Waylon Read online

  In those days, you were either with the gang, or you’re with the guy who runs from the gang, or you’re a clown. I tried to be a hoodlum, walking around with my collar turned up. I could fight pretty good, which I’m not proud of, but just the same, sometimes you had to. Alvin Holmes used to be the biggest bully, and picked on me. I thought, look how big he is. Why mess with him? One time he came up behind me and made me mad, and I kicked his ass bad. I liked it so well I went and found him twice more that day and whipped him again.

  When you drop out of school, you can’t really hang out with kids who are going to school. Their parents won’t allow that. So you have to hang out with other people who have quit, or people who are older than you, and you get into things you shouldn’t even be thinking about.

  One guy who quit when I did wound up six months later in reform school. I saw another one about six years ago who had spent thirty of his fifty years in prison. He’s since been killed in a robbery attempt.

  I had to work, and that probably saved my life. The rest of the guys who quit school usually got in a lot more trouble than I did. Down deep inside, I guess I regretted leaving almost immediately, because one of the first things I did after I got out was buy a dictionary. But Daddy made me work, and when you’re tired, you slow down a bit.

  He kept me off the streets. I helped out down at the Produce most of the time, and then seemed to get a job just about all over town. I didn’t last too long anywhere, usually enough to know I wasn’t good at any of them.

  I was probably more like a mule than a horse. There was something about mules that I liked. They’re strong—I could lift a hundred-pound sack of feed down at the Produce—and hardworking, but they’re stubborn sonofabitches. If a job was too big or wrong for them, they’d know it. A horse would pull till it injured itself, but a mule wouldn’t do that.

  All my work had dead end written over it. I’d be standing on the back of a cotton stripper, which is the last thing they do before they plow the stalks under. You put a mask on, and goggles, and you use pitchforks to pitch it back, and the other guy would be trompin’ the cotton. If that pitchfork slipped out of your hand, he’s a goner. You can’t breathe and those cotton fibers get up your nose, and the clods and rocks come shooting out of the chute and you have to watch it or else you get your ear chopped off. We’d do that all day long.

  I stocked shelves at a dry goods store. I was a projectionist at the Mexican movie theater, and I’d always get the reels mixed up. I unloaded trucks at the Piggly Wiggly’s. I ran an air hammer at a paint-and-body shop. Once I got a job at a service station. I went to work about six, and this guy came in and wanted his oil changed. I drained all the oil, and replaced it with transmission fluid. I looked around, realized what I’d done, and just went home. I did that a lot.

  In truth, there wasn’t much else to do. Littlefield didn’t want kids congregating for fear they’d get into trouble. It had the opposite effect. With nothing to keep us busy, we just roamed the area, looking for ways to get our kicks.

  We used to lean on car fenders in town, smoking cigarettes and talking. We’d wear white shirts with the sleeves rolled up, and we’d also roll the legs of our Levis, which we bought long, to show off our boots. We’d push our pants down real far, so they’d pop in the back when we walked. They’d hang so low it looked like eighteen families moved out of the ass end of them. We’d pull our cowboy hats over our eyes, click the metal taps on our boot heels to create sparks, and the most exciting thing was to walk across the street till some car would come by. You’d whack the side of it. Real hard. And then act like they hit you.

  Oh, we were cutting up. When I was old enough to drive, we’d drag Main, cruisin’ bumper to bumper, a set route moving from the railroad station up to the municipal building where we’d turn and head back the other way. Put two dollars in the tank and you could entertain yourself all night. I had a ’47 Chevy with the high-torque engine and a vacuum shift. Anytime you mashed the gas the windshield wipers would stop. I lowered the back and put skirts on it, but I dropped it so bad the front main couldn’t get any oil and it kept throwing rods. You worked on those cars more than you drove them.

  Sometimes it got a little crazy. Out on 54 there’d be drag races, and every once in a while someone would miss the curve at Bula and get killed. With the cars we had, eighty miles an hour was unbelievable, out of control. We’d bait the cops, and they’d chase us through the back roads and cornfields. It was almost like a game.

  A lot of people kept fighting roosters; that used to be a big sport. And violence never seemed to be far away from the front page of the newspaper. I remember once some guy thought his wife was fooling around on him, and he hid in the trunk of their car. She had a rendezvous outside of town, and he got out of the trunk and shot them both, her and her lover, five rounds worth. He got off.

  I was too busy trying to hold down a job to get in more than your basic trouble. I was no stranger to work; I’d been working pretty regularly, after school and on weekends, from the time I was ten years old. In fact, it probably was easier for me to know how to work than to play. I had a hard time learning to have fun, and it only got worse as I got older. Sometimes it seemed like all I had ever done was work.

  That was probably why I took to the guitar so single-mindedly when I had the chance. It was a way out. We couldn’t afford lessons, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me. I almost never let the instrument out of my hands. When I got home, I’d walk in the house, say hello, sit down, and start picking at the guitar. My brother James D. recalls that I could be looking right straight at him and never know he was in the room. I’d just be banging away, singing a song I might’ve heard on the radio, lost in my own world.

  I was expelled from music class in high school for “lack of musical ability.” If they wanted a B flat, they’d just hand me a B and I’d flatten it. I never learned to read music.

  But I couldn’t think of anything else other than to be a musician. I took my guitar everywhere I went, and hung onto it for dear life. I’d play with anybody I could. My dad was the only musician I knew on the Jennings side, though the Shipleys could boast my great-grandmother Nora West—grandma’s half-sister—who played harmonica and a little piano and accordion. She liked to huff and puff “Freight Train” on the harmonica, complete with chugging train noises, and sing old folk hand-me-down ballads.

  Oh shut your mouth you little bird you

  Don’t you tell no tales on me

  And your cage shall be lined in the finest of gold

  Hung high in the green willow tree, oh tree

  Hung high in the green willow tree

  When relatives would come to town, I showed up with my guitar and sang for as long as they’d listen to me. I had a good ear, and sometimes, even after hearing a song only once, I could give it a whirl.

  Country music was looked down upon when I was growing up. It was the music of the “have-nots.” We may have had patched clothes and we weren’t invited to the right parties, but still, sitting around the potbellied stove listening to the Opry, we had a kinship with the performers. I felt chills all over me the first time I heard Hank Williams sing “Lost Highway.” I would stay up late on Saturday night listening for him, happy if I could just hear him speak. I always wanted to be a singer, but he etched it in stone. I even had a premonition of him dying. I was in a drugstore downtown, and I put on “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.” I thought, wouldn’t it be weird if he died with that record out; and he did. It tore me up terribly when I heard the news. It was like my world had ended.

  I played what I heard. We listened to Chet Atkins and Hank Snow; we took pride in the fact that Ernest Tubb came from Guthrie, Texas, down by Fort Worth, even though that seemed an eternity away. He was Texas through and through, and Momma took an especial shine to him. Daddy was a big Jimmie Rodgers fan; in fact, he loved all bluegrass. I idolized Carl Smith so much I even tried to comb my hair like his.

  I had other influ
ences, too. When I would deliver ice across town, in the Flats where the black people lived, I used to stand outside Jaybird’s Dew Drop Inn and listen to the rhythm and blues. On Saturday night it was a jumping joint, with crap games, gambling, and bootleg whiskey. Albert “Jaybird” Johnson himself drove around in a baby-blue Cadillac with a continental kit.

  Lamb County was dry, but you could head over to Jaybird’s and they’d bring alcohol out to the car. Liquor wasn’t cheap. A pint of Old Crow would cost you five bucks, and the beer came in a quart bottle for a dollar.

  In terms of race, Littlefield was as typically southern as you could get. About the time I was born, you could still go down to the Palace and see a vaudeville show starring the Kentucky Coon Hunters and the South Plains Colored Amateurs with Bozo Bailey, Table Spoon Tommy, Hot Feet Harry, Hair Lipped Harry, Blossoms, and Liza. Less entertainingly, a drunken black man who allegedly killed the local sheriff had to be taken to an undisclosed location to save him from a white lynch mob.

  I grew up with “them” in the balcony and “us” down below, the colored fountain and the white fountain. Dunbar School was over “there,” literally across the Santa Fe tracks. I never went to an integrated school. Yet I pulled cotton with black people, and I played with the little black kids, and never thought anything about it.

  We weren’t perfect, and there did come a time when I realized some of the things I had been saying all my life were wrong. Tommy and I had been playing in these trees with our slingshots, only we didn’t call them slingshots. Three or four black boys, bigger than we were, came up and asked us, “What you got there?”

  Tommy said, “Niggershooters.” So they made Tommy climb the biggest tree and made me shoot at him. At least they didn’t kill us. But there was really nothing racial about it. It’s just how we were taught. I was raised being told that if I don’t quit crying, that nigger man over there is going to get you. We didn’t know “nigger” was a bad word.

  I was the only white boy that was allowed in the Dew Drop Inn. I’d listen to the black musicians play, and you could start to hear how the beat was spilling over into the first glimmerings of rock ’n’ roll. There was a guy there who called himself Chuck Berry Jr. He could walk like a spider with his legs over his shoulders, balancing on his hands. He had two gold front teeth, with a four-leaf clover in each, and he was the first person who ever taught me to move all my guitar strings up and put a banjo string on the bottom where the high E is. Then I could push those slinky strings clear up the neck.

  I was starting to take my guitar out in public. From family gatherings I’d progressed to the Youth Center. I not only got to perform for the Jaycees and the Lions Club—they didn’t pay me, though they’d say “Think of the experience you’ll get”—but they taught me how to eat with a fork. I used a spoon at home till I was twelve or thirteen.

  It was about then that I won my first talent show. Momma drove me over to Muleshoe thirty miles west. From there, I made the rounds. When I sang “Hey Joe” over Channel 13 television from Lubbock, my whole family trooped out to my aunt Frieda’s to catch me. I won a watch, and I was so excited that it wasn’t until I brought it home that I realized it wasn’t working. It was empty inside, like those dummy watches they put in a shop window. I had to take it all the way back and get the real one.

  Without dances to play for, since kids might be tempted to have fun, most of my appearing was done at the Palace Theatre at their Tuesday local talent night. You could win a twenty-five-dollar war bond, and I’d do three or four songs on my own, and then maybe back up a couple of the other performers. Sometimes I played with James Jolley, who was three or four years older than me and actually wrote his own songs. I thought that was pretty unusual. Before I heard his “Apple Blossom Time,” I never thought about writing a song.

  It didn’t matter whether you could carry a tune or not, but folks came from all over the region to show what they could do. I can remember a little girl from Sudan named Terry Sue Lewis, and Terry Vance, a guy from Lubbock that jumped around like we heard Elvis Presley did.

  I was also fixing to get married. Maxine Carroll Lawrence lived out by Spade, had won a local beauty contest and was a senior at the high school there. She was a cheerleader, with black hair and blue eyes, and I’d wait for her after the team bus got back from the football game. Or I’d pick her up after I’d spent an afternoon pushing back cotton for Curtis Dyer, all covered with lint, dirt, grass, mud, everything.

  You had to drive by the sewer to get to Spade. Ask one of the spit-and-whittle crew how to find it, they’d say “You just go out the Lubbock Highway till you smell shit and turn left.” Maxine lived a lot farther out than that, in a little house with her mom, and if you were quiet, you could see the jack rabbits and coyotes passing by. She was a natural beauty, and I loved her black hair, just the opposite color of cotton, and her long eyelashes.

  It was a typical West Texas courtship. I didn’t have very much money. I’d usually pick her up late, so I wouldn’t have to buy her a hamburger. Sometimes we’d go out and get a Coke; she loved Cokes. We’d sit out there at the Chat ’n’ Chew, or the Dairy Queen, or the Tastee-Freez, and maybe spring for one of their foot-long hot dogs. “Goin’ with,” as we used to say. Steady.

  Most Saturday nights we’d drive over to a jamboree in the little town of Whiteface, named after the cattle. There used to be a theater there, and they paid me enough for gas. Maxine and I would park on the way back, trying to get out of the way of the steering wheel, off some back road near the county line separating Lamb and Hockley, while the flatlands of Texas receded all around us.

  Or we’d go to Ed Taylor’s drive-in. It didn’t matter what was showing. We were always in the back seat, necking. You just knew this was the night. This had to be the one. I’d try to get her to give-it-up at the drive-in, and we’d usually stop on the way back home, where I’d give-it-another try.

  For the first year, all Maxine really gave me was the stone-aches, bad. After I’d drop her off at the house, I’d be doubled over, having to walk spraggle-legged from where I’d kissed her goodnight. I couldn’t wait to get out of sight. The only way I could relieve myself after one of our hot dates was to jump out of the car, go around the front and grab the bumper, spread out my legs, and strain real hard to lift it off the ground.

  We were just kids. We had no idea what we were doing, both Before and After. Even though I’d had plenty of girlfriends, I was dumber about women than anything in the world. My daddy had taught us boys to put our mother on a pedestal, and that she could do no wrong. There was none of this smarting off or talking rough to Momma. Daddy wouldn’t put up with it. Consequently, even though my momma may not have been perfect, we thought she was, and every girl in the world was going to be like her.

  On Christmas Eve, 1955, I went with Maxine, our moms, and Tommy to the home of the Church of Christ’s pastor in Clovis, New Mexico, and got hitched. It was a Saturday night, and it wasn’t really considered a wedding. It was more like going to get married.

  Maxine thought she was pregnant. I didn’t tell Momma, and I don’t think she told her mother, but they probably suspected. You could get married without a blood test in New Mexico.

  We didn’t know anything about birth control. Rubbers and rumors, that was about it. Even if I had a clue, I never had the nerve to go in the drugstore and get them. In Littlefield? Are you kidding me? They kept them behind the counter, so rather than risk embarrassing yourself, you took the chance of ruining everybody’s life, including your own. No reflection on Maxine, but I didn’t want to get married right then.

  I was so young. You can’t have a clue at that age about marriage and trying to make a go of it, especially when you’re a country boy right off the turnip truck, uneducated and still searching for your place in the world. You start realizing you have to make a living, and worry about raising children. I couldn’t figure out how I was going to take care of a wife and baby.

  I couldn’t even figure out
how late she was. I never thought about abandoning her. Hell, I’d already committed the ultimate sin from the way I was raised. We went ahead and got married, and on our wedding night she started her period. That’s old country boy luck for you.

  Still, there we were, already married, so I was going to make the best of it. The women gathered around and gave her a shower at the home of a Mrs. R. C. Blevins on January 5, and we moved to a small house opposite the high school on North Lake. It was the same place I’d lived as a kid.

  We had no idea how to even get along. As far as being helpmates to one another, we’d get in a fight over the stupidest things. I’d think we were going to have Mexican food, and she’d make a hamburger casserole, and it’d hurt both our feelings. For spite, we’d wind up throwing it out and going hungry.

  As it was, we could hardly make ends meet. I was working for the Thomas Land Lumber Company, earning forty-five dollars a week. Verle Roberts at the Roberts Lumber Company thought I was a good worker and wanted to hire me. I told him I wouldn’t change jobs for less than $48.50 a week take-home, and after some wrangling, he finally gave it to me.

  That slavedriver made me earn every bit of it. He was a taskmaster, having me come in early and stay late, picking at me with his high voice, working me to death. One day I was driving the cement truck and I took a corner too damn fast. If you turn quick in a cement truck, it’ll slarsh, all go to one side, and you’re a goner. It rolled over on me, spilling across these people’s lawns. That was the last day I worked at the lumber company. I got out of the truck, shut the door, and went home. Once again.

  Hello, this is Waylon Jennings coming over the Voice of Lamb County, KVOW, 1490 on your radio dial in Littlefield, bringing you twenty-three reguley, uh, regularily, uh, regularlee scheduled newscasts a day.…

  I was on the radio. I might not have been able to pronounce “regularly,” but for six hours, from four in the afternoon to ten at night, the airwaves were mine. I had a two-hour country show, and then another two hours of the classics, where I had some more pronunciation problems, and then another two of whatever was left over: Waltz Time, Today’s Symphonies, Mantovani.