd Skynyrd / From my Daddy and Ernest Tubb too / I do country rock, I do blues …” -


’Country State Of Mind’ was co-written by Williams Jr and Roger Alan Wade, and was released in 1986 as the first single from the ”Montana Cafe” album, reaching # 2 In 1986. in contrast to the more direct, even forceful, lyrics of ‘A Country Boy Can Survive’, here Hank Jr is laidback, relaxed, peacefully fishing, sharing home made wine with mates - and enjoying a resulting peaceful, easy feeling (with apologies to The Eagles) which he identifies as a state of mind induced by the country (just as the title suggests) -
“That hot, old summer sun / Make you beg for your next breath / So, you best be on the creek bank / Laying in the shade /
Chewing on a hickory twig / Pass that bottle, I'll have me a swig / I ain't got a lot but I think I got it made / In the shade …” -

Mark Chesnutt covered ’Country State Of Mind’ for his 2010 album “Outlaw”. The song was also covered in 2020 by Josh Turner and Chris Janson for Turner's album of the same name.

From a time when opposing politics didn’t stop fellow artists from teaming up together, in ’Mind Your Own Business’, staunch Republican Hank Jr teamed up with Democrat Party activist Willie Nelson (who also appeared yesterday as one of Hank Jr’s rowdy friends at the party), along with Reba McEntire and southern rocker and “left winger”, Tom Petty and even Reverend Ike in this storming cover of one his father’s most famous songs, admonishing the town gossips for snooping around and spreading rumours about him and his wife. Also notable in this version is the neo-early 1950’s sound of the accompaniment, with its pedaless steel guitar, recreating the original honky tonk sound of the Hank Williams Snr era. Hank Jr and the gang also managed to take their cover all the way to # 1 this time too, in both the U.S. and Canada, in 1986 -


’Born To Boogie’ (not to be confused with the T-Rex song of the same name) roars out of the gate with a driving guitar lick, 4-on-the-floor drums and honky-tonk piano, an autobiographical rocker that endeared him to fans and fellow artists alike, a favourite dancefloor filler. The “Born to Boogie” album was released in 1987 and became another # 1 seller and for Hank Jr. The single also peaked at # 1 in both the U.S. and Canada. ‘Born to Boogie‘ was classic Hank Jr, lyrically sharing his autobiography in one of his most entertaining songs to hit the charts. Once called ”country radio's hardest rocking hit ever" by journalist David Cantwell, ’Born to Boogie‘ cooked at a time neo-traditional country music was making major moves (think George Strait and Randy Travis). ‘Born to Boogie‘ also references two of Hank Jr’s favourite things - his nickname “Bocephus” and his “rowdy friends”. From the piano solos to guitar solos, to Hank Jr yelping, “I was born to boogie!” it’s hard not to love this song … or at least to not dance to it. There’s be-bopping and jitterbug boogieing aplenty, as Hank Jr goes about reclaiming his reign as elder statesman over the burgeoning neo-traditionalist movement of the late 1980’s in style -
“… Now before I could walk, I had a guitar in my hand / By the time I could talk, I had my own band /
I went on the road when I was eight years old / When I turned fifteen, I was stealing the show /
Money to burn and the girls were pretty / It didn't take me long to learn that I was born to boogie …” -

In 2016, the singer re-recorded ’Born To Boogie’ on his excellent “It’s About Time” album with help from Brantley Gilbert, Justin Moore and Brad Paisley.

We finish today’s selection with the second single from the “Born To Boogie” album, ‘Heaven Can’t Be Found’. Yes, Hank Williams Jr. is a rocker and became an Outlaw badass. However, when he wants to be, he can also be one of the finest traditional country singers in the genre’s history. You won’t find any stronger proof of that than on this breathtaking performance, that stands as one of the finest Hank Jr song performances in the books. This traditional classic country offering got to # 4 in 1987 -
“… I called and looked in everyplace you used to hang around / I've searched in every bar and club and honkey tonk in town /
And I don't know if I can go on without breaking down / I've looked all over hell but heaven can't be found …”


By 1987, Williams was on an artistic and a commercial roll like never before. For years, ever since the Hank Jr became the third Outlaw, he had spurned the Nashville music establishmen, refusing an invitation to join the Grand Ole Opry and not attending any award shows. The establishment had spurned him in return, not awarding him a thing, despite his Grammys successes, until the sheer magnitude of his sales and stardom meant they could no longer ignore him without looking petty and out of touch. In 1987 and again in 1988, after being a recording artist for 25 years, Hank Jr, now in his late thirties, finally broke through and won both the CMA and ACM Entertainer of the Year trophies - the highest awards in country music.

But, just like all our other artists in this history, Hank William Jr’s time at the top couldn’t last forever. Tomorrow will conclude Hank Jr’s illustrious music career to date - not that he’s concluded anything yet, despite suffering some recent personal tragedies.

 

[Purple7x08_24]

By the early 1970’s, Hank Williams Jr become a consistent country hit maker whose warm, bluesy delivery sounded nothing like his dad’s. The bad news was he sounded just like everybody else - and particularly like George Jones and Merle Haggard. Nor had he exorcised his demons. Despite becoming a father to a son, Shelton Hank Williams in 1972 (yeah - y‘all know him, having just celebrated his 50th birthday - another Williams of outrageous talent and the usual family vices) Hank Jr abused alcohol and pills , married, womanised and divorced and even attempted suicide at age 25. Finally, convinced that his audience came to hear the reincarnation of Hank Williams, the one true son of the rural South, Hank Jr dropped out of the business temporarily, to concentrate on making himself unique

Rick Marschall analyzes the pressures on Williams in The Encyclopedia of Country and Western Music - "To a creative artist, being accepted for wrong reasons is usually more frustrating than finding no acceptance at all. And such was the challenge to a very young Hank Jr. as he developed”. Indeed, many of the songs Williams wrote into his twenties, after severing ties with his mother Audrey, still dealt with his father - either directly or indirectly - and this is the perfect example. For all that Hank Jr was all for seeking his own voice, not just an imitator of his famous father, it seems Hank Jr was still haunted by the legend though - or more likely because - he had no personal memories of, being too young at age 3 when Hank Snr died at age 29. This reached # 12 in 1973, not one of his bigger hits of the time, it one that‘s so much a part of Hank Jr’s story -
“… They say Hank sung a real good song and I’ll say; ‘He did.’ / Because he opened up his heart and He poured out the soul /
that most of the singers always keep hid / yes he did / Long as I live I’m gonna regret / I can’t remember him singing me to bed /
They say he is the greatest one yet / I don’t know / But I wouldn’t be surprised at all, if that ain’t so …” -


Through the early 1970‘s, Williams threw himself into songwriting with a vengeance, trying to piece his life together through the words of his songs. Just like his revered father - and seemingly consciously following his example - Hank Jr’s songs became increasingly personal. But at the same time, both his drug and alcohol abuse he had started at age 18 steadily worsened, along with his depression - one feeding the other in an ever worsening spiral down. His personal life became progressively more complicated, culminating in attempting suicide by overdosing on pills in 1974. He survived after his stomach contents were pumped out at hospital. Hank Jr later recalled - “There was a doctor, he told me - “You’ve been taught to look like, act like, and be like Hank Williams your whole life. He died at 29. And you’re going to beat him‘. Those were his exact words. And he said, “I want you to start saying ‘the hell with that, you go do your thing and you kiss that other stuff goodbye“. That was some pretty good advice”.

Following the attempt, (though not before recording another cover album of his father’s songs, but this time less imitative and more his own style than in the past), Hank Jr moved from drug drenched Nashville to Cullman, Alabama, rethought his life in and out of music and refocusing both his creative energy and his troubled personal life, recorded his first truly original work, the album “Hank Williams Jr and Friends” that featured Waylon Jennings, the Tucker Band’s Toy Caldwell, Charlie Daniels and others who weren’t in the traditional country camp. Upon moving to Alabama. Williams wanted a contemporary reaffirmation of the old kind of music that had powered southern honky tonks in the 1950’s. He achieved this with a fusion of blues/country, R&B/country and rock/R&B. He was one of the first to experiment with that sound - his 1975 album “Hank Williams Junior and Friends” is considered a watershed recording in the Outlaw style, following the path pioneered by Waylon Jennings.

Though the now 26 y.o. Hank Jr wasn't scoring as many big hits in 1975 as he had in the early 1970’s, having lost a large portion of his old countrypolitan fans while building - but still slowly a new fan base, his music had finally become truly original and focused. ’Stoned at the Jukebox‘, from the “Hank Williams Junior and Friends” album was Hank’s most searing work to date, but released as a single, it just scraped into the Top 20, at # 19 in 1975. Notice how he still brings a reference to his father into the song - ‘I Can’t Help It If I’m Still In Love With You’ was one of Hank Snr’s honky Tonk classics -
“… Lord, there's a cold heart gone and I'm stoned at the jukebox / Playin' I can't help it if I'm still in love with you /
Cause that's the kind of songs it takes to get all this ole hurtin' out / Lord, I love that hurtin' music, cause I am hurtin', too…” -


‘The Living Proof’, another single release from the “Hank Williams Junior and Friends” album, is the most personal song Hank Jr has ever written so far, setting out his issues in the form of a prayer, first observing he seems to be living out the very words of the songs he sings - and those old songs of daddy -
“… I'm gonna quit singin' all these sad songs / 'Cause I can't stand the pain / Oh, the life I sing about now /
And the one I live is the same / When I sing them old songs of daddy's / Seems like every one comes true /
Lord, please help me / Do I have to be the living proof …”
Then not for the first time, he refers to his old problem of having those who only compare him (unfavourably of course) to his father, but at least now he‘s attracting younger fans who likes his own music -
Why just the other night after the show / An old drunk came up to me / He says "You ain't as good as your daddy, boy / And you never will be / Then a young girl in old blue jeans / Says, "I'm your biggest fan …"
Having recently had a near death experience (the 1974 suicide attempt) and with continuing battles with alcohol, drugs and depression, Hank Jr declares he’s not wanting to die yet and name-checks 3 greats who were all dead by age 35 - foundational country blues legend, Jimmie Rodgers (posts # 120-122), the greatest of all, his own father (205-214) and rockabilly and ballad great Johnny Horton (# 296-308) -
“… Remember Jimmie and Hank and Johnny / They were in the summer of life /
When you called them away, Lord / I don't wanna pay that price …”
Then, highly ironical with hindsight, his prayer that his son, Shelton Hank Williams, stays away from music - not only did Shelton become Hank III, but Hank Jr went on to have 2 more children to his second wife and one more to his third wife - and they also all became professional country musicians and / or songwriters -
“… Don't let my son ever touch a guitar / May he never sing the blues / Let him be free /
Don't make him be more living proof …”
Finally, Hank Jr’s most personal lines, a plea that he doesn’t want to be a dead legend like his dad, he confesses he’s needed help at times, but although he’s now materially well off, he’s doing it rough, feeling lonely (his marriage was now in ruins) and without a place that feels like a home -
“… I don't wanna be a legend / I just wanna be a man / But Lord, You know sometimes /
I've needed a helpin' hand / And it ain't been so easy lately / I've had to go it all alone /
But I've always had anything I ever wanted / except a home …” -
‘The Living Proof’, like the best country songs, told a real story, but the public at the time weren’t buying it - it barely made the Top 40, topping out at # 38 in early 1976. It took a few years longer for Williams to build a mass fan base for his new music direction -


Ironically, just as “Hank Williams and Friends” was giving a needed boost to Hank Jr’s career, establishing Hank Jr as the third major outlaw after Waylon and Willie, he was nearly killed in an accident. In August 1975, while mountain climbing at Montana’s Ajax Peak, he slipped and fell off the mountain, tumbling down nearly 200 metres, incurring multiple fractures and deep lacerations, including a badly fractured skull that very nearly claimed his life. Rescued by a team of 6 and a helicopter, he endured multiple reconstructive surgeries to his face and skull. His mother Audrey died only months after the accident, bankrupt, after years of struggling with addiction to alcohol and various drugs. It took a long time for Hank Jr to recover - over a year - but once he did, Hank Jr continued meshing together blues, country, and rock as a genre all his own. Already a talented multi-instrumentalist, his ability to play a range of instruments put him in a unique position to make the most out of his new musical path.

Although Hank Jr was very successful serving as a musical impersonator of his father during the first part of his career, it wasn’t until he changed course with his music style did he catapult from stardom into superstardom. In addition to changing how he played music, he also changed his appearance. After his near-fatal accident and his series of reconstructive surgeries, due to the disfigurement and scarring, he sported a beard, wore a cowboy hat and sunglasses. This became his signature look. When he returned to performing, in 1976, he was also determined as never before to distinguish himself beyond his father’s legacy - though it still took a few years to break through the ceiling, with one of the greatest drinking songs of all time, but it’s so much more than that - it‘s Hank Jr’s manifesto to the music world.

OK, ‘Family Tradition’, along with Bobby Helm’s ‘Fraulein’, ranks to this day as one of favourite honky tonk drinking songs. But the lyrics offer still more, as Hank Jr proudly and loudly proclaims his place amongst the Outlaw musicians and declares his full independence from his fathers music - but still pays respect to his father’s legacy. And all the while he is reminding his listeners that if he behaves badly, well, it’s just carrying on the William’s family tradition - when this song was released in 1979, Hank Jr turned 30. His hellraising daddy died of morphine and alcohol at age 29.

The song starts with his Outlaw proclamation with a defiant defence of his musical “change in direction” -
“Country music singers / Have always been a real close family / But lately some of my kinfolks / Have disowned a few others and me / I guess it's because / I kinda changed my direction / Lord, I guess I went and broke their family tradition …”
Then comes the rollicking “drinking” chorus -
“… They get on me and want to know / Hank, why do you drink? / Hank, why do you roll smoke? /
Why must you live out the songs that you wrote? / Over and over / Everybody makes my prediction /
So if I get stoned, I'm just carrying on / An old family tradition …”.
The second verse pays tribute to fathers legacy, as Hank Jr had done in song so many times before, as we have seen - but this time he declares his own music “… ain’t exactly the same …” and asks his listeners to consider his position (as the son of the legend) -
“… I am very proud / Of my daddy's name / Although his kind of blues / And mine ain't exactly the same / Stop and think it over / Put yourself in my unique position / If I get stoned and sing all night long / It's a family tradition …”.
And I can’t pass over the last verse, with some very funny lines, that relates to his personal battles with whiskey and women -
“… Lordy, I have loved some ladies / And I have loved Jim Beam / And they both tried to kill me in 1973 / When that doctor asked me / "Son, how did you get in this condition?" / I said, "Hey, Sawbones / I'm just carrying on an ole family tradition".
So grab your best Tennessee whiskey and after a few good swigs, you might join in loudly at the chorus -

’Family Tradition’ can be seen as the exclamation mark for a series of songs we’ve seen over the last 2 days, starting with 1964’s ‘Standing In The Shadows’, 1973’s ‘Hank’ and 1975’s ‘Living Proof’. It peaked at # 4, his first top 5 hit since the Countrypolitan ’Last Love Song’ in 1973, showing Hank Jr had, at last, fully won over a new, younger market for his Outlaw music.

When Hank was once asked how he writes songs, he answered - “Well, I got a good woman at home” - which became the first line of this 1979 hit. The rest was written within 10 minutes (just as his father famously wrote his classic songs). ‘Whiskey Bent And Hell Bound’, the title track to Hank’s second album of 1979 is a waltzing honky tonker about what he gets up to whenever his “good woman” isn’t around. Turns out he just chills out with a cold beer and listens to country music - that is until someone puts Hank Williams on. As soon as he hears ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’, he goes full on black suit Spiderman, starts drinking whiskey and hooking up with random angels (being polite here) in honky tonks. The song shows off Hank’s classic country vocals - and, appropriately (and typically), he uses them to reference his father -
“… Don’t you play "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry” / Cause I’ll get all balled up inside / And I’ll get whiskey bent and hell bound ...”. It’s easy to imagine Hank Jr singing this song from a dusty old bar, explaining in a vulnerable moment, as he does, that “… Hank’s old songs always make me feel low down...” -

’Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound’ went up to # 2, his most successful hit since the Countrypolitan ’Eleven Roses’ in 1972 - and it did even better in Canada, going all the way to # 1. Despite just missing the coveted # 1 poSition in the U.S., the success of ‘Family Tradition’ and ‘Whiskey Bent And Hell Bound’, cementing Hank Jr‘s prominent place in Outlaw music, set Hank Jr up nicely for his massive success in the 1980’s - that’s reserved for tomorrow.

JackOutback
edgie worth a read

 

[Professor Knowall]

So Hank Williams’s Jr ruled the 1980’s, with his distinctive brand of bluesy outlaw country - and by the mid 1980’s often “strayed” into outright southern rock, but also still added an original assortment of the most traditional honky tonk songs like ‘Everytime I Hear That Song’, from his “Pressure Is On” album. Williams catalog shows his depth of knowledge about music of all sorts. He could croon or simply recite country lyrics while playing acoustic or electric guitars and fiddle. He was known for endless covers and hearty banter on stage, and occasionally for going too far. There are several songs that many these days consider going beyond today’s very narrow, artistically restrictive, PC standards. Hank Jr never really stopped being an Outlaw, and he paid the price for his independence of thought and willingness to say - and sing - just what he thinks needs saying that, without doubt, kept him out of the Country Music HoF for years beyond when he should’ve been admitted - until his continuing omission became a scandal in itself.

Now back to his music, picking up in 1988. I spoke about Hank Jr’s Southern Pride songs a few days back, how it fitted in with a renewal of the South in the 1980’s, and we’ve already seen a couple of examples of these songs. But ‘If The South Woulda Won’ is the best of them. Some now find it a tough song to listen to in 2022 - triggered by the title, they think it celebrates the Confederacy in some uncomfortable ways. However, listen to the lyrics and it does no such thing. Here, Hank Jr is obviously having a lot of fun - even having himself elected as President of the South, proof enough the song shouldn’t be taken at all seriously.

The song simply celebrates aspects of Southern culture - especially its music, but also references Cajun cooking and Tennessee whiskey amongst other things, while also name checking 12 Southern states. The only times he gets somewhat serious is when he yearns to get Florida on the right track by taking Miami back from the drug pushers (Miami was notorious at the time this song was written for being overrun with violent Colombian drug syndicates - and it was subsequently cleaned up a lot), he promises to hang murderers and also ban cars from China as president. But he also includes putting his legendary father on $100 bills and making the anniversaries of the deaths of southern music icons, Elvis Presley, Patsy Cline, and Lynyrd Skynyrd as national holidays.

What’s more, listen to the clever (and often overlooked) music accompaniment, which, though underpinned by a solid southern rock sound, includes different elements of country - including Appalachian ”Hillbilly” fiddling, honky tonk, blues and New Orleans Dixieland jazz, all derived from the South - and it seems even music critics miss the nod to Western swing legend, Bob Wills, when Hank Jr says “… some Dixieland jazz, boys, … ah yeah… ”. It's Southern pride on overdrive, and yet another Top 10 hit in 1988, but also it spelled the end of Hank Jr’s commercial radio success, aside from a few other mid-chart hits, as tastes changed going into the 1990’s -


By the end of the decade, Hank Jr’s rough’n’ready blue-collar persona was becoming a little tired, especially in light of the new breed of clean-cut new traditional country singers who had taken over Nashville. He could still have a hit, but by the end of 1990 he was no longer hitting the Top 10 and by the middle of the 1990s he even had trouble reaching the Top 40. Despite his declining record sales, Hank Jr remained a popular concert draw into the latter half of the 1990’s, as well as a relatively prolific character in the studio. His string of new albums tapered off in the early 2000’s, with 2003's “I'm One of You“ marking his final album for several years. He returned toward the decade's end, however, with the “127 Rose Avenue” album in 2009. A single from it, ‘Red, White & Pink Slip Blues’, a paean to the economic pain of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, an anthemic truth tale reflecting the concerns and hardships of the common person, struggling to find his/her place in a country that seems to have packed itself up and left them behind. The single was a modest # 43 hit. The album itself was another seamless blend of loud Southern rock-style guitars, rowdy, rebellious lyrics, hell-raising drums and fist-pumping choruses with a couple of traditional country ballads thrown in for good measure - including another cover of his father’s ‘Long Gone Lonesome Blues’. Hank Jr stuck to the formula that had worked to keep him on the charts for nearly 30 years.

Hank Jr’s finances were helped in good part by having his modified version of ’All My Rowdy Friends‘ as the lead-in to Monday Night Football for over 20-some years, as mentioned a couple of days back. That little lucrative ritual suddenly ended when ESPN pulled the song after the mainstream press falsely reported that Hank Jr compared President Obama to Hitler in an off-the-cuff comment on Fox News. What Hank Jr did was jokingly compared polar opposites, in President Obama’s golf match with Republican conservative House Speaker John Boehner to Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu - a somewhat tasteless, unfunny joke, but he never actually compared Obama to Hitler as a person, as claimed by the mainstream media, and the reaction to what he said was both inaccurate and way OTT.

The whole affair fired up Hank Jr like nothing before, bouncing back with the top-selling 2012’s “Old School New Rules”, as snarling, as blunt and self-assuredly political album as any he has ever done. It was also the first release for his own independent Nashville-based label, Bocephus Records, indicative of how much he has taken over complete control of all aspects of his image, work, and career. That said, for all the conservative, don't-tread-on-me polemics that come through in songs here like ’Takin' Back the Country’ and ’We Don't Apologize for America‘, it’s the songs that don't go there that mostly work the best - the honky tonker ’I'm Gonna Get Drunk and Play Hank Williams‘, with Brad Paisley, the duet with Merle Haggard on Haggard’s ’I Think I'll Just Stay Here and Drink‘ and ’Old School‘, a fine personal narrative about learning the ropes, in which he name-checks everyone from Dolly Parton to Johnny Cash. The album peaked at # 2 and even crossed over to the pop charts, peaking at # 15.

As for the loss of his Monday Night Football opening gig, Hank Jr typically didn’t hold back, with ‘Keep The Change’, a shot at the TV networks, the media, the president and his supporters - “… This country’s sure as hell been goin’ down the drain / We know what we need / We know who to blame …”, he sings building into a chorus that refers to the “United Socialist States of America”. Most Hank Jr fans by now were kinda aligned with his politics and lapped this up. Others … not so much. But regardless of the politics, which I won’t buy into, it’s a great example of Hank Jr’s 21st century work -


Hank Jr.’s ongoing exclusion from the Country Music HoF was such a point of contention that on his 2015 album “It’s About Time”, in the song ‘Just Call Me Hank’, Bocephus delivers the line -
“Don’t call me an icon / I don’t care about the Hall of Fame / Just gonna live my life in my country boy kinda way…”
Hank Jr also manages to sneak in a reference to his father with the line - “… Yeah I know that lonesome whip-poor-will …”, a line from Hank Williams (and IMO, the whole of country music’s) greatest song, ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ (Post # 214). This family reference sets up the closing lines -
“… My name is Bocephus but I'm really proud / When someone just calls me Hank‘ -


In telling Hank Jr’s story, I’ve held 2 songs back - one deliberately, but the other, from 1981 album “High Notes”, I intended to include in my usual chronological order, but I stuffed up, overlooking it when it’s turn came as I was too focussed on his big hits. Though I have previously explained that for Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, being an Outlaw was solely about artistic freedom, and not about any actual “sound” (after all, Waylon and Willie, despite their long friendship and collaborations, had very different approaches to their own music), nevertheless, Waylon and then Hank Jr, through there use of country rock, came to be seen as the epitome of “Outlaw music”. I think this is a great example of what “Outlaw music” is about - in this case not a rip-roaring party song but one of those with dark themes about the down-trodden and misfits of society - ‘I’ve Been Down’. And apart from that, it’s just a damn good song, too good to leave off this history -
“… I had to find a way to get some money / Never thought I'd go this far but It would mean living out on the streets /
So I robbed a liquor store with my daddy's army gun / Had to shoot a cop coming out the door / and now God I'm on the run … “ -


I held this one, a 7 # hit from 1989, back to the very last deliberately, as it just seems the most appropriate one to end with. You could make a long list of Hank Jr‘s songs where he name-checks his father in direct or indirect ways. As we’ve seen many times over the the last week (and I could’ve provided heaps more examples), Hank Jr never forgot where he came from and never stopped reminding everyone else.

’There’s A Tear In My Beer’ was one his father had written and recorded (as a demo) over 35 years prior, but the recording had been in the hands of Bill Lister, who had originally recorded the song. In 1989, his wife found the demo in the attic and they gave the recording to Hank Jr, who, in a twist, added his vocals and instrumentation to the track and used then cutting-edge electronic merging technology to create the music video in which he and his father appeared to be playing the song together in a way not possible in the '60s, '70s and early '80’s. The result was wildly successful, becoming a # 7 hit in 1989, thanks in large part to the unforgettable video that starred father and son - although the son was at this point a decade older than his father had lived to be! It also earned Hank Jr both the ACM and CMA Music Video of the Year awards, and a Grammy for Best Vocal Collaboration -


Over his career - so far, for he has made it clear he ain’t finished yet - Hank Jr has released 56 studio albums and 25 compilation albums. He has released 109 singles and 24 music videos. Ten of his singles have reached # 1 (or 11 if Canada is included).

After a sustained public campaign, including threats of protests at the ceremony, Hank Williams Jr. was finally inducted into the Country Music HoF in 2021. For sure, one of the reasons Hank Jr‘s HoF induction was such a long time coming had to do with how polarizing his personality has been outside of country music over the last 20 years. Also consider when his good friend Waylon Jennings was inducted in 2001, Waylon didn’t even show up for the ceremony. Some like to think that Waylon was such an Outlaw, he blew the Hall of Fame off. But in truth Waylon was suffering from pretty severe diabetes at the time, and probably just wasn’t in good enough physical shape to attend, passing away just 5 months after his induction.

Still, there was concern that Hank Jr mightn’t attend either after how long his induction took, which might leave egg on the face of the Hall of Fame. Or maybe he would have some unsavoury things to say. Either way, inducting him was the right thing to do, and his continued exclusion was undermining the HoF’s credibility. Ultimately Hank Jr. did show up, though according to him, if the induction had been the day before, he might not have.

Well, Hank Jr did attend, and in his acceptance speech, showing typical humour, the avid hunter and outdoorsman, said - “Well, the good thing is this didn’t happen yesterday, which was the opening day of deer season, which is kind of like squirrel season was with my father. My little 6-year-old grandson sitting out there with his .44 Magnum Ruger, took his first deer.” And then yes, Hank Jr. addressed the elephant in the room - “A lot of people to thank. And I know who they are. They know who they are. That part about the family with the open arms? Well, that might have been a little bit different in my case...“. But after his slight rib of the HoF, Hank Jr. kept it positive for the rest of his very short speech, ending by reciting names to some of his biggest songs - and a reminder he left Nashville for his breakthrough success - “But, I went to Muscle Shoals, Alabama. And all my rowdy friends are coming over tonight. I was born to boogie. And this is a family tradition”.

Hank Jr has recently endured 2 personal tragedies. He and his third wife, Mary Jane, had 2 children together - musician son Sam Williams and daughter Katie Williams-Dunning. Sadly, Katie was killed in a car crash in 2020. Then in March 2022, his wife of 31 years died unexpectedly having what was meant to be a routine plastic surgical procedure. Hank Jr was devastated but has coped with his grief by throwing himself back on the road, honouring his touring commitment. After a 6 year hiatus from recording, Hank Jr resurfaced in June 2022 with “Rich White Honky Blues”, a down-and-dirty blues album featuring Auerbach and his session pros. At age 73, Hank Jr is showing no signs of slowing down.

So, with the third of the Outlaw legends, Hank Jr’s career, along with Waylon and Willie, now covered, that’s also this history done for this year, as I’m about to head back to the bush for Christmas, as I do every Christmas, so no time now for any further history stuff until I return sometime in the New Year (however, I’ll probably do some short posts on other stuff if/when I can). But I ain’t done with this series yet - not even the Outlaw part, there’s a few more to come - and I also haven’t forgotten a promise to someone here I made a while back now.

 

[PatsFitztrick]

Happy Christmas, Prof - and thanks for making this thread a must-read everyday.

 

[Professor Knowall]

Happy Christmas, Prof - and thanks for making this thread a must-read everyday.

Thank you - and likewise I wish you, Purple (and all my other loyal followers ) a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

This little project (as I had originally envisioned), which I started just to keep me sane (or confirm my insanity) during the lockdown, seems to have taken on a life on its own and it’s become part of my routine when I’m at home in between my frequent trips away - when I’m often beyond the reach of the internet..

Anyway, for Christmas, here’s 3 classic country music Christmas songs -
One of the most famous Christmas pop songs of all, this country‘n’rockroll hybrid ‘Jimgle Bell Rock’ wasn't a massive hit at the time in 1957, but has since become a perennial Christmas favourite 65 years later. The lyrics are rock, but Bobby Helms (post # 377) keeps it country enough, with the great Nashville “A-Team” session guitarist, Hank Garland and backing vocals of the Anita Kerr singer—


Brenda Lee was famously only 13 when she recorded ‘Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree’ in 1958, which has gone on to become one of the most successful Christmas songs of all time. While the song itself -again mainly because of the lyrics- has a rock‘n’ roll like vibe, its instruments - particularly the guitar work of Hank Garland and Harold Bradley - also mark it out as a country Christmas standard -


Now my favourite, a song reflecting the true meaning of. Hristmas. I’ve featured ‘Pretty Paper’ and told the story behind the song in post #783 on Willie Nelson, but here’s another outstanding version. Now a Christmas standard, originally a hit for Roy Orbison in 1963, ‘Pretty Paper’ was inspired by a crippled vendor outside a Fort Worth department store, being ignored by busy Christmas shoppers but noticed by Nelson. An amputee with no legs who peddled paper and pencils for a living, Nelson suddenly recalled the man a few months before Christmas, and put the memory to music - “He had a way of crying out those words – ‘Pretty paper! Pretty paper! – that broke my heart …” Nelson wrote in his autobiography It’s a Long Story. It reminds you that Christmas is not a happy time for everyone, especially those who are on their own without friends or loved ones to spend the season with (even of this year it will only be by phone/zoom/chat). It shows how they can tend to fall off the radar of many people who are busy making Christmas special & celebrating with their families.

Here we have Americas 2 greatest living musical icons in a duet, Dolly taking the lead role in the vocals, Willie andTrigger providing both vocal and instrumental support -


So y’all enjoy a safe and Happy Christmas and New Year!

 

[CliffMcTainshaw]

A couple of days ago after being dragged into an Op Shop by my wife I found a book, by Willian McInnes called "A Man's Got To Have A Hobby", a very very funny book about growing up.
Today being quite hot, I went outside and sat under the shade of the lemon tree and started reading the book. I got to page 49 where Johnny Horton and his song "Sink the Bismarck" were mentioned. I turned to page 50 and another Johnny Horton song was described, "North to Alaska". McInnes wrote about how his Uncle Reg could burp the chorus to the song. I remember these as popular songs on the radio when I was young.
At that very moment a lemon fell from a great height and hit me on the head. I went inside and on my way decided to look up Johnny Horton. I remembered being a kid and listening to the songs on our HMV Radio. When I looked them up, they were both hits in 1960, I was 8. He also had another hit earlier that year with the song "Battle of New Orleans", which was the year's Grammy winner for Best Country and Western Recording. In November 1960 Johnny Horton was killed in a car accident.

 

[Professor Knowall]

A couple of days ago after being dragged into an Op Shop by my wife I found a book, by Willian McInnes called "A Man's Got To Have A Hobby", a very very funny book about growing up.
Today being quite hot, I went outside and sat under the shade of the lemon tree and started reading the book. I got to page 49 where Johnny Horton and his song "Sink the Bismarck" were mentioned. I turned to page 50 and another Johnny Horton song was described, "North to Alaska". McInnes he wrote about how his Uncle Reg could burp the chorus to the song. I remember these as popular songs on the radio when I was young.
At that very moment a lemon fell from a great height and hit me on the head. I went inside and on my way decided to look up Johnny Horton. I remembered being a kid and listening to the songs on our HMV Radio. When I looked them up, they were both hits in 1960, I was 8. He also had another hit earlier that year with the song "Battle of New Orleans", which was the year's Grammy winner for Best Country and Western Recording. In November 1960 Johnny Horton was killed in a car accident.

Another really interesting post - lemon falling and all (even if it didn’t quite lead to a Isaac Newton type insight when he was hit by an apple). Coincidentally, Johnny Horton was mentioned in this thread just a couple of weeks back in post # 801 (the first post on this page), as one of the 3 greats name-checked as being taken too soon (the others being Jimmie Rodgers and his own father) in Hank William Jr’s autobiographical song ‘Living Proof’ -
“… Remember Jimmie and Hank and Johnny / They were in the summer of life /
When you called them away, Lord / I don't wanna pay that price …”

Hortons’s potted history was outlined in posts # 296 & 301, which featured his now renowned pioneering rockabilly work, then his big “historical ballad” era in post # 308. Here’s an example of his earlier rockabilly, with a video of some early line dancing -


I got back to the city yesterday and was meant to have a couple of weeks off, but now I’ve been called up to Rutherglen for a few days and Adelaide next week, so I‘m unsure when the next history instalment will be - but it’ll be sometime this month.

 

[CliffMcTainshaw]

Homage to John Prine by a Swede and an Aussie.

 

[backtozero]

Great Grandson of Hank Williams doing great things.

 

[Professor Knowall]

Great Grandson of Hank Williams doing great things.

Yes, Hank IV was mentioned in this thread when he surfaced last year. Though I’d known about him for some years, it seemed he wouldn’t come to anything until his recent emergence. It seems he’s determined to offer a point of difference, just like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather.

As for his great grandfather, his legend still lives on strongly - and has lately even grown stronger again. I managed to get back in town (before having to depart again) for the Hank Williams Tribute night at The Gem in Collingwood on the 5th - but the place was so packed, I was only part of the overflow crowd on the footpath. I dunno how I feel about Hank Snr in particular and vintage honky tonk music in general now being so popular with the hipsters (or whatever they call themselves now) of Melbourne’s inner North, but as one of them said to me - it’s as far away from the dross of modern pop that one can possibly go.

On January 25 the Gem is having a honky tonk club night. Meanwhile, inner north venues like the Union at Brunswick are now regularly featuring honky tonk, bluegrass and even an occasional Western swing band, while Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell amongst others feature on the Railway Hotel Brunswick regular playlist.

I’m now again back home and getting ready to deliver some more history - this time on an outlaw that in time became more notorious for his wild, reckless behaviour than his music. I aim to at least partly repair his reputation by showing how good his music was (and which deserves to be better remembered), set apart from his personal failings.

 

[Professor Knowall]

I’m back and ready to resume the endless country music history, with another outlaw artist - but unlike Waylon, Willie and Hank Jr, this one isn’t now recalled much at all - at least not for his music. Yet ne had the vocals that rivalled George Jones, was a talented, in-demand guitarist and on top of that, was also a great songwriter. He could’ve, should‘ve and would’ve been a legend - but was brought undone by his own wild excesses, with often sordid, unsavoury tales of lawsuits, fights, drunkeness, drug addictions, sexual assault, shooting and prison - and it’s an unfortunate fact his wild ways served only to sensationalize the man and obscure his music - which at it’s best was some of the finest hard core, fhonky tonk music ever made.

His own unsavoury legend, truths, half-truths, and fabrications included, must be considered when weighing his brilliance. After all, had he been anything less than the rough and tumble misanthrope that he was, had he never left home at age 15 to hop freight trains and travel the rails, singing his way as the honky-tonk "Ohio Kid" in as many bars and honky tonks in as many towns as the railroad would take him to, had he never touched a drop of drink or punched on in many a dingy barroom and had he never been hounded by his seedy past, or dogged by the tax office, record labels, and lawsuits, he would never have become the man he was. Moreover, he likely would never have sung with such ferocious credibility, the fiery honky-tonk country songs he sang. The man and his music are inseparable.

Our latest outlaw was born Donald Lytle in 1938, in Greenfield, Ohio, halfway between Cincinnati and Columbus, an unlikely place for a future country star to hail from, being located not in the South, but not entirely out of bounds. Outside the large cities of Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, Ohio was one small hick town after another - hundreds of them, and country music had always been king. The great radio powerhouse WLW broadcast out of Cincinnati, bringing country music to towns like Greenfield, and of course WSM and the Grand Ole Opry were well within broadcast range.

Greenfield is your ”classic“ middle-American town of functional red brick buildings, hiding behind a growth of oak and maple trees along the town's main street. ‘Old Glory’ hangs limp from every other lamppost, alternating its moments with bright red banners proudly declaring "Greenfield, since 1799”. Small family owned businesses with names like Burnies Restaurant and Buck's Tires brim with downtown civic pride. It's the sort of town, full of church-going, mostly sober right living citizens, that people who were born there tend to either always stay, or at least come back to year after year for the summer homecoming festivities. Except, of course, those who always just want out. Our artist couldn’t flee it soon enough.

When asked about his early years, our artist never talked about his father but remembered his mother having Hank Williams records in their house and reckoned Hank as his biggest influence. His mother gave him a guitar at age 6 and entered him in local talent contests when he was 9. By age 13, Donald was working steadily as a semi-professional singer around Greenfield. But, having enough of the small town stability and constraints, at age 15 he took his guitar and the clothes on his back, and hopping the first freight train that he could, he got out of town (similar to how Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson also hopped freight trains at about the same age), traveling to all the cities in the Ohio/Indiana/Kentucky area, singing in local bars and honky-tonks, working his way up to many of the top country nightclubs in Ohio before making the big decision to join the armed services (as did most of our country artists from that era did), in his case the navy.

It's hard to imagine anyone less suited for the rigours of military life, with it’s structure and discipline, having to obey orders, and sure enough within a few months he had been court-martialed and put in the brig for belting the daylights out of an officer, severely fracturing his skull. In 1956 he was sentenced to 4 years hard labour. While in the brig, Lytle escaped twice but was quickly recaptured both times. His sentence was eventually reduced just to be rid of him sooner and long before his release date they let him go out of sheer exasperation. After being freed, Lytle drifted around, including playing the bars and honky tonks of Florida and Texas and then finally decided to give it a go in Nashville.

Lytle had been playing his guitar and singing in bars, honky tonks, soda fountain diners, and what-have-you's since he'd left his old hometown and was now dead set on making a living off the only work he'd loved - honky tonk singing. If you’ve followed this history over the past couple of years, you would now that Nashville in those days was a hard-drinking, pill-popping fighting town that often lived out the clichés of its music. And while a wild hard-living hellion like Donald Lytle could slip into town unnoticed, it's didn’t take very long for word to spread about some new kid in town who could write a solid melody, play a snap guitar and sing his own songs with an otherworldly, one-of-a-kind growl.

After arriving in Nashville, Lytle fell in with another then unknown hell-raiser, Roger Miller (see posts # 479-482) and was “discovered” by prominent exec, Buddy Killen, who gave him a job as a songwriter and demo singer for Tree Publishing (still a huge force in Nashville, but now called Sony/ATV Music Publishing). While it was a professional gig in the music business, it was the sort of job where one barely made enough money to rent a hot attic room at a dingy boardinghouse. Paycheck caught a break however, when master producer for Decca Records, Owen Bradley, heard one of his demos and signed him to a recording contract, which must have seemed like a huge break for the struggling young singer. It was, but as it went for Buddy Holly with Decca a few years earlier, simply having releases on the label was no guarantee of success. Bradley must have believed in the talent young tenor singer though, as 4 singles were released under the stage name Donny Young over the next 3 years, all excellent examples of hard-core honky tonk and country.

The first release, ’It's Been a Long, Long Time for Me‘ was released in 1958. Written by Lytle (now called Donny Young), it’s a great bouncy number reminiscent of the hits Faron Young was having at the time and should’ve been a hit - the record was superb on all accounts, with an impassioned vocal and the full A-team session-man treatment from Owen Bradley, including the famed session guitarists, Grady Martin and Hank Garland, but with Donny Young being a complete unknown, with no tours behind him and no effort made to promote the single on radio, it just didn’t fly -


The flip, ‘On This Mountain Top’, featured Young’s drinking and partying buddy, Roger Miller, on harmony vocals - Miller was given a co-billing on the label. Donny Young’s second record, ’The Old Man and the River‘, released in 1959, was yet another 2 side artistic success that alas garnered no sales. The Roger Miller written song (he was also writing song demos for Tree Music at the same time) was a great Cajun-flavoured song with a memorable chorus -


By the time of the third release, ’Shakin' the Blues’, Young really hit his stride. This is a masterpiece in every respect - songwriting (it was written by none other than Young’s boss at this point, George Jones), arrangement, performance, and production. The song had "HIT" written all over it but yet again it failed to chart. While ‘Shakin' the Blues’ has seen release on numerous rockabilly compilations, the truth is that it’s a hard-driving honky tonk with a beat. The twin fiddles and steel guitar could have made it a Ray Price session, but Young’s frantic vocal separates into something else entirely, something entirely his own. The mold for the later Paycheck hits was cast with this record - edgy, unpredictable, and raw - which certainly would make him a good candidate for rockabilly but actually foreshadowed the Outlaw Country movement that would come some years later -


The failure of ‘Shakin' the Blues‘ must have soured Decca on the marketability of Donny Young, and he wasn’t allowed any more sessions at Bradley's studio. But one more cut was released in 1961, ’I Guess I Had It Coming’, written by Donny Young and dated from the first session in 1958, featuring Roger Miller on harmony vocals once again, though he was not credited on this release. Although it was another great song with a lot going for it, the release seems to have been an afterthought, with no promotion put behind it whatsoever. Decca dropped Donny Young soon thereafter, and he moved back to Ohio -

It’s taken some 60 years for this music to be rediscovered and finally appreciated by the growing numbers of vintage honky tonk lovers.

While licking his wounds back in Ohio, Young had the fortune to hook up with a like-minded young singer named Darrell McCall, who was also an Ohio native with a love for hard-core country music. The pair started singing together and discovered their vocal harmonies meshed perfectly. Soon Young was plotting his return to Nashville, this time as part of a duo, which he christened the Young Brothers (and, indeed, Darrell McCall was known as Darrell Young around Nashville for a number of years). The pair hit Nashville with something less than a splash, with literally pennies between them. The first night in town, they slept underneath the Main Street bridge before getting a room at a dirt-cheap (and dirty) boardinghouse dive, which served as a headquarters for broke musicians looking for work. Roger Miller also lived there, and Young relished being reunited with his old buddy.

Between Young, McCall and Miller, they began setting a standard for rowdy, riotous behavior that is the benchmark for country musicians to this day. Most of this was caused by their copious use of uppers, the common Nashville party flavour during the 1960s. To quote McCall - "You had to take uppers back then, just to keep up with the grueling pace. We started out with what they called Ol' Yellers, which weren't too bad for you, as they had vitamins and nutrients inside. Then we got into White Crosses, Black Mollys, Yellowjackets, and Speckled Birds, which were harsher and harsher forms of speed as time went along. By the time we got around to Speckled Birds, things were getting pretty nuts”.

During Young's tenure with Decca Records, he had been hiring himself out as a bassist to help pay the bills. In fact there hadn't been much promotion of Donny Young the solo artist to speak of, save for one aborted tour with Roger Miller and Bill Anderson that had ended with Miller having to pawn his newly purchased portable record player (which he had bought so the trio could listen to their own records while on the road) for petrol money home. Young proved to be both a first class bass player and high harmony singer, and he filled that role with the then top country stars, Porter Wagoner (posts # 430-432), Faron Young (# 261-266), Ray Price (#269-275) - until he was replaced on bass guitar by Willie Nelson, but not before he penned the hit ’Touch My Heart’ for Price - and, most notably, George Jones (# 405-412) over much of the 1960’s (thus he is heard providing the chorus harmony in most of Jones’ 1960’s hits).

But, in an unexpected move, the younger restless drifter Donald Lytle now resurfaced in the 24 year old Donny Young, as he ventured westward and spent most of 1962 and 1963 in Southern California and Las Vegas. In Vegas he worked for Bakersfield Sound pioneer Wynn Stewart (post # 455), who ran the house band at the Nashville Nevada Club. Wynn's bass player at the time was none other than Merle Haggard (# 497-502), and Haggard hit it off with Young right away - another pairing of 2 rowdy souls schooled in the art of hell-raising.

Paycheck loved the West Coast and its country music scene and was a big fan of Buck Owens in particular. In fact, Owens had Young to thank for finally getting him played on the radio in Nashville, which had shut him out up to that point due to his outsider status. When back in Nashville, Young spent many sleepless nights staying up with renowned d.j. Ralph Emery at WSM, and persuaded Emery to play one of Owens's songs, which helped break Owens into the Nashville establishment.

Had it not been for producer, Aubrey Mayhew, the man born Donald Lytle might have continued using the Donny Young stage name indefinitely, perhaps making scads more obscure singles and touring as a sideman with a dozen more big-name stars. As it turned out, Mayhew rechristened Donny Young as Johnny Paycheck after an obscure prizefighter (and not, as populary believed, as an amusing counterpoint to Johnny Cash), and he even formed a new subsidiary, which he named Hilltop, specifically to release Johnny Paycheck records. The timing was finally right this time around. With Paycheck's third release on Hilltop, an obscure Buck Owens album track honky tonker ’A-11‘, Paycheck finally had his first breakout chart hit. Here’s an interesting video of Paycheck singing this live in 1966 (there’s also better sound quality studio recordings on YouTube if you want). In this, he was playing bass guitar for George Jones, who had just finished singing. His introduction makes it plain he was still pretty much an unknown to the wider audience outside the Nashville music bubble - but at least he finally had some promotion and a resultant charted hit, albeit just a modest # 28 in 1965 -


Johnny Paycheck and George Jones had an on-again, off-again relationship that was as stormy as it was productive. Paycheck had a nasty habit of getting drunk and punching on with his employers, and Jones was no pushover himself. Both men were short in both height and temper and both loved to drink and raise cain. The explosive relationship between the two was tempered by the fact that both men dearly loved each other and would always forgive and forget, only to repeat the exact same scenario the next time around.

Notably, music historians have pointed out George Jones seemed to absorb Paycheck's vocal styling during this time frame, a fact Jones never exactly denied, though citing Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell as major influences. Many of the inflections, dips to the low registers following by soaring high notes, and other examples of the classic George Jones style seem to have come directly from working with Paycheck during those years. The proof does lie in the chronology of the recordings - Jones's output before working with Paycheck demonstrates a completely different mode of singing, more rooted in the traditional Hank Williams style than anything else. However, once Donny Young (aka Johnny Paycheck) began singing harmonies with Jones, the style so associated with Jones in later years began to take shape. Paycheck intimated that both influenced each other during the time they worked together, which seems both logical and true.

Anyway, that’s more than enough for one day, but there’s much more to tell about Johnny Paycheck - and some of the best honky tonk music of all - tomorrow.

 

[Professor Knowall]

To recap from yesterday, in 1965, Donald Lytle, aka Donny Young, renamed himself again (or was named by his producer, Aubrey Mayhew) as Johnny Paycheck (from a Chicago prize fighter) and working with Mayhew, he charted with a couple of minor country hits, ‘A-11‘ and ‘Heartbreak Tennessee’. The following year, he and Mayhew went out on a limb with their own business partnership, starting Little Darlin’ Records. There are now many honky tonk afficianados who regard Paycheck‘s Little Darlin’ era as his best work.

The Little Darlin’ recordings were all stone country, honky tonkers, driven by Paycheck’s keening tenor vocals and the superb steel guitar work of a young genius on the course to greatness, Lloyd Green, who is an essential part of Paycheck’s early music. In a just world, they would all have been big-sellers. They certainly stood out at a time when string-laden pop-country ruled the airwaves. It was around this time that Paycheck also made the grade as a songwriter, his ‘Apartment No’ affording Tammy Wynette her first hit While ‘Touch My Heart’, another of his compositions, provided Ray Price with another top 10 hit.

The Little Darlin' label would become, if not a moneymaking or commercially viable entity (which it never was), a forever-significant title in country music history based solely on the run of extraordinary singles churned out by Paycheck during its 4 years. The seeds were sown during these Little Darlin’ years of 1964-69 for what would later be known as Outlaw Country, and no one could fit that bill better than Johnny Paycheck, a man who all too often lived the life he sang about. During the course of these years Paycheck and Mayhew, along with steel guitarist Lloyd Green, would record a slew of highly influential records and set the mold for exactly who and what Johnny Paycheck was supposed to be - dark, brooding, moody, violent - with such milestone recordings as ’Pardon Me (I've Got Someone to Kill’, ‘You'll Recover in Time‘ (about being straightjacketed in a mental ward) and ’The Cave‘ (a song about nuclear destruction), all of which sent influential waves of change throughout the country music community.

In fact, Paycheck's approach to vengeance and violence on songs like ’(Like Me) You'll Recover In Time’ (wrapped in a straightjacket and tossed into a padded cell after his love has driven him mad, Paycheck wishes the same fate on his do-wrong woman), and ’(It's a Mighty Thin Line) Between Love and Hate‘ (which, of course, Paycheck has no problem crossing whatsoever) is so upbeat and done up with such a maniacal aural smile that he'd make (ultra-violent crime/pulp novelist) Jim Thompson blush and modern 'gangsta' rap artists seem like kids at play.

During these incendiary years, Paycheck rattled off terrific cut after terrific cut and took the woe-is-me moan of country music and turned it into a hopped-up, embittered act of revenge that would, at the time, push some fairly conservative boundaries to their edge (murder ballads had always been a part of the country music tradition, but rarely, if ever, were they so up tempo, catchy, and artfully good-humored). The most chilling song, however, is Paycheck's definitive outlaw mayhem ballad, the Mayhew-Paycheck co-written song that is as infamous as it is great - in fact I rate it as about the greatest honky tonk mayhem ballad ever - ’(Pardon Me) I've Got Someone to Kill‘, from 1966. Lloyd Green’s steel colours the end of each line with an atmospheric tension that grows with every syllable and no-one could’ve delivered it better, more perfectly than Paycheck. It's the story of a cuckolded man whose revenge will not be complete until he kills everyone, including himself -
"… This gun will buy back the pride they took from me / And also end this life of mine that's worthless now..." -


‘(Pardon Me) I’ve Got Someone To Kill‘ appeared on Paycheck’s seminal 1966 album, “Lovin’ Machine”, and I‘ve resisted the temptation to include other honky tonk cuts from the album including ‘Miller's Cave‘, a murder ballad of the most desperate kind, with a character who is unrepentant and yet gains his punishment by becoming lost in the same cave where he buries the bodies of his lover and her backdoor man. In typical Paycheck psychobilly fashion, this is followed with a cheating torch song. In addition, there's a killer read of Merle Haggard’s ’Swinging Doors‘, done in swinging honky tonk style. As if ’I've Got Someone to Kill’ wasn't enough, there's an avenging rocking honky tonker in ’The Johnsons of Turkey Ridge‘, which celebrates the mass murder of a family. But the classics don't end there - Paycheck's stellar read of ’Between Love and Hate‘, with it's sonorous cello underneath the mix, is moving and strange. The album ends with ’I Know I Never Will‘, with Green playing counterpoint to Paycheck's devoted romantic lyric, although he still sounds menacing. It’s a crazy golden-era honky tonk record, one that allows for no compromise, no Nashville input (a good portion of it was recorded in New York), and no allowance for resolving any of the contradictions in Paycheck's voice and delivery. It's a true masterpiece.

In the end, I included just one more from the album, not necessarily one of the best but only because, released as a single, it became Paycheck’s first top 10 hit, peaking at # 8 in 1966. In the loopy title track, ‘Lovin’ Machine’, where it becomes (deliberate) difficult to tell if Paycheck is talking about a car or a woman he picks up in it. This clip also shows the awesome vintage cartoon cover to the single -


1967 was a busy year for Paycheck, first releasing an album of classic country standards “Country Soul”, followed by a gospel album “Gospeltime My Way”, which included 5 self-penned originals (I could comment on the propensity of even the most wild, hell-raising hard drinking, drugging, fornicating country artists of that era to release at least one or more gospel albums but I won’t) before releasing another classic Little Darlin’ honky tonk set, titled “Jukebox Charlie And Other Songs That Make The Jukebox Play”, which lives up to its title. There are killer renditions of the infamous ’Apartment #9’, ‘Down at Kelly's’ and ’You Can Hear a Teardrop’. These are all honky tonk drinking songs that are closer in spirit to the outlaw spirit of country that would flourish a few years later than what Willie and Waylon were doing at the time, thoroughly rooted in the hard honky tonk styles of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens but darker than either. Another significant aspect of the album is that Paycheck and Mayhew wrote over half the tracks. Only Bobby Bare's ’Motel Time Again‘ tops the originals on the album, and Paycheck's version I reckon tops Bare's, the single reaching # 13. It’s one many a constant traveller can relate to -


The album’s title track, ’Jukebox Charlie’, peaked at # 15 in 1967. Once again, besides Paycheck’s spot-on delivery as, broken by a woman, he takes us straight to the travails of a honky tonk bar, Lloyd Green adds the icing with his mastery of the pedal steel -

Charley Crockett does a good cover of this on his 2022 album ‘Jukebox Charley’, but like most others, he can’t match Paycheck’s vocals.

In 1968, the eager to please Little Darlin' outfit put together a collection of Johnny Paycheck recordings from 1965 to 1968 for a ‘Greatest Hits’ compilation album (albeit he only had a few actual hits). You would expect the best songs from these years were assembled for this album, but there wasn’t much rhyme or reason to the track choices or the sequencing. Nonetheless, it is hard to find much fault with the material or performances included, and much has been written about the high quality of playing from a group of session regulars that includes fiddler Buddy Spicher and, of course, pedal steel whiz Lloyd Green, the latter providing big old buckets of fat, distorted lead runs. In point of fact, an experimental distortion unit was invented for some of these sides by the engineer, Glenn Snoddy. Fans of honky tonk at its most sad and outright miserable probably can't do better than Paycheck from this period, including ’It Won’t Be Long Before I’ll Be Hating You’, which begins with -
"Lately life with you has been unbearable..." -


Tomorrow will follow Johnny Paycheck’s career with a couple more from his Little Darlin’ honky tonk classics then on to a new direction - and his increasing battles with his own demons.

 

[Professor Knowall]

Welcome back to the life and music of the outlaw, Johnny Paycheck, as we move on to 1969, with him still churning out great honky tonk music for his Little Darlin’ label. During his time with Little Darlin, Johnny Paycheck gained the respect of many country musicians - but his hard core honky tonk was either 10 years out of date or 10 years too early - honky tonk just happened to be out of fashion for much of the sixties, its appeal mainly limited to dedicated country fans but not the larger suburban market then mostly enamoured by the smoother, lusher, Nashville sound. So no matter how good, he struggled in the charts, his last Top 20 hit being ‘Jukebox Charlie’ in 1967. But that doesn’t mean his music wasn’t great - and appreciated by so many more now. Take this number, ’I’m Gonna Sink I Might As Well Go To The Bottom’ from Paycheck’s 1969 album “Wherever You Are” - with Lloyd Green providing another killer accompaniment on the pedal steel. In a hindsight view of what was in store for Paycheck, the title now has a lot of irony (and prophetic truth in his case). It’s also, for those who love honky tonk like I do, another damn good song -


With Paycheck’s songs now struggling to reach the upper chart levels, Little Darlin' ran out of money and had to close in late 1969. However, Aubrey Mayhew wasted little time in setting up shop under a different label, striking a deal with Certron Corporation, a manufacturer of magnetic tape, to start a Music Division in Nashville. Paycheck followed Mayhew across to Certron, releasing the album “Again” (which had already been recorded for Little Darlin’) in 1970, another loaded with hard-core honky tonk cuts, including ’Living the Life of a Dog‘, a hilarious romp that would’ve had multiple meanings for Paycheck. But my pick might be a bit obscure, but for me it’s a little gem. Paycheck had the ability to take one right into those dark, windowless, grimy, smoke filled honky tonks, lit only by neon, where the jukebox plays Hank Williams sad songs and the liquor flows freely, with the likes of ’Honky Tonks And Slow Sad Music’ -


Perhaps predictably, the hard core honky Tonk album “Again” didn’t chart at all in an era where the smooth Nashville Sound gave way to the even smoother Countrypolitan sound, even being successfully embraced by former traditional country artists as Faron Young and the smooth vocals of Ray Price, profiting from the songwriting talents of Kris Kristofferson. With his business and musical relationship with Aubrey Mayhew now ended feeling dejected and defeated, label-less and lost, Paycheck shot through to the West Coast again, first to San Diego then quickly ended up on the skids in LA, bottoming out on booze and drugs. However, he still left behind in Nashville a reputation as a first rate talented musician His saviour was Billy Sherrill, the famed CBS Record producer, who sent a colleague, CBS record executive and unabashed Paycheck fan, Nick Hunter, to look for him. It took some doing, with much travelling and questions of various dives before Paycheck was finally tracked down to Denver after being unfindable for a year. He was at rock-bottom, in very poor physical shape, weighing some 40 kilograms and flat broke.

But with the ever-growing and newfound audience of country music listeners hungry for good songs sung by great country
voices, it wasn't long before Paycheck was brought back to Nashville with a contract with major label, Epic, teamed up with the Countrypolitan king, Billy Sherrill for a career re-shaping comeback. It meant his range expanded beyond his classic honky tonk songs to more refined material - with an inevitable infusion, though thankfully not too overwhelming, of trills and accoutrements (Sherril was too smart to overload Paycheck’s strong vocals with too much heavy strings and backing chorus etc). Anyway, no matter what one thinks of the music (it sure ain’t my favourite from Paycheck), Sherrill’s gamble with the hugely talented, but erratic, volatile high risk Paycheck, soon paid off. The album “She’s All I Got“ reached # 5 in 1971, and the album’s title track topped out at # 2 in both the U.S. and Canada, by far Paycheck’s most successful so far -


Under CBS and Billy Sherrill’s direction, Paycheck’s image of a honky tonk hanger-on who sang songs of menace, revenge, violence and tear-in-your-beer laments was now re-invented as a sort of ”dangerous, he-man” sex-symbol, one whom females could also buy into - even though (or maybe because) he seemed to have aged 20 years in the previous 5 (to quote a George Jones song), losing his previous James Dean like good looks and pompadour to one who looked like he had packed in a lot of life experience - which he had. Further success followed in 1972 with ’Someone To Give My Love To’ reaching # 4 -


With the back-to-back hits ‘She’s All I Got’ and ‘Someone To Give My Love To‘, Paycheck had successfully shepherded Paycheck to be a mainstay of the CBS Records Nashville roster. But renowned for his lush, countrypolitan arrangements, Sherrill never could quite polish up Paycheck’s rough edges, so though these recordings were not as wild or uninhibited as the Little Darlin’ sides, they still retained a tense, soulfulness that lifted them way above the Nashville norm. Nor did Paycheck abandon honky tonk altogether, even under Billy Sherrill‘s production. The last track of 1972’s “Someone To Give My Love To” album was introduced by Paycheck as “Here’s one for the boys”, after follows by a stone country honky tonker, led in by the crying pedal steel. This number is unknown even to most honky tonk lovers, who usually completely overlook Paycheck’s Billy Sherrill produced material. So once again it’s time to head back to the bar to wash the memories away with ’It’s Only A Matter Of Wine’ -


For the next few years, working with the man who had resurrected his career, Billy Sherrill, Paycheck was hardly out of the charts, having further Top 12 hits with ‘Love Is a Good Thing‘ at # 12 in 1972, ‘Something About You I Love’ at # 10, ‘Mr. Lovemaker’ going to # 2 (and # 3 in Canada) and ‘Song and Dance Man’ at # 8, all in 1973 and ‘For a Minute There’ at # 12 in 1974, he had finally become something of a recognised star, even taking on the moniker “Mr Lovemaker” in 1974. But the act and new image couldn’t last much longer. Though, at least to the public, he appeared to be off the booze, his wild ways hadn’t really changed much - and there’ll be more on that tomorrow, along with yet another change in his music direction, as the outlaw era explodes - with Johnny Paycheck a natural fit.

 

[Professor Knowall]

We left off yesterday with Johnny Paycheck, after his artistically fruitful but commercially lean Little Darlin’ era, having been rescued from the bars and drug dens of Denver by Billy Sherrill, cleaning him up and presenting him as a sort of “Bad man” sex symbol and a singer of love ballads (though Paycheque still slipped in a few booze soaked honky tonk laments into his albums), led to Paycheck’s most successful and consistent period so far. This attempt to bend Paycheck into a soft-country artist continued for a few years, until he finally "went outlaw" and asserted his testosterone... so it's kind of slim pickings for hard country fans - the vocals are right, but the songs and their Countrypolitan accoutrements are wrong for Paycheck

Paycheck had a steady run of hits through the 1970's but still, he found trouble. For a time, his wild, most self-destructive days seemed to be behind him - but this didn’t last long. As his income from his hit records increased, so did his expenditure on booze, women and pills - and the rest he just wasted. In a supreme irony (remembering that cheque is spelt as check in the U.S.), in 1973 Paycheck passed a cheque that didn’t pay and was convicted of cheque forgery. In 1976, his behaviour becoming ever more erratic, he was saddled with a paternity suit from one of his many flings (he actually married in 1971, but this marriage was on and off like a strobe light) and chronic financial woes due to his spendthrift ways and problems with the tax office (aka IRS), forced Paycheck into bankruptcy In 1976.

After the Outlaw movement of Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson took hold of country music in 1976, PayCheck was recast by Sherrill to fit the new “genre”. Artistic freedom wasn’t a problem in Paychecks‘ case - Bobby Bare, Waylon and Willie had already paved that road For him. Waylon and Hank Jr had also also set new standards in a public persona as hard drinking, drugging,shabby, long haired anti-authoritarian rebels (and it wasn’t just an act in their case), so capitalising on Paycheck’s checkered past and rough and rowdy ways, this approach seemingly worked - Paycheck was a natural outlaw.

The "new" Johnny Paycheck was an odd amalgam of image and talent. Gone were the youthful James Dean-esque looks (though this was mostly due to Paycheck's hard living of booze and drugs) but be certain the fast learning Nashville country music image-making folks knew what their new audience expected in terms of their "outlaws" appearances, replaced by a growth of beard, dark, wide brimmed cowboy hats, denim, and wide leather belts with gaudy buckles. The appearance was pure outlaw, and it met the expectations for a man who'd sung all of those mordantly entertaining Little Darlin' honky tonk classics. Paycheck made it work with his indisputable singing prowess and a pen as sharp as his ear was keen for a terrific country song. So while others (notably Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings) made far more enduring headway with the "outlaw" imagery, and although Paycheck, with his self-destructiveness as much a put off as a come on, always seemed destined for the footnotes of country music history despite all his obvious talent, it was always Paycheck who seemed to be the man with the commoners touch.

So after a couple of relatively lean years on the charts with his soft country stuff, Paycheck bounced back with his first “outlaw” album, a harder-edged sound and image with 1976’s “11 Months And 29 Days” album (why the title? - it happened to be the length of his suspended jail sentence for passing the bad cheque). The cover featured a photo of him in a jail cell, and the opening title track, with it’s moody fusion of country and delta blues, set the tone for the album -


Another from the “11 Months And 29 Days” album, ’The Woman Who Put Me Here’ refers here not to any jail, but Paycheck’s favourite musical haunt, the honky tonk bar, as he invites us for a toast or four or more as he once again laments his misery and who’s to blame for it -
“Let's drink a toast to this honky tonk we're standin' in / And for the man behind the bar who pours the beer /
One for the band who plays the songs and makes us want to cry / And the rest for the woman who put me here …” -


Even if the “11 Months and 29 Days“ album didn't tear up the charts, it established the sound and persona that became Johnny Paycheck's signature in the late 1970’s and it provided the template for his next album, ”Slide Off of Your Satin Sheets”, which did indeed provide a big hit, its title track, a relaxed, nearly seductive tune that once again illustrated how Billy Sherrill could polish singers as ornery and mean as Paycheck without defanging them. In contrast to Paycheck’s usual honky tonk themes of misery and loss, ’Slide Off Of Your Satin Sheets’ intimated the pleasure, rather than the torture, of romance, and took Paycheck back to the Top 10 for the first time in 4 years, reaching # 7 in both the U.S. and Canada -


Paycheck - like so many others - cited Hank Williams as his first musical influence, as his mother was a huge fan and had a collection of records. So in this honky tonk heartbreak song from ”Slide Off of Your Satin Sheets” album, ’Hank You Tried To Tell Me’, Paycheck pays a homage of sorts by referring to one of the many Hank Snr’s classics, the 1947 ‘Mansion On A Hill’, in which the poor singer‘s lover chose a loveless and unhappy marriage to a rich man over true love and bliss mixed with poverty. However, in ’Hank You Tried To Tell Me’, it seems as if the ex-lover is quite happily better off surrounded by riches, as Paycheck ruefully observes -


The ”Slide Off of Your Satin Sheets” album also contained a song perfect for Paycheck - ’I’m The Only Hell (Mamma Ever Raised). This provided his second Top 10 hit from the album, going to # 8 in the U.S., # 6 in Canada. The following lines were particularly apt for Paycheck, because early in his career he was briefly employed as Patsy Cline’s bass player, but out at her ranch and high on pot, he stole her car and drove it round and round until it ran out of petrol. Patsy promptly sacked him -
“… Mama tried to stop me short of stealing / I guess that's why I had to steal that car /
She told me not to smoke it / But I did, and it took me far away …” -


So with 1976 done and Paycheck now comfortably ensconced at home in the Outlaw camp, his natural element, and reaping the rewards of his change of direction, despite - but in truth also because - of his drinking, drugging, brawling, reckless lifestyle, finally, 19 years after arriving in Nashville with talent to burn (and burn it he too often did), he was about to reach the peak of his career … and this we will see tomorrow.

 

[Professor Knowall]

We start off today where we finished off yesterday in 1977 with one more from Johnny Paycheck’s “Slide Off Your Satin Sheets” album - and it’s straight back to the honky tonk with ’You’re Still On My Mind’, where, in true honky Tonk tradition, empty bottles never can erase the memories. This was a cover of a relatively little known Jeff Daniels original from 1959. Gram Parsons also covered it in 1968 in his stint with The Byrds, but Paycheck gives the song just the extra punch and bit of roughage it needs -


Maybe it was Paycheck's lovable loser quality. Perhaps it was his geographic lineage (born and raised in southern Ohio, just to the north of Kentucky, where the old-world Confederate lines of North vs. South were never quite clear). Or maybe it was quite simply his majestic genre-defying voice and all-round talentWhatever it was, Johnny Paycheck always seemed to be the one country artist on the verge of something big - but never quite getting there. It was an astounding 19 years between the day Paycheck first entered a recording studio and his first # 1 hit at age 40. It's likely that few of the bikies, truckies and long-haired rebels buying the Paycheck records of the late 1970’s knew that the gravelly-voiced survivor dated back to a completely different era, when he was a skinny, pompadoured young man with a soaring high tenor voice, trying to make a name for himself with a name that no one would ever remember - the forgotten alias of Donny Young.

But in 1977, with the nation in a recession, inflation running rampant, and unemployment steadily in the mid-teen percentages Johnny Paycheck struck a nerve and shot a country hit straight out of Nashville and deep into the American culture like no country record had ever done before. Fellow crazy outlaw, David Allan Coe's love-gone-bad tune ’Take This Job and Shove It‘, became one of the most misconstrued singles in history, as it was popularly mistaken as a defiant workingman's anthem, making Johnny Paycheck both a star - and in the end, a caricature.

’Take This Job and Shove It‘ was certainly the anthem of the late '70's" John Morthland recorded in his wonderful book The Best of Country Music, and he wasn't confining such a claim to the country music genre. The song was an absolute cultural sensation. It opened millions of ears to country music as men and women in office spaces, people on assembly lines, teachers, lawyers, doctors, short order cooks, all of the working in America who were witness to a shrinking dollar value, increasing costs of living, and an economic future that hardly seemed worth all of the sweat and stress of their jobs all took up the cry - "Take this job and shove it!". Like Peter Finch's Howard Beale in the 1976 movie, Network, howling at his captive television audience and telling them to run to their windows, fling them open, and yell, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!", the slaves of a pitiful economic reality found an affinity for this trite dirty tune sung by a rebel who'd been broke, busted, and counted out himself once or twice before, and, if they were never to be so bold as to say it themselves they were comforted - thrilled in fact - that someone was finally saying (so they thought),"Take this job and shove it!" -

The irony is - this song was never intended as a working class anthem - if one ignores the chorus and listens to the verses, it clearly ain’t, as the singer is only contemplating leaving his job over his woman leaving him -
“Take this job and shove it / I ain't working here no more / My woman done left and took all the reason / I was working for …”.
Furthermore, he doesn’t actually tell his boss to shove it, he’s only still only thinking and imagining about it - as so many do, but don’t follow through -
“… One of these days I'm gonna' blow my top / And that sucker, he's gonna' pay / Lord, I can't wait to see their faces /
When I get the nerve to say / Take this job and shove it …”.

It’s also not really a great song, far from Paycheck’s best or even better songs - it doesn’t flow, the melody ain’t quite there, it’s clunky and really just a novelty song - just one that was perfectly timed to capture the market at that time. Paycheck himself wrote much better songs than this one. It was a combination of the right song given to the right singer at the right time, but much of that combination was down to producer Billy Sherrill, who had steadily been smoothing out the rough edges in Paycheck's sound while exaggerating his outlaw stance for almost comical effect. But unlike Chuck Berry, who long lamented the juvenile humour in his novelty song ‘Mr Dingaling’ being his biggest seller, Paycheck never complained and no doubt enjoyed both the notoriety and the considerable income boost of finally having a # 1 hit.

The iconic song also inspired a 1981 movie of the same name and was perfect material for punks such as the Dead Kennedys’ blazing 1986 cover and for rappers like Canibus and Biz Markie’s 1999 tribute alike. ’Take This Job and Shove It‘ propelled the same-titled album to # 2, taking Bobby Braddock's drinking song ’Georgia in a Jug’ to # 20 along the way -


’Georgia in a Jug’ is just 1 of 4 explicit drinking songs in the “Take This Job And Shove It” album - even the title track has a drinking undercurrent, it just doesn't make it explicit. The best is the bizarre, dark but funny ’Colorado Kool-Aid’ a tongue-in-cheek talking blues (in the tradition of Hank Williams‘ alter-ego, Luke The Drifter), about Coors beer (a beer very much associated with the West), Mexicans and lopped-off ears. What starts off as seemingly good ad for the virtues of Coors beer then goes sideways and, just like Hank’s Luke The Drifter narrations, has a moral (of sorts) to the story. Fellow outlaws, Waylon, Willie and Hank Jr never did this sort of stuff -


Also from the album is ’The Spirits of St. Louis‘, its title an obvious pun on Charles Lindberg’s famous aeroplane The Spirit Of St Louis, in which he made the first non-stop solo flight from New York to Paris to collect the $25,000 reward on offer in 1927. The song itself is loaded with geographical references - all to do with drinking, as the singer tries out the 100 barrooms of St Louis a dozen times over, without it doing him any good -
“… Cause I've drank beer from old Milwaukee / Bourbon from Kentucky / And I've had my share of California wine /
I've sipped Tennessee's best whiskey / Drank every bar dry in this old city / But all the spirits in St. Louis can't get you off my mind …” -


Unfortunately, Paychecks’ sudden new super-celebrity status, and the money that went along with it, jettisoned the performer back into the drug and alcohol addictions that had helped to ruin his career 10 years earlier. With more money to spend than ever before, he soon traded up in his substance addiction, turning from cheap pills to more expensive uppers and, along with his friends, Waylon and George Jones, to cocaine. Longtime bandmate Gary Adams recalled his wild behaviour on Mike Judge’s Tales From The Tour Bus - “Paycheck had a total disregard for the law when he was drinking. He had a way of destroying himself … We’d stay up for 3 or 4 hours just to get in tune and then jam for 3 or 4 days straight“.

A short man, it seems Paycheck was always looking for ways to make himself feel bigger and tougher - like many country singers, Paycheck didn’t shirk a punch-up, and like another heavy drinking short man, Lefty Frizzell, he often actively started a fight - and by all accounts, like Lefty, he was a damn good brawler. There’s a story of him playing at an honky tonk when some Hells Angels walked in, and being metal-heads, started making a nuisance of themselves and mouthing off at Paycheck and his “hick” music. So Johnny stormed over to them, politely asked the leader out for a “fair fight”, which he agreed to. So they went out the back where Paycheck belted the leaders lights out in just 2 well timed punches, earning their respect and support.

Now I don’t know if this is true or just a good story (there’s only one doubtful source for it on YouTube), but what is a fact is that around this time, Paycheck became very good friends with the legendary Hell’s Angels leader, Sonny Barger. Barger, who died in June 2022, wrote years later that he and Paycheck were best friends and described the rough, tough, hewn country singers like Paycheck, Lefty, Haggard, Waylon, Cash and Willie etc as being real men. From this time on, Paycheck was often found this in the company of the Hells Angels.

Anyway, enough for today. We leave off with Paycheck, at age 40 in 1977, finally riding on the crest of a wave of success. Tomorrow will see the start of the big wipe-out that followed - but not before some more good honky music from Johnny Paycheck.

 

[Professor Knowall]

Welcome back to 1977 again, with Johnny Paycheck, at age 40, having finally having his first # 1 hit - even though it was more of a perfectly timed novelty song written by David Alan Coe instead of one of his own self penned honky tonk classics, which had a much more limited mass appeal, was at the very peak of his career. But, finally having money to spare, he graduated from pills to cocaine, and inevitably became more addicted to the white powder as he was to alcohol. The consequences weren’t too serious at first - Paycheck long had a reputation for being a great bloke when sober - and having a too easily triggered short fuse when not. In an interview he defended his volatility thus - ''I'm a man who believes that right is right and wrong is wrong. Treat me right, and I will give you my all. Treat me wrong, and I will give you nothing. They don't like me for that, but that's the way I am.'' It took a few more years before things fell apart and got dire.

As a contemporary of what could be considered the second great era of country music artists (the first being the obvious birth of the modern form with the likes of the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills, Hank Williams and Bill Monroe) Paycheck is often left off of the lists that point to George Jones, Patsy Cline, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson as high priests of the post-WW2/post-suburban American country music milieu. Yet, as the form began its long trek from a secularized and mostly regional, rural or blue collar entity toward a more mainstream acceptance, Johnny Paycheck had as much talent as any on these lists - but destined not to join them at the top of the country music pedestal.

As well as as his own raw edges and roughness, which even the famed “Countrypolitan” king producer, Billy Sherrill, couldn’t wash out and stopped trying to, his own personal qualities (or weaknesses) which, without doubt, heavily contributed to the great honky tonk musician he was, as a singer, songwriter and guitarist, led also to his downfall. But before we get to that, pour a glass of your best Tennessee whiskey (or Kentucky bourbon if you must) as we get back to his music, starting with one more honky tonk number from his 1977 best selling “Take This Job And Shove It” album, ‘Barstool Mountain’ 1977 -
“… At closing time I step down off the mountain / I'm strong enough to make it without you /
I know that I'll be right back here tomorrow / Too weak to sober up and face the truth …”


After his “Take This Job And Shove It” album topped out at # 2 in 1977, Paycheck followed up in 1978 with “Armed And Dangerous”, which included the single ‘Friend, Lover, Wife’, which reached # 7 in the U.S. and # 8 in Canada. But for me, the standout track is ‘the self-penned Thanks To The Cathouse (I’m In The Doghouse With You)’. Plenty of Paycheck’s honky tonk tunes have an underlay of parody and dark humour, but here it ain’t disguised at all, as the frustrated sex deprived singer rues getting into a bit of further trouble -


Next, in 1979, came the album ”Bars, Blondes & Booze”, a slice-of-life LP, nicely peppered with shades of George Jones and Ray Price (both former employers), from Johnny Paycheck's late-1960s heyday, when the future boss-hater was still championing great rough-hewn honky tonk. Cut for the Little Darlin' label, it finds Paycheck telling it straight from the bar, wryly musing about his alcohol predicament in ‘The Pint of No Return’ and ‘I Drop More Than I Drink‘, barroom denizens with ‘We're the Kind of People‘ and cheating songs like ‘The Meanest Jukebox in Town‘.

Later in 1979 came the “Everybody Has A Family, Meet Mine” album. The cover shows a gang of sleazy looking blokes - all members of Paycheck's band and road crew. The album is another peek into a sleazy and even depraved honky tonk lifestyle, in line with Paycheck‘s greasy and grungy outlaw image. The "family" was his finest working band, and the efforts of instrumentalists such as the striking harmonica player P.T. Gazell insures everything has a nice kick to it. It’s laden with an undercurrent of ironical humour, which may best explain the opening track, ‘(Stay Away From) The Cocaine Train’ - on the surface, just another preachy anti-drug song focussed on the perils of cocaine, but coming from Paycheck, who was barely disguising his own increasing cocaine habit along with his binge drinking, it’s a clear cut case of “do what I say, not what I do“ -


After that cautionary cocaine track, from the same album, again filled with barroom, honky tonk drinking songs, is ‘Drinkin’ And Drivin’, another ”don’t you do this” song, as he sings of drinking and driving himself to what seems a likely oblivion over that infernal woman of his - something honky tonk fans know is just pure convention, not to be taken literally. The song, which got to # 17, references some CB radio terms popular at that time, with the Smoky And The Bandit Movie and the smash hit ‘Convoy’ -
“…Breaker, Breaker, this is Heartache, / now hear me loud and clear /
I got a memory on my tailgate, Hey-hey / and old smokey's on my rear
I'm gonna chase my headlights / till I can drink me blind /
I'm gonna be drinkin' and drivin' that woman right off of my mind …” -


Another from the “Everybody Has A Family, Meet Mine” album is the rollicking, upbeat, Top 40 tune with the solution for being dumped on the night for another - ‘Fifteen Beers. That’s a few more than I could handle - I’d have to switch to whiskey and Ice after six, but Paycheck must’ve been made of sterner stuff - and had more drinking experience -


In 1980, a broke, almost broken, booze and cocaine addled George Jones teamed up again with his old backing singer and bassist, Paycheck to record a duet album aptly entitled “Double Trouble“. Jones, despite his condition - or maybe because - was enjoying the attention of young rock & rollers, thanks to an appearance at Willie Nelson’s 4th July picnic concert at Austin (helped along by David Alan Coe) and a glowing article in Rolling Stone. Jones and Billy Sherrill decided to make the most of his new rock audience, and Paycheck’s outlaw notoriet. Primarily consisting of 1950‘s rock & roll covers -’Maybellene‘, ’Along Came Jones’, ‘Roll Over Beethoven‘ etc. - the arrangements are flat, lifeless, and over-produced, featuring an overbearing chorus of female supporting vocalists. And to make it worse, the vocals of both - Jones the greatest country vocalist of all and Paycheck not so far behind him - were terrible. Both sound as if they were on one of their notorious drinking and drugging binges, making jokes with each other throughout every song and singing without regard for key - Jones being the main offender. There is a bizarre fascination in hearing them so completely off their heads, but it is an embarrassing record, easily the worst album either George Jones or Johnny Paycheck ever recorded.

Shortly after the twin success of those singles, Paycheck’s career began to crumble due to his excessive, erratic and sometimes violent behaviour. In 1979, his former manager began a prolonged and difficult legal battle against him after Paycheck belted him in his office. In 1981, a flight attendant sued him for slander after he drunkenly started a fight with other passengers on a plane (made worse when some of his band members joined in) and when she tried to stop it, he threw a torrent of abuse laced with sexual slurs at her - these days he would be arrested for that. She was awarded $175,000 for her ordeal. The IRS also continued to hound him fabout where his money went (as if they didn’t know about his lifestyle) and in 1982 sued him for $103,000 in back taxes.

Paycheck’s songs had become, if you haven’t already noticed, to be like parodies of his lifestyle, including titles ‘Me And The IRS’ and ‘D.O.A. (Drunk On Arrival)‘. His unruly, drunken and drug fueled behaviour and resultant bad publicity - not helped by hanging out with the Hells Angels - was by now impacting on his chart success. But worse - much worse - was to come. Tomorrow will rap up the wild ways of the honky tonk outlaw as Johnny Paycheck’s career comes crashing down through his own actions - and finally, an unlikely redemption.

 

[Professor Knowall]

Today will conclude Johnny Paycheck’s music and his increasingly wayward life story - but not before going straight back into his “Everybody Has A Family, Meet Mine” album, releaes in December 1979, for right in the middle of it all lies an absolute little masterpiece, the brooding and frightening ’Ballad of Billy Bardo‘, a tale of a narc (police informer), told with the sing-songy repetition of something like "Froggie Went a Courtin'," making the violent surprise ending that much more potent. Surely this was real popular with Paycheck’s Hells Angels friends -


In 1981, Paycheck released what turned out to be his final album for Epic (more on that just below) - thereby inadvertently capping off his prime - “Mr Hag Told My Story“, digging through the Merle Haggard songbook, assembling 10 perfect barroom ballads and then, in a great coup, recording them with Merle’s band, the Strangers, including 3 duets with Merle. Instead of picking predictable songs, Paycheck avoidEd the really big hits, choosing a bunch of lesser-known gems Haggard has penned. There’s a YouTube video from this time with Haggard, supported by Willie Nelson and Paycheck performing together at Anaheim stadium, LA. With Merle singing and Willie playing trigger, after a few minutes Paycheck is announced and comes manically bounding on stage, jumping around like an over excited houndog and obviously totally off his chops - you can guess how. Merle and Willie both have a WTF look on their faces, but Paycheck does manage to settle enough to deliver his backing vocals with Willie. The video is both very funny yet so somewhat disturbing at the same time.

As mentioned yesterday, in 1981 in Denver, Paycheck drunkenly (or more likely, wired up on cocaine), started a fight on a plane before take-off, in which several of his band members joined in. He then unleashed a torrent of abuse, throwing in indecent sexual slurs, on a flight attendant who had tried to calm things. He and his band were ejected from the plane and was lucky not to be arrested. The flight attendant sued Paycheck for slander and was awarded $175,000 - a big sum in those days. Worse was to come.

So on that note, a single from his next album, 1982’s “Lovers And Losers” album, ‘D.O.A. (Drunk On Arrival) 1982, is most apt - not to mention another great honky tonker, even if Paycheck was surely aware of the self parody in the song’s title. One can notice Paycheck’s voice not as strong as normal, with less timbre - an affect from cocaine that also afflicted 2 other great vocalists in George Jones and Waylon Jennings for a time until they overcome their addiction. This is partly (and cleverly) covered up here by the strong female backing in the chorus, all making for a rollicking good honky tonker -

Despite its qualities, ‘D.O.A. (Drunk On Arrival) tanked, only reaching # 88 on the charts, while the “Lovers And Losers” album turned out to be his last with Epic or any other major label. Besides the changing music tastes and fashions as the 1980’s rolled in, with the Outlaw era dying off, there was another specific reason for this - something which remains an enduring stain on Paycheck’s life story.

I’ve spoken in the past in this history series about how young people married back in the eras thus covered, with the age of consent in most Southern states set at 14 and in Louisiana at puberty. Things were only just starting to change in these areas in c1980. In addition, having sex with young girls (be they legal age or not), was common, almost a rite of passage, for many a pop star, rock musician and country hero (not to mention their band members and even roadies). If I named them all now, it would be a long list.

But in 1982, Paycheck was accused of crossing all acceptable boundaries. In what now (though apparently not to all back then) seems the most sordid of the many Paycheck tales, he was arrested for the alleged rape of a 12 year old girl. The case is murky and obtaining reliable factual details seems impossible now. Paycheck visited a house in Casper, Wyoming, after performing that night and the visit apparently involved a drug deal - whether Paycheck, who was normally supplied by the Hells Angels, was buying or selling I simply don’t know, but he was arrested the next day for rape of a 12 year old daughter at the house. He vociferously denied the charge and said he was set up for money (the parents also lodged a $3 million civil suite). The charges were finally dropped when the parents didn't want their girl to testify in court and in a plea deal, he accepted a $1,000 fine for a misdemeanour sexual assault charge. Sensitive to the publicity and public opinion, the major CBS record label, Epic, dropped him after 11 years. Today, even without the rape conviction, he would probably have his career cancelled altogether, convicted by the weight of popular opinion. But back then, Paycheck was able to move on to the AMI label, but the hits got smaller and less frequent.

Just a month after the court case, Paycheck was arrested in Raleigh for not paying a $26,000 court judgment for failing to appear at a 1979 concert in Greensboro. He was released after a bail bondsman agreed to guarantee payment of the civil judgment. But 2 months later, in September 1982, he filed for bankruptcy for the second time (recall the first time was in 1976), thereby averting an IRS auction of his belongings to satisfy all his debts, including $300,000 to the IRS alone and avoiding the even larger lawsuit payouts, but losing all rights to his music royalties. Much worse was to come.

Even as his behaviour became ever more erratic, with his boozing an ever increasing cocaine addiction (though, just like his constant friend, George Jones, it’s reckoned his alcoholism may have actually negated the worst affects of cocaine), Paycheck, now on the minor AMI label, with its cheap production values (the kinda annoying drumming on this sounds like it’s from a machine, while there’s no info on who did the quite fine piano and pedal steel accompaniment) was still capable of providing surprisingly good music. Despite everything now going against him, his reputation battered, ‘I Never Got Over You‘ was beautifully sang and so still made it to the Top 30 in 1984 -


In a 1985 story in The Tennessean, Paycheck openly admitted to using cocaine and even extolled its virtues, saying - “Cocaine and alcohol are OK, upfront drugs”. Late in 1985, after wrapping up a tour, still yet to figure out the caricature's life he was living out, Paycheck kept the party going at a Hells Angels clubhouse in Maryland. The club happened to be under FBI surveillance, and the Angels were warned the place could be raided by a rival gang to blow the place up. Paycheck and the Angels all split, but before leaving, Paycheck ran back inside to grab a stash of Peruvian cocaine. He got on the road, high wired out of his mind, with 2 cases of cash and the large stash of coke. Paycheck stopped at the first bar he could find … The North High Lounge in Hillsboro, Ohio. Two good ‘ol boys at the bar – Lloyd and Larry Wise – had been drinking that evening. Apparently the boys were feeling loose and initiated a conversation with Paycheck - “He come in there and he was talkin to a couple of ol boys … we all used to grow up together. They had several beers, maybe as many as 8. They were as friendly as they could possibly be … they didn’t know that he was just totally, totally gone on his cocaine”.

It just happened that Larry Wise was a native of Paycheck’s old home town of Greenfield and a big country music fan. Although the exact details of their conversation remain unknown, Wise began talking to Paycheck, who asked to be left alone. The dialogue escalated, with Wise - either as some sort of peacemaking gesture, or a clever dig at Paycheck’s small-town roots (doubtful, given Wise was a native of the very same small town) - offering to take Paycheck back home and feed him a home-cooked meal of deer meat and turtle soup. That’s when Paycheck, who, as we know, had one of his earliest hits with ‘Pardon Me, I’ve Got Someone to Kill‘, took offence and reached for his .22-caliber pistol (pistols in holsters are still a common sight in many a good honky tonk).

”I never seen the gun, and I never heard the shot,” Larry testified during a hearing 8 days later, claiming he began backing away as soon as Paycheck roared, “Do you see me as some kind of country hick?“. Although Wise ultimately ran from the bar, he wasn’t fast enough to avoid a bullet to his head from Paycheck’s gun, which left him bleeding above the right eye. Thankfully Wise was hardheaded and the bullet went through the top of his forehead and out of the top of his scalp, with a witness testifying - “It just barely went through his scalp, it weren’t nothin’ serious“. Wise testified - ”He blowed my hat off. I guess he took it as a personal insult.”

Paycheck, who, despite the eye-witness accounts, claimed he shot Wise in self-defense, battled the case for 4 years, often with a little (or a lot) of help from his friends. George Jones and Merle Haggard came to his aid in 1986, paying $50,000 in bail money to get Paycheck out of jail. Later, Johnny Rodriguez and Jerry Lee Lewis played a show in Memphis to help raise money for his mounting legal bills. But come to his trial, Paycheck makes no effort to be presentable - his unkempt, hollow-eyed appearance and cocaine habit makes him look positively deranged in court, drawing comparisons with Charles Manson. Upon taking the witness stand, still fully wired to the hilt with cocaine, he takes a large gun and twirls it around as a trick - and seals his fate in the process - his lawyer immediately knew all hope was lost.

Finally, after 3 more years of appeals, in 1989, Paycheck was finally slapped with a 7 to 9 year sentence - the appeal judge wasn’t taken in by Paycheck’s plea he had become a Christian, had completely given up drinking and drugs and turned his life around - he had heard that sort of schlock too many times before. But, in what to me is the strangest part of this story, it turned out that Paycheck was actually speaking the truth - in the period from his original trial in 1986, where he was still addled with cocaine and booze, and his final sentencing hearing in 1989, he really had found religion, stopped drinking and even overcame his cocaine addiction. Then prison became a life-changing experience. He turned out to be a model prisoner, finally finishing his high school education he had earlier quit at age 13, obtaining a diploma and managed to quit his one last addiction - tobacco. He earned a pardon from the Ohio governor after serving less than 2 years and released in 1991. Coincidentally, David Allen Coe, who wrote Paycheck’s 1978 # 1 hit ‘Take This Job and Shove It‘, had also spent time in the same prison.

Known for years as a renegade and victim of drugs and booze, Paycheck came out of prison clean. He also made good on the conditions of his parole. He kept his life on a straight course and gave anti-drug talks to young kids around the country as part of his required community service. To his credit, and with an uphill battle ahead of him, being flat broke and still hounded by the IRS (causing him to be declared bankrupt for a third and final time in 1996), Paycheck returned to the music industry and tried to once again resurrect his career, resuming touring, which included regular appearances in Branson, Missouri, and recording for Playback Records. In 1996, the Country Music Foundation released a collection of Paycheck’s early recordings for Little Darlin’ that found favour with young fans of classic country music, while in 1996, he released an album on new material, the aptly titled “I’m A Survivor“. Though somewhat hampered by cheap production technique, including the annoying use of a synth-drum, Paycheck’s vocal’s, much improved again from his cocaine days, still shines through, including this most ironical song, ‘I Can’t Quit Drinkin’, having not touch a drop of alcohol for nearly a decade -


One of the oddest facts about Paycheck is that he only married once, in 1968, and despite several separations over the years dire to his wicked, wild ways, including disappearing for a whole year in 1970-71 until found drunk and destitute on the streets of Denver, the marriage somehow stayed intact, albeit with interruptions and Paycheck actually became a family man in his last 2 decades. With his wife, who like other wives of country singers and sinners such as Johnny Cash, George Jones and Waylon Jennings (Jessi Colter put up with a lot) amongst others, stayed put despite his many infidelities, wild ways and addictions, and they had a son in 1976 - John PayCheck, who is now a country singer in his own right (and worth a listen). Perhaps to emphasise his new outlook on life after his release from prison, Johnny started spelling his surname as “PayCheck” in the 1990’s. He increasingly clung to privacy after his release from prison, a now quieter, mellow and much nicer person.

In 1997, putting a punctuation mark on his redemption, Paycheck was finally inducted a member of the Grand Ole Opry, something he took much pride in, having come from so far down in his life. Paycheck had first signalled his change of direction of his life as early as 1986 in what many consider his best song - and Paycheck later described as the song he was most proud of and the most meaningful to him - the self-reflective ‘Old Violin‘. And in one of the most emotionally charged nights in the Grand Ole Opry’s rich history, Paycheck took to the stage after his induction - the outcast now forgiven his sins - for a performance that drew tears - and not just from the audience but from Paycheck himself. Here, from that night, Paycheck sings sincerely, without any self-parody, peeling away at the ups and downs, and the pending end of his life, ending his song reflecting on the lifetime he’d given over to music -
“… And I looked in the mirror, that's when I knew / That there I was seein', an old violin /
Soon to be put away, and never played again / And just like that, it hit me /
That old violin and I were just alike / We’d give our all to music / And soon, we’d give our life” -


Though Paycheck had beaten his demons during the final years of his life, he never shrunk from the bad-boy reputation that he had created, even he professed to more than a decade of sobriety. At the Grand Ole Opry induction, Paycheck remarked people who came to hear him play, still expecting to see the whiskey-drinking, cocaine-using, wild-eyed performer with unkempt hair and a surly frown - "They still remember me as that crazy, good-time-Charlie honky-tonker, and I don't tell 'em any different“. But even as his credibility rose, his health, ironically given his now clean lifestyle, was deteriorating. He began to suffer with poor health mainly based around asthma and emphysema. In January 1998 he was airlifted to hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico after suffering a severe asthma attack. This effectively marked the end to Paychecks music career.

At age 64, with a body beaten and broken by a life of smokin’, drinkin’ and drugs, Johnny Paycheck passed away in 2003, unable to pull out of a lengthy illness compounded by emphysema and asthma. A report of the funeral service stated “A true cross-section of authentically hard-core country music fans attended. Some young, longhaired country fans. A whole church pew of hard-bitten Hells Angels in their full biker regalia, plus a member of the Red Devils motorcycle club who was bumped up to another row. A lot of middle-aged-plus men with long gray ponytails and jeans and the hard eyes of much life experience. Some burly guys whose noses had been re-arranged by fists. Some tough-looking women who showed a lot of life's lessons in their faces and their expressive eyes. Some very proper-looking men and women I would take for Sunday school teachers. A lot of nightclub denizens wearing sunglasses at 1 o'clock in the afternoon, indoors. A lot of black cowboy hats. And a whole lot of black leather. Several people I would avoid in a dark alley. By and large, it was the roughest-looking funeral crowd I have ever seen. But that's indicative of Paycheck's life and career. He is buried in Nashville‘s Woodlawn Memorial Park in a plot paid for by his old friend, one who could relate to his wild way - George Jones.

There was never anything phoney about Paycheck’s music. He was one of those rare artists that wouldn’t sing it if he didn't
feel it and acknowledged that much of his work was reflective of the life he lived. A year before he died he said - “That was
me, them’s all life. I regret a lot of that stuff I did”. All too often Paycheck’s headline making exploits over-shadowed his
musical achievements. It‘s a shame, for it just so happens that he was one of the mightiest honky-tonk singers of his or
any era, with a voice and a body of work that should have him as a Hall Of Fame legend. Alas, this doesn’t appear likely in
todays harsh, unforgiving, censorious climate. I’ll let Paycheck have the last word - “To me, an outlaw is a man that did
things his own way, whether you liked him or not. This world is full of people that want you to do things their way, not
necessarily the way you want to do it. I did things my way”. Regrets and all.

Someone once said that a movie should be made of Paycheck’s life - but the trouble is nobody now would believe it.
Now I ain’t done with the Outlaws yet. The next instalment should be soon enough, but on someone far tamer and a lower profile than Johnny Paycheck.

 

[Professor Knowall]

Our latest outlaw artist has a far lower profile than all the others, and is often overlooked altogether - and I might’ve done so myself, but I have just a couple of days to spare, and I think her contribution to country music is too good to ignore. Although her biggest hit and signature song was before the outlaw era even begun - and many unfairly regard her as a one hit wonder - she was the first female artist - actually the first artist of either sex after Waylon and Willie - to be identified with the outlaw movement. She was unafraid to sing songs that reflected the sometimes gritty realities of modern life, having first came to fame singing Kris Kristofferson's ’Help Me Make It Through the Night’, a song other artists were reluctant to touch. She was also noted for her husky voice, the result of spending many years singing in smoke-filled clubs, working professionally since childhood.

This is no wild, often reckless artist like Johnny Paycheck - although she did marry 4 times compared to Paycheck’s single marriage which somehow survived all his wild ways. So there’s very few stories of interest to tell about her. And before going further, a word about the music to come - it ain’t no form of party or dance music or any sort of toe tapping variety, let alone anything to rock along to. But Smith’s evocative, husky vocals, with her on-note enunciation reminiscent of Jim Reeves, her behind the beat timing a reminder of Willie Nelson - are to be consumed quietly and contemplatively, alone, not in company, best late at night, perhaps thinking back over the years of some lost loves or heartaches you’ve had or caused along the way - and I’d strongly recommend some whiskey to accompany any memories the music evokes.

She was born Jewel Smith in the unlikely country music nursery of Orange County, California in 1943. However, her father was in the military and the family moved frequently, living for periods in country and western music heartlandi states of Texas, Colorado, and Arizona. At age 11, Smith dropped out of school to sing professionally 6 nights a week in an Oklahoma City nightclub (yep - 11, like many others, she grew up fast), taking the name Sammi Smith. Like Loretta Lynn, amongst others, she married at age 15 (not unusual at the time, as we know) to Hank Thompson's Brazos Valley Boys great steel guitarist and nightclub owner, Bob White. They had 3 children and divorced soon after the birth of the 3rd child. At songwriter Gene Sullivan and Johnny Cash’s bass player, Marshall Grant‘s urging, a newly divorced Smith moved to Nashville in 1967 and signed with major the label, Columbia. She had her first minor (# 53 hit), ’So Long, Charlie Brown, Don't Look for Me Around’. In 1970, she had another minor (#58) hit with ‘Brownsville Lumberyard’, but never rose into the Top 50 while recording for Columbia, who dropped her thus. Smith then signed to the newly formed, small, obscure Mega Records. Her first single for the label, ’He's Everywhere’ did reasonably well, topping out at # 25 in late 1970, despite having no promotion.

One of Smith’s early acquaintances at Columbia was the office janitor and aspiring songwriter Kris Kristofferson, who like Smith had grown up in various southern locations due to his father being in the military. He wrote ‘Help Me Make It Through The Night‘ in 1969, a time when he was still struggling to make it in the industry. The title was based on an interview in Esquire that Kristofferson had read, in which Frank Sinatra, asked what he believed in, said - “… Booze, broads or a bible…whatever helps me make it through the night ...”. Around the same time, he was staying with a fellow country artist Dottie West and her husband. Kristofferson offered the song to West, who originally rejected it due to it being “too suggestive.” She eventually did record it, but only after several other artists, including Smith, had released their own versions. West later confessed not recording this song first was the greatest regret of her career.

R&B and Soul singer, Percy Sledge, was the first person to record the song in 1970. However, his version was overlooked, with many considering the song as too risqué. Kristofferson's lyrical seduction piece, a perfect evocation of the times, expresses a direct sexuality unusual for its time, with Smith singing: "Take the ribbon from my hair“, a neat amendment to the original lyrics, written from the male point of view, which read - "Take the ribbon from your hair. It’s hard to imagine now, but at the time, it was considered controversially bold for a country singer. However, Sammi Smith had no such problems, saying she appreciated the frankness of the song and didn’t see anything scandalous or provocative about the track. ‘Help Me Make It Through The Night’ became, far and away, Smith’s biggest ever hit, the one she’s still remembered for, her signature song. ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night‘ quickly became a monster hit, hastening right up to # 1 and then crossed over to the pop side, peaking at # 8, the biggest 1971 crossover hit.

On Kris Kristofferso’s history, in post # 661, there’s a youtube video of Smith singing (well, lip-syncing) this live on the Johnny Cash show, so here I’ve opted for a better quality studio clip -
“… I don’t care who’s right or wrong / I don’t try to understand / Let the devil take tomorrow / Lord tonight I need a friend …” -

In 1971, ‘Help Me Make It Through The Night‘ won the CMA’s single of the year and landed Smith a Grammy for best female vocal performance. It also netted Kristofferson a Grammy for best song. Smith never got another # 1 hit, because, as she says, “It was like following a Rembrandt with a kindergarten sketch“. The song made Smith and Kristofferson household names in the music business. Ironically, what she didn’t know then is that her record label, Mega, had been formed as a tax write-off and the last thing the owner wanted was a hit record! The massive hit for Sammi caused a tax hit for the label owner. This explains the continuing lack of promotion for Smiths’s subsequent records.

Smith was also a songwriter and wrote a number of songs that became hits for others, including ‘Cedartown, Georgia‘, which became a major hit for Waylon Jennings, and ’Sand-Covered Angels‘ for Conway Twitty. She also wrote ’When Michael Calls‘, the B-side of ’Help Me Make It through the Night‘. Smith charted 14 more singles for Mega, only 2 of which cracked the Top 10, including her follow-up single in 1971, ’Then You Walk In’. But, in truth, after ‘Help Me Make It Through The Night‘, she only had a few relatively minor hits and none of them (apart from her cover of Merle Haggard’s ‘Today I Started Loving You Today’, seen below) have really endured. Therefore, I’ve made a captains call here to concentrate on some of her high quality covers of some great country standards - the sort of songs that shouldn’t be forgotten, and a good excuse to include a few not seen before in this history series. So get your whiskey or weed, settle in and let your memories go with the flow.

‘Lonely Street’ was written in 1956 by Carl Belew, Kenny Sowder, and W.S. Stevenson in 1956 and originally performed by Belew (who, like Kristofferson, was a much better songwriter than singer) and later by Dave Rich. It’s been recorded by loads of artists since, including as the title song on Kitty Wells “Lonely Street” album in 1958, Patsy Cline in 1962, The Everly Brothers in 1963, Ray Price, also in 1963, Gene Vincent in 1966. George Jones in 1967, Tammy Wynette in 1968, Bing Crosby in 1968 and Emmylou Harris in 1989. Ironically, the highest selling release of this country standard was by pop crooner, Andy Williams, which reached #5 on the pop chart and (surprisingly) #20 on the R&B chart in 1959. Smith included this achingly lonesome sounding cover on her debut “Help Me Make It Through The a night” album in 1971 -


’Just Out Of Reach (Of My Two Open Arms)’ was written by Virgil "Pappy" Stewart and originally recorded by his band, The Stewart Family, in 1951. It was a Top 10 hit for Faron Young in 1952, and was also covered by Patsy Cline, Percy Sledge, Brenda Lee, all in 1962, Jim Reeves in 1963, George Jones in 1989 and David Ballincluded in 2001.The most successful version (again ironically) was recorded by R&B and soul singer Solomon Burke, his 1962 Gospel-like version with very strong country undertones set him on the road to stardom. Smith’s poignant version comes from her 1972 album “Something Old, Something New, Something Blue” -


In 1973 Smith moved to Dallas, to join her close friends Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. Her new home was also close to the burgeoning Austin music scene, with Willie Nelson leading the way. As such, Sammi became the first singer other than Waylon and Willie to identify as part of the outlaw country insurrection right from the very start - even before the term was invented. However, although a dope smoker, her lifestyle wasn’t so wild (in complete contrast to our last outlaw, Johnny Paycheck) and her own music style hardly changed. Seemingly not ambitious or driven enough, but perhaps also tied down by having to bring up her children, she stuck with her minor record label, which had no interest in promoting either her singles and albums.

‘Long Black Veil’ is a 1959 ballad, written by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkins and originally recorded by the legendary Lefty Frizzell, whose rendition reached #6 and led it to become a standard (see post # 218 for Lefty’s original), covered by a variety of artists in country, folk and rock styles, including Johnny Cash in 1968 (he also performed a duet with Joni Mitchell In 1969), The Band in 1968 (and performed it at Woodstock in 1969), Joan Baez incorporated the song into her live repertoire, and recorded it twice, David Allan Coe in 1984, Marianne Faithfull in 1985, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 1986 and The Dave Matthews Band, who performed the song live with Emmylou Harris at a Johnny Cash tribute concert, in 1999. It was also performed by Bruce Springsteen in 2006, Mick Jagger with The Chieftains for their 1995 album “The Long Black Veil”, Mike Ness from the punk-rock band Social Distortion, in his 1999 debut solo album, Jerry Garcia, David Grisman and Tony Rice in 2000, Harry Manx on the compilation ”Johnny's Blues: A Tribute to Johnny Cash and in 2009 by Rosanne Cash.

But the most successful, highest charting cover version was the #26 hit released by Smith from her “Sunshine” album in 1974. In its original version, the story is told from the point of view of a man falsely accused of murder and executed. He refuses to provide an alibi, since on the night of the murder he was sharing a bed with his best friend's wife, and would rather die and take their secret to his grave than admit the truth. The chorus describes the woman's mourning visits to his gravesite, wearing a long black veil and enduring a wailing wind. In Smith’s atmospheric version, with it’s quite original backing that makes a real point of difference, she tells the story from the point of view of the lover (with a few altered lyrics) who dons the long black veil to mourn in secret -


The title song of her late 1975 album, ’Today I Started Loving You Again‘ was written by Merle Haggard and Bonnie Owens in 1968. Haggard first recorded it as a B-side to his # 1 hit, ’The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde‘, and failed to chart - but it, rather than the # 1 A-side, became one of his most requested concert songs and went on to become a country standard (see Merle’s original on post # 498), covered by many artists including Jerry Lee Lewis, Waylon Jennings and Conway Twitty, all in 1968, Connie Smith in 1969, Skeeter Davis in 1970, Al Martino and Kenny Rogers in 1972, Barbara Mandrell in 1974, Bobby Bland in 1975, Gene Summers in 1980, Emmylou Harris in 1986, Dolly Parton in 1996, Jeff Carson and Merle Haggard for Carson's 1997 album, “Butterfly Kisses” and Martina McBride in 2005.

However, Smith’s 1975 version, released as a single from her 1974 “Sunshine” album, was the most successful cover of them all, her third and last Top 10 single, topping out at # 9. Merle Haggard maintained that it was his favourite rendition of his song. It’s not hard to see why Merle formed this opinion, given Smith’s soulful, restrained yet emotional take -


Tomorrow (or it may be a day or so after - I’ve just been called into the CBD for the next couple of days) will see out the remainder of Sammi Smith’s career, as she gradually fades into the background, but not before delivering more beautiful covers of classic standards in her warm, seductive, husky vocals - be sure to have more whiskey.

 

[Professor Knowall]

While Sammi Smith was never a headliner in the Outlaw movement as it moved through the 1970’s, she was a close friend of both Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, often shared the stage with them and joined both on tours. She married Jody Payne, Nelson's guitar player, and bore him a son they named Waylon. Now a singer and actor, Waylon Payne released his solo debut album in 2004. In 2004, he and his mother made a guest appearance together on the Grand Ole Opry.

Now it’s time to grab that whiskey again. Another from Smith’s 1975 ”Today I Started Loving You Again“ album, ’When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again‘ was written by Wiley Walker and Gene Sullivan in 1940 and first recorded by them in 1941. In 1944, Cindy Walker took it to #5 on the Folk chart with the song. In 1948, Cliffie Stone took it to # 11. Numerous artists have done covers of this standard since, including Elvis Presley in 1956, Bill Monroe, Hank Thompson, Eddy Arnold, Jim Reeves, The Statler Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jerry Reed, Merle Haggard and Emmylou Harris. This is Smith in her element, mixing the heartache and misery of today with the hope of better days ahead -


Also from Smith’s 1975 ”Today I Started Loving You Again“ album, ’Am I That Easy To Forget’ was another great standard written by Carl Belew (the writer of ’Lonely Street’ featured yesterday), releasing the original in 1959. Despite Belew being a very averagevocalist, the song itself was good enough to reach # 9. Loads of cover versions have been done since, including by Skeeter Davis, reaching # 11 in 1960, Ernest Tubb in 1960, Gene Vincent in 1966), George Jones 1967, Patti Page in 1968, Jim Reeves, posthumously reaching #12 country in 1973 and Prairie Oyster in 1991. In 1960, Debbie Reynolds recorded a version that reached # 25 on the pop chart, but the highest charting version was by Engelbert Humperdinck, reaching # 18 on the pop chart 1967 and # 1 on AC chart in early 1968. But for me, Smith‘s melancholy 1975 version is about as good as it gets. You can feel the singers heartache and pain here, -


And yet another from 1975 ”Today I Started Loving You Again“ album, ‘Before The Next Teardrop Falls’ was written by Vivian Keith and Ben Peters and most famously recorded by Freddy Fender. His version was a major crossover success in 1975, reaching # 1 on both the pop and country charts. The song was actually written back in 1967 and had been recorded more than two dozen times before Fender’s brilliant version. It had achieved modest success in versions by various performers; the original version by Duane Dee reached #44 in 1968, and Linda Martell sent her version to #33 in early 1970. Jerry Lee Lewis recorded a version of it on his 1969 album. Other notable covers have been from Loretta Lynn in 1975 and Dolly Parton later recorded it for her 1996 covers album. Parton's version featured vocals by David Hidalgo, who sang the Spanish lyrics that Fender introduced to the song. smith’s 1975 version reinserts the original English lyrics, her husky voice providing a sad reassurance of hopeless devotion -


From Smith’s first album with Elektra “As Long As There’s Sunday” in 1976, ‘No-one Will Ever Know’, which is a fair candidate for about the saddest country song ever written (and yeah - in a genre that has “sad songs” covered like no others, that’s quite a claim), was written by songwriting great Fred Rose. Tony Bennett, who had just scored a smash pop hit with his cover of Hank Williams' ’Cold, Cold Heart‘, released a version in 1952, but the song really took off as a standard when Hank Williams‘ original was finally issued as a posthumous single in 1957. Since then, notable covers have included The Wilburn Brothers in 1958, Marty Robbins in 1962, Don Gibson, a pop version by Al Martino released a pop version, Carl Smith, Roy Orbison in 1963, Stonewall Jackson in 1963, Dottie West, Loretta Lynn, Hank Locklin, Hank Snow, Ferlin Husky, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams' hero Roy Acuff in 1968, Ronnie Milsap, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Watson and David Allan Coe included it on his 1997 album, “The Ghost of Hank Williams”. The sadness in this song is perfect for Smith’s restrained, precise, heartbreaking vocal delivery -


Finally, from Smith’s album, “Mixed Emotions“ in 1977, ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’ was written and recorded by Don Gibson in 1957. It was released in 1958 as the B-side of ’Oh, Lonesome Me’, which he had composed on the same day, thus becoming a classic double-sided hit single. At the time of Gibson's death in 2003, the song had been recorded by more than 700 artists - a few too many too mention here - but most famously by Ray Charles, whose recording reached # 1. Smith’s album version actually follows Charles arrangement, starting with a gospel choir like chorus. However, I prefer this live version, ditching the choir and going back to the basics of the song, with behind the beat timing and vocals underlining the lyrics sense of hopelessness and loss -

Note Smith’s attire of a Native American style belt and other accruements she wore in the live clip.

After 1979, little was heard from Sammi Smith. She moved to Globe, Arizona and became involved in Native American causes, devoting considerable time and resources helping particularly the San Carlos Apache Reservation (she was part Kiowa-Apache. Besides the 4 children of her own, she adopted 3 others. Smith’s former husband was Willie Nelson’s guitarist Jody Payne and, being part Apache herself, she adopted 2 Apache children and formed an all American Indian band, Apache Spirit. In 1978 she set up the Sammi Smith Scholarship for Apache Advance Education, the aim being to increase the number of Apache lawyers and doctors, which led in turn to the construction of a new school. A number of well-known country artists, including Johnny Cash, Mickey Newbury, and Johnny Rodriguez, performed at the school's first charity event. She also started her own band called Apache Spirit, made up of Native Americans.

In the mid-1980‘s she married her fourth and final husband, Johnny Johnson and together they ran a Cattle Ranch in Bristow, Oklahoma. She did appearances on the Grand Ole Opry and toured Japan. She also had a line of pottery, bath salts, and hand painted ceramic tiles for the bathroom. Although her last hit recording was in 1986, Smith continued to perform irregularly, including making occasional guest star appearances at the Grand Ole Opry. In July 2004, her son Waylon Payne debuted at the Opry and she performed on stage with him, singing her signature song amongst others, to thunderous applause. Seven months later, in February 2005, she was dead - her lifetime spent performing in smoky nightclubs for 50 years from age 11 - not to mention being a heavy smoker also from age 11 onwards - no doubt played a large part both in her husky voice and her death from emphysema at age just 61 - even Johnny Paycheck outlived her.

Smith is primarily remembered (if remembered at all) for ’Help Me Make It through the Night‘, an assessment that downplays
her songwriting, well-recorded albums and her criminally underrated vocals. Her husky alto, with her intimate, almost spoken phrasing, framed by unfussy country-soul rhythms and doom-saying strings, marks her throughout as among the most interesting vocalists of her time.

So that’s a brief sketch of Sammi Smith’s life and music - and enjoying her renditions of thse classic country standards. When I’m next back (I’m unsure just when), it’ll be with another outlaw, but with a higher profile - and an attitude to match.

 

[Professor Knowall]

Our next artist found her path to a being ranked among the Outlaws not by associating with the other outlaws like Sammi Smith did, but by a change in her musical direction and, even more so, her notorious behaviour. But before she reached her Outlaw stage, she was already different from any other artist in this history this far - many who didn’t breakthough to major stardom until into their thirties, a few even in their forties, with 20 years of music experience behind them. But today’s artist had a recording contract with a major label and a hit record to go, at age just 13 and by age 15 had already chalked up a string of hits. There’s been teenagers in the music business before and since – Brenda Lee, Britney Spears, Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus (through her TV character, Hannah Montana) come to mind for example, but this Texas native at age 13 wasn’t singing 2 minute innocent songs about “Sweet Nothin’”s for a teenage market. She was singing adult material, leaving little to the imagination, singing about illegitimate children, mental insanity, murder and love – of both the emotional and carnal kind. She is also, by some margin, the youngest artist by birthdate to be featured in this series

Tanya Tucker was born in 1958, in Seminole, West Texas, the youngest of 3 children. Her father, Beau or “Bo” was a heavy equipment operator and the family moved often from Texas to Arizona, Utah, Colorado and Nevada, as he chased major construction projects, but Tanya's early childhood was mainly spent in Wilcox, Arizona, where the only radio station in town played nothing but country music - hence, even while the Beatles were at the height of popularity and rock’n’roll captured most of America’s youth market, Tanya just happened to be raised in towns sufficiently isolated to have country music still dominate. The Tuckers‘ also went to the concerts of stars such as Ernest Tubb (posts # 161-165) and Mel Tillis (# 648-657). Tanya's older sister by 7 years, LaCosta was praised in the family for her vocal abilities and, encouraged by them, went on to have a professional country music career of her own, including a # 3 national hit.

After learning to play the saxophone at age 6, when she turned 9, Tanya‘s father asked if she wanted to be a regular kid or if she wanted to try being a singer like her big sister. You know the answer. In addition to the much older LaCosta, Bo Tucker also took his youngest daughter's ambition very seriously and by age 10, Tanya started competing in talent shows in and around Phoenix, where the family had recently moved. Though she didn't win any, the experience gained helped her learn how to perform before live audiences. Despite her age, Tucker even cut demo tapes which her father took to Nashville in hopes of impressing record producers, but when they learned the singer Bo was trying to promote was his own daughter, they wrote Tanya off as just another child whose naturally biased parents thought she had talent.

Meanwhile the Tuckers moved again, to a small town in southern Utah, and there, in 1971 she auditioned for the western movie Jeremiah Johnson. Tanya didn’t win the major role she tried out for but she was hired as a bit player. It was at this time she also got one of her first big musical breaks, due to the dedication and sheer persistence of her father. He drove Tanya the family all the way to Phoenix for the Arizona State Fair (akin to our agricultural shows), just on the chance the featured performer, Judy Lynn, could use 12 year old Tanya in her show. Tanya sang for the fair's entertainment people who were impressed enough to allow her to sing solo on-stage. After this, Bo drove the family all the way to Douglas, Colorado in the hope Tanya might be allowed to sing at their fair/rodeo. Spotting the major star Mel Tillis (posts # 648-657) in the backlots, she boldly went up to him and asked if she could sing on-stage with him. He was so impressed with her audition that he sang several songs with her on-stage that night and asked her to come back the next day, but unfortunately Bo had to return home to Utah due to work commitments.

Not long after, with Tanya about to turn 13 the family decided to move to Las Vegas (they lived in a caravan), figuring it was a good city for an entertainer to get a start. with Tanya about to turn 13, Bo fortuitously won $1,500 at Keno one night, so he spent the money making a demo tape of Tanya singing 6 songs. Bo took them to former actress, song-writer for Elvis Presley and music agent Dolores Fuller, who now lived in Las Vegas. Fuller liked what she heard, and brought the tapes to the attention of Columbia Records producer, Billy Sherrill, who, in another fortunate coincidence, was not only personally known by Fuller but also just happened to be in Las Vegas at that precise time for a gambling weekend. if you‘ve been following this series, would know Billy Sherrill well by now as the “Countrypolitan king” (Countrypolitan being the 1970’s updated, even more sophisticate, Nashville Sound) and the producer of our last 2 featured Outlaw artists, Johnny Paycheck and Sammi Smith. After Fuller met up and played the demo tapes to Sherrill, he agreed to a personal audition. After Tanya sang for Sherrill in person, he promptly signed her to a contract and advised the family to move to Nashville. Tanya had only just turned 13.

So, with Tanya now in Nashville, Sherrill initially planned to have her record a newly written song he thought suitable for a just turned 13 year old - the sugar sweet and innocent ‘The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA‘. But with it’s "skip-a-dee-doo-dah" line and blissful happiness, the 13 year old Tanya stood up to Sherrill like very few ever did, saying “it ain’t my kinda song“ (it subsequently became a smash # 1 hit when performed by it’s writer, Donna Fargo - post # 647), though Tanya eventually agreed to record it for her debut album, counterbalanced by the next track, Hank Williams’ all-time classic, ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Try’). But for her first single release, Tanya stridently demanded a fully adult song instead and Sherrill, not used to being bossed around by anyone, let alone a 13 year old girl doing her first professional recording (she even told Sherrill to shut-up at her first session) offered ’Delta Dawn, which became the opening track off her album of the same name.

The song, set in the town of Brownsville, located at the North end of the Mississippi delta, just SE of Memphis, was about a middle-aged woman who can’t forget or get over the lover who abandoned her in her youth. The songwriter, Alex Harvey wrote the song about his alcoholic mother -“My mother had come from the Mississippi Delta and she always lived her life as if she had a suitcase in her hand but nowhere to put it down”. Ten years before Harvey wrote the song, he was performing on TV and told his mother not to come, lest she get drunk and embarrass him. That night she died in a car crash, and Harvey believed it was suicide caused by his rejection. He suffered from guilt over the incident for years, until a cathartic incident the night he wrote the song. He was at fellow songwriter Larry Collins' house, who was asleep while Harvey fiddled around on his guitar. He believed his mother then came to him in a vision - “I looked up and I felt as if my mother was in the room. I saw her very clearly. She was in a rocking chair and she was laughing ... I really believe that my mother didn't come into the room that night to scare me, but to tell me, ’It's okay‘ and she had made her choices in life and it had nothing to do with me. I always felt like that song was a gift to my mother and an apology to her. It was also a way to say ’thank you‘ to my mother for all she did”.

To perhaps get a fuller appreciation of this song, one could go back to post #528, a brief description of the Mississippi Delta region, where the past hangs so heavily over the present, clammy like a hot humid delta summer day. Anyway, critics raved over Tanya’s surprisingly mature throaty vocal style. Her version beat out others just cut by established country stars Kitty Wells, Waylon Jennings and Bobby Bare, to become by far the most popular, her debut single at age 13 (which the record company tried to keep secret at first) reaching # 6 in the U.S. and # 3 in Canada in 1972, despite Columbia spending nothing on publicity -

In 1973, New York based Bette Midler released her down-tempo version that sadly stripped the song of its Southern feel and spirit - I don’t think she got it - but Australian pop-singer Helen Reddy's 1973 pop version was surprisingly good, even sounding Southern like Tanya - in fact it was an exact carbon copy of Tanya’s version and, with a huge promotion budget, dominated the pop charts in the U.S. and became a massive hit in Australia. Sherrill was furious with the New York head office for allowing the whole rip-off of Tanya’s version and the promotion expenditure of it after it was denied to Tanya.

Another from Tucker’s 1972 debut “Delta Dawn” album, ’Jamestown Ferry‘ also scored a hit for Tanya, reaching #5 in the U.S. and all the way to # 1 in Canada. This funky little slice of countrypolitan was everything the 13-year-old Tanya was becoming synonymous with in the early 1970’s. With lyrics (presumably) way beyond her experience and a deep soulful vocal that belied her age, ‘Jamestown Ferry’ tells the story of a woman wandering the honky tonks and bars, sadly reminiscing about how her lover used to treat her before he left her by catching the ferry -

Texan Charley Crockett, who I’ve mentioned and posted clips of several times over the last couple of years, and over the last 6 months or so has broken through to some national prominence, released a worthy cover of ‘Jamestown Ferry’ (with a few minor lyric amendments for the gender reversal), in 2017.

Following the great success of her first album and singles, Columbia tried to keep Tanya’s tender age of 13 a secret, fearing it might harm her credibility as an artist that was singing songs for an adult, not teenage, market. Inevitably news of her age leaked out and, if anything, it caused her to be even more of a new sensation, increasing her profile and gaining an even bigger fanbase.

Tucker quickly followed these successes with her 2nd album, “What's Your Mama's Name?”, in 1973, in which the title song, another curious slice of southern gothic written by Dallas Frazier and Earl Montgomery, tells the story of a mysterious man named Buford Wilson through a series of flashbacks. Beginning 30 years ago in Memphis, we find him wandering the city asking if anyone remembers a woman he recently had a relationship with in New Orleans. After 10 years of searching he asks a “little green-eyed girl” what her mum’s name is and gets arrested for enticing a child when he offers her sweets. The song ends with Wilson being found dead with a “faded letter” in his coat pocket telling him he has a daughter and that her eyes are green like his. All makes sense now. It went all the way to the top in both the U.S. and Canada, Tanya’s first U.S. # 1. The song is Tucker in all of her early glory, now age 14 - a traditional, story-driven song delivered in Tucker’s authentic, already rough edged, country voice. Even then, with a song that was unashamedly country, Tucker also achieved some crossover chart success, a foretaste of the future -


Tucker’s 1970’s breakthrough was fuelled by memorable, idiosyncratic songs that drew out the grittiness and emotional contour of her already distinctive voice. The second single from her “What’s Your Mama’s Name” album, ‘Blood Red and Goin’ Down‘ portrays a husband hunting down his unfaithful wife and her lover and killing them - a theme much the same as Johnny Paycheck’s honky tonk classic, ‘Pardon Me As I Have Someone To Kill’, but this time the tale is vividly told from the perspective of a woman whose father once dragged her along with him as he set out to murder both her mother and the man she has run off with - the song title was supposedly describing a Georgia sunset but also sets the scene for what’s to come. Tucker somehow lends the matter-of-fact memory of the father’s distress a tone that feels just right - at once forever traumatised and yet preternaturally sage, splitting the difference between unthinkably tragic and inappropriately cheery thanks to the song’s mid-tempo Western feel and Tucker’s eerily precise vibrato. It’s typical of early Tucker - a tragic narrative, bolstered by introductory gang vocals and a catchy, simple chorus. Tucker’s performance and delivery are mature and confident as she delivered her 2nd U.S. (and 3rd in Canada) # 1 in 1973 - and she was only 14 -
"… Where did I go wrong, girl? / Why would she leave us both this way? /
At times like these, a child of ten / Never knows exactly what to say …” -


The singer-songwriter David Alan Coe has been mentioned a few times in this history, most recently as the writer of Johnny Paycheck’s best selling 1976 hit ‘Take This Job And Shove It‘. But almost 3 years prior to that, in 1973, he wrote a song they became Tanya’s 3rd consecutive #1 hit and also the second-biggest crossover hit of her career, owed in part to Tucker’s full-throated commitment to the over-the-top love ballad.

This often misunderstood song from early 1974, Tanya’s 3rd consecutive # 1 (4th in Canada) in Tucker’s breakout run, is actually not as salacious as the title - or its first line - suggests. I’ve read claims this is an inappropriate song for a 15 year old, as the singer is issuing an invitation for sex. But, if one reads the lyrics correctly, this ain’t so at all – instead, it’s a series of metaphors about commitment that David Allan Coe first wrote for his brother’s wedding vows. A simple tender plea from one lover to another, the biblical references ramps up the emotional power of this otherwise simple country song. Tucker’s tender rendition of ‘Would You Lay with Me (in a Field of Stone)’ even has death on its mind - that “field of stone“ isn’t only a metaphor for the inevitable struggles awaiting a long term commitment - it’s also a cemetery - hence, far from a mere invitation to sex, the song is really a plea for a life-long commitment until death. Tucker goes big in her delivery of lines such as “… Would you go away to another land / Walk a thousand miles through the burning sand? …” and the payoff shows in the song’s lasting popularity -


Tomorrow will follow the remainder of Tanya’s teenage years, as she continues with her adult material in her own distinctive vocal style, as she drifts ever closer along her own path to becoming an Outlaw.

 

[Professor Knowall]

While still in her early teens, Tanya Tucker started getting billed as a sex symbol in spite of her age. A massive Rolling Stone cover story headlined her as “The Teenage Teaser” centred on drooling male fans and how the success of adult themed songs like ‘Would You Lay With Me (In A Field Of Stone)’ fueled their lust. The article, which now sounds like it was written by a dirty old lecher, opens with the line - “Grown men follow her from town to town. Young boys camp outside her door. Fans call her the female Elvis ...” The article went on to describe Tanya as “… a torrid teenage sex-pot … the holy grail …” and also described a 39 year old male at a concert called Red “… breathing heavily and swaying in time, transfixed … staring at the most beautiful navel in show business” “An attractive 15-year-old in body-fitting outfits singing ‘Would You Lay with Me’ draws a peculiar cross section of fans,” and notes that her audience included “lesbians, for one thing,” and “horny males of all ages“. Imagine Rolling Stone with an article like that today for a 15 year old Girl! But back then, there were other articles in that prestige magazine all but celebrating rock stars having sex with underage girls - it basically promoted pedophilia.

Tanya - along with Johnny Rodriguez, the too-often-overlooked young latino Texan star (posts # 713-716) with whom she frequently toured early in her career - brought a degree of youthful sexual energy to her performances that country music hadn’t seen before. In Finding Her Voice, an encyclopaedic history of female country singers by Bufwack and Oermann, Tanya is described as country music’s “first female superstar with an open, free sexual image”, Loretta Lynn, who had married at age 15, acknowledged Tucker’s influence (jokingly) in 1975, telling a Tennessean reporter she’d recorded her controversial single ‘The Pill‘ with Tanya in mind - “There she is, just 15 years old and singing, ‘Would you lie with me in a field of stone. She needs to know about the pill!”

Elvis Presley may be credited with helping to shape the Golden Age of rock‘n’roll, but there are plenty of less-than-reputable things that have come out about him in the years after his death, including, of course, the well known fact he preferred to have girls that were no older than 15, and at the time, Tanya fitted the bill. In 2019, she recalled going to one of his concerts - "My dad told me as I was leaving the trailer that night, going to the Elvis show at the Hilton, he said, 'Now, look here, that boy can have any girl he wants in the world,' he said. 'Make sure he knows he can't have you". Just saying no once wasn't a clear enough message however as Elvis kept pursuing her - "He constantly asked me to come to Graceland, but I never did, because I didn't want to be one of the girls." That wasn't the first time Tanya had shared her thoughts on Elvis. She told Rolling Stone back in that 1974 article - "I wanta think that Elvis is perfect”. When the reporter suggested then that maybe she shouldn't meet him, she responded - "You're right”.

Now on with the music, picking up where we left off yesterday. In 1974, the second single released from the “Would You Lay With Me In A Field Of Stone” album, ‘The Man That Turned My Mama On’ offered more daring adult material from the young singer. Written by singer-songwriter Ed Bruce, the poignant ballad tells the story of a girl whose father died of illness when she was only 5. She longs to have known more about him, who was a traveling salesman her mother married in a heartbeat -


There’s no other way of putting this - here we have 15 year old Tanya singing a rock solid country song or rape and revenge. ’No Mans Land’, also from the 1974 album. , but never released as a single, tells the story of Molly Marlo, a beautiful young woman who years ago, as an innocent virgin, was r*ped by a bloke named Barney Dawson, and will have no man after what happened to her. She goes to school to become a nurse. The song closes with Barney in prison, deathly ill and in pain, happy to see the nurse arrive - until he realizes exactly who she is -
“… Years later, Barney Dawson laid in prison / In feverish pain, that suffering shell of a man /
He was glad to see the nurse from Millards Clinic / Till he saw the burning eyes of No Man's Land.” -


Leaving Columbia and producer Billy Sherrill (who was very sorry to see her go, despite or maybe because of all her temper tantrums and sass, Tanya moved to MCA on her 16th birthday in 1974, determined to make records that were in keeping with the sophisticated country-rock of the Eagles. The resulting album, simply titled “Tanya Tucker”, was a mix of half country and half pop/rock, but the most successful (and best) from the album were clearly the full-on country songs, not the pop pap.

The first single from the album, ’Lizzie And The Rainman’ is a musical version of the 1956 Burt Lancaster movie The Rainmaker, the meandering narrative song tells the story of a rainmaker who visited a drought-stricken town in West Texas and ended up persuading a skeptical local woman named Lizzie Cooper. After various other artists had already recorded it, Tucker put the song on her self-titled albs and made a hit out of it, peaking at # 1 and was also Tanya‘s biggest crossover hit, making it to Pop chart’s Top 40, peaking at #37. In some ways, ‘Lizzie and the Rain Man’ is proof Tucker was at her most universally accessible when her sound was most clearly country - but it took a while for that lesson to sink in to the still young but increasingly wild Tanya -


It was at age 16 Tucker first began to acquire a wild reputation as she grew up. She had begun drinking (despite the legal drinking age being 21 in the U.S) and later remarked how it started - "You send your ass out on the road doing 2 gigs a night and after all that adoration go back to empty hotel rooms. Loneliness got me into it”. It was just the beginning of things to come.

On to the next single from 1975 “Tanya Tucker” album, and it’s time to grab a mandolin and get square dancing! On this paean to the great traditional rural western American Saturday night (now all but gone), Tanya reminisces about all the times she used to sit at home singing along to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio while her parents and her sister went into town dancing - until she was finally old enough to join them. ’San Antonio Stroll’ sounds just like it should - the narrator in it sings about her folks going to “that big square dance in town” while she stays at home, listening to “that old opry show” so that she doesn’t “get lonesome or blue”. Tanya’s recording lands perfectly, somewhere between opry and square dance and childhood simplicity (which makes sense, since Tucker was 16 when the song was released). The upbeat toe-tapper became her 5th # 1 hit -


‘Here’s Some Love‘ was the title track and first single from Tanya’s 1976 album of the same name. Her 6th studio album, it would turn out to be her only # 1 album, and in many ways, the title track is its thesis statement - a mid-tempo love song with a sound that rests somewhere between classic country and adult contemporary, reflective of Tanya’s maturing sound at that time - albeit she was still only 17. Lyrically, there is not much that remarkable about the song, but Jerry Crutchfield’s production, combined with the singer’s charisma and charm turned this into another # 1 hit, her 6th (# 2 in Canada) and one of Tucker’s many crossover hits -


So we leave off in 1976, with the now 17 year old “veteran”, riding high on her wave f success, already with 6 # 1 hits in both the U.S. and Canada and a household name in country music, and a “sex-symbol”, now facing what many child or teenage stars found too difficult - staying on top while negotiating the often precarious road to adulthood. In Tanya’s case, she did have one key difference that set her apart from other young teenage performers, to her advantage - right from her first successful recording as a 13 year old, her material was adult oriented, not aimed at the teen market. So she could just continue doing what she had been doing over the previous 5 years, without having to re-invent herself.

But that wasn't her plan. In that infamous Rolling Stone article back in 1974, mentioned above, the writer suggested to her to pursue a career in the much larger pop market (much as Taylor Swift did a few decades later). The then 15 year old Tanya didn’t say no at the time, though she pointed out she wasn’t a pop person (whereas Swift was always a pop person with a bit of pretence pop-country). But it seems the idea (with it’s temptation of a much larger market) stuck. Tomorrow will see how Tanya’s plan to come a pop/rock star carried out - and how she became fully “credentialed“ as an Outlaw.