Waylon Read online

  KVOW specialized in block programming, which meant they played all kinds of music. The whole station was held together with barbed wire and spit, and I’d been working there since I was barely a teenager. By the time 1956 was underway, I was almost an old pro. I’d play the records, announce the ads, and sing songs over the air. A man named Ed Taylor loaned me an old Martin guitar, and I used to take requests from the listeners, even if it sometimes meant I would sing one song to the tune of another.

  I couldn’t afford to buy a guitar of my own. I’d had an electric guitar, with one pickup and an Alamo amplifier. I hit a big E chord and that thing jumped a foot off the floor. The speakers just busted immediately. I ordered a Kay out of a catalogue, and I thought it would never arrive. I had to sell it after I got married. Keeping a guitar and a wife was way out of my range.

  I knew I would be leaving Littlefield soon. It was just a matter of time. I always figured in the back of my mind that people divide themselves in two: the ones who don’t know it’s out there and those who know there’s something somewhere else.

  When you live in Littlefield, you’re at the center of the world as you’re aware of it. You might hear about things, but there’s really no way of being sure they exist. You can catch a glimpse in the movies, or listen real hard and hear it on the radio, or sniff it out of the air. The ones who know something’s out there and don’t go looking for it are the ones who grow old fast. The ones who don’t care, well, they’re happy staying where they are.

  I couldn’t be like that. I had to get out. From the time I was a kid, I never considered doing anything but playing music. Everything else was a stepping-stone. I was stubborn enough not to lose sight of what I wanted, and dumb enough not to realize just how long and hard the road was going to stretch for me, and how much I would have to fight for what I believed.

  Jimmy Stewart, who still runs his tractor along Hall Avenue when he’s not pitching horseshoes, likes to tell me that I never gave up and I never gave in. I didn’t have a choice. All I could do was dream, sitting under that big Texas sky. It was like I saw a black cat running across my path and I pulled my handkerchief out and chewed the corner off of it to kill the bad luck. That cat was my lifeline if I stayed in Littlefield, and the handkerchief was my guitar. My singing did the chewing.

  I used to love going to the carnival when I was little, especially to see the carousel horses. It wasn’t so much riding them around and around, grabbing at the brass ring, that got to me. Rather, it was their look. They were all wild, they were all free, they were all running. Not controlled by anyone or anything. That was what I was drawn to. The motion of freedom.

  If I’d stayed in Littlefield, I might have wound up like one of those coyotes they tie to the fence post and let rot, as a warning. Or maybe I would’ve ended like Ol’ Pat, sick and crippled and no teeth. We kids would go to the store for him, or visit him in his little one-room shack; he was real lonely. He let us smoke, and we’d sit and talk to him and keep him company. Ol’ Pat didn’t want us messing up his bed, so he hammered nails through a board and put it under the bedspread. One day, when I was about nine, I came in and found him. He was the first dead person I’d ever seen.

  The empty shells of wooden windmills surround Littlefield like sentinels watching and waiting for a war that’s already passed. There was a time they pumped water and caught the wind. Sometimes the taller they stood, the more precarious their hold on the earth, and the more they had to battle that which they were designed to catch. The world’s highest windmill was built on the XIT ranch in 1887. Its 132 feet was toppled by the winds in 1926. Only a replica now stands at the corner of Delano and Phelps.

  The higher I tried to rise, the more chance I might’ve had to be blown over.

  My hometown hasn’t changed much since I was a little boy. Whenever I’m back, I get in the car and start driving around. I’m searching for my youth. Looking for my past. The trees I planted with Tommy are still there; they’re grown now, and so am I. Sometimes, if I squint a bit, I think maybe the folks I’m expecting to see are still there too. Around the bend, turning the next corner, about to open the door.

  Tater Gilbreath lives over yonder. He and his family can pull a bale and a half of cotton a day. He’s my best friend, and in the summer our feet get so tough from running barefoot that grass spurs, goat’s heads, and devil’s claws can’t break our stride. Not a day goes by that we aren’t fighting. Tater’s momma comes running out of the house with a belt or a switch and starts whipping on us. She wears thick glasses and can’t see nothing but two pairs of overalls. If I’m on top and beating Tater, I’ll get the worst of it.

  Marge Veach, the war bride, she’s going to make some cakes and fudge for us after I get back from Brawley’s grocery store. Look at Fred Harrell’s two Cadillacs, both bedstead green, a ’39 with a wheel in the running board and a ’47 convertible. Maybe get me one like that someday.

  We can stop for a bite at Two Gun’s restaurant. He’s cross-eyed; one eye goes to Dallas and the other to Fort Worth. Hey, there’s Cleve up in the tree, singing for all the world like Roy Rogers. Let’s play cowboys and take a pretend shot at him. I know that crazy idiot’ll fall plumb to the ground. If he gets hurt we could take him over to Doc Simmons. He’s not really a doctor, but hell, Cleve’s head is too hard to hurt much anyway.

  You hear about the murders over on Seventh? Killed the man and his wife, left the kids tied up in the bedroom. Or the wedding party where the best man tore down the back roads after the happy couple off on their honeymoon. The newlyweds made a left as the road swerved. The best man didn’t. They’re still picking up his pieces in the cornfield.

  Maybe I’ll go see Rae, prancing like a thoroughbred racehorse, or Georgeanne. Try to get them to take a ride up to Blueberry Hill lover’s lane. Nasty nasty nasty.

  Here comes Wendell and Tommy cutting me off as I’m driving out of town, running over the field and through the alley, trying to catch me. I can’t stop now. I’m on my way.

  CHAPTER 2

  BUDDYS

  What if,” I asked my dad one day somewhere in the early 1950s, “they mixed black music with the white music? Country music and blues?”

  “That might be something,” Daddy replied, and went back to pulling transmissions.

  On a fall morning in 1954, listening to KVOW’s Hillbilly Hit Parade, I heard that something. I was taking my brother to school. It was about 8:20, and the reason I remember is that the program was only on for fifteen minutes each day, from 8:15 to 8:30 A.M.

  Elvis Presley was singing “That’s Alright Mama” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”

  The sound went straight up your spine. The way he sang, the singer sounded black, but something about the songs was really country. Maybe it was the flapping of that big doghouse bass, all wood thump, and the slapback echo of the guitars wailin’ and frailin’ away. It just climbed right through you. I had grown up hearing Bill Monroe sing “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” but this was something entirely different.

  I thought, what a wild, strange sound. Up at the station, I looked at the yellow Sun label from Memphis as if it were from Mars. I started listening for it. They didn’t know what to call Elvis yet on the radio, though they thought of him as a country artist. “That’s one of our boys there,” they’d say, just to let their listeners know. But nobody was sure of what he was going to mean.

  One thing was for certain. When he came to Lubbock in January of 1955, he was billed as the King of Hillbilly Bop. Dave Stone of KDAV had first booked him for an ungodly little amount, a hundred and fifty dollars or something. Fifty dollars apiece for the three of them.

  Bill Black, Elvis’s bass player, called Dave to set up some details of the date. He was kind of acting as manager then. Now Bill Black sounded black; he had that Memphis drawl, and we hadn’t heard many Memphis people. Dave didn’t know what he had gotten himself into; he was talking around it, through it, and finally came out with it. “Bill, are you black?”

/>   “Hell, no, we’re white,” said Bill. That was how it was then, back when black people could write the songs but nobody wanted them to sing them. Which is how Pat Boone got to cover Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,” if you can believe that. In Lubbock, audiences might have been legally integrated, but blacks still sat in the balcony while whites sat in the orchestra.

  I didn’t get to see Elvis the first time he came through town. I heard about it up in Littlefield, how he performed at the Fair Park Coliseum with Hank Snow and Martha Carson and stole the show in his red britches, orange sport coat, and white buck shoes. How he played the Cotton Club out on Slayton Highway southeast of town and got in a little scrap or something there.

  The second time Elvis hit Lubbock, they paid him four thousand dollars. He was part of a package tour that also featured Billy Walker, Jimmy and Johnny (though Johnny had already been kicked out of the group and was replaced by Wayne Walker), and Tillman Franks, who played bass and managed Jimmy and Johnny. He later worked with the Louisiana Hayride and as Johnny Horton’s and David Houston’s manager.

  Usually up-and-coming performers would spread out when they hit a region, trying to earn a little extra traveling expenses and a few additional fans. I booked a show for Billy Walker and Jimmy and Johnny at the Littlefield high school auditorium. They asked me to put up the posters, and they’d give me a percentage. My then-girlfriend Maxine took the tickets. I’d also get to sing on the show.

  I had heard there was a talent scout there. Jimmy, of Jimmy and Johnny, was making eyes at Maxine, singing “If you don’t want to love me, honey, somebody else will,” and trying to make out with her. I never realized that was part of being a singer. Finding the girls. I hated him.

  Billy told the longest joke I ever heard in my life. I’m laughing. I’m sitting there with my eyes like dollars. I’m thinking Tillman Franks might be the Mercury Records talent scout.

  Right in the middle of my spot, I was singing a Faron Young song, “If You Ain’t Lovin’ You Ain’t Livin’,” when my voice went. In the back of my palate, I have a long thing that hangs down like a match stem. Sometimes, if I’m anxious or nervous, it’ll touch down to the back of my tongue, or hit my vocal cords, and that’ll just take my voice away.

  All of a sudden I stopped singing. I thought my life was ruined. I couldn’t believe that there was my big chance and I blew it.

  I did make thirty-five dollars at the door. And I got to meet Elvis in Lubbock. Even then, he was about the hottest thing to hit West Texas. They invited me backstage, gave me free tickets, and the whole show was there. He and Scotty were standing over by the stage, and Elvis was just jumping around everywhere, bouncing and bubbling over with enthusiasm, full of more energy than anybody I ever saw. He was talking to me like he’d known me a thousand years.

  “I’ll sing you my next thing I’m going to record,” he said. It was “Tweedle Dee,” the LaVern Baker song. “My next single,” though I don’t think he ever recorded it. He did it on the show that night.

  I was crazy about Elvis. I loved that churning rhythm on the bottom. He didn’t even have drums yet, but the rock ’n’ roll part was unmistakable. You’d think it was overnight, but he’d been plugging away a long time. He had a hard way to go, because they were fighting him from every corner in the South, calling him names—white trash bebop nigger stuff; though he could pretty well handle himself. I think he popped a couple of guys on his way up.

  On my radio show we’d do some of the rock ’n’ roll things: Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Little Richard. Every time I played a Little Richard record the owner would come all the way back to the station from home. He wouldn’t even call. He’d just cuss me, until one night I played two of them in a row and he fired me.

  My hero then was Sonny Curtis. He was so far advanced to what I was as a guitar player that I seemed struggling compared to him. His uncles were the Mayfield Brothers, a bluegrass group, and Ed Mayfield had actually been in Bill Monroe’s band. Sonny couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t know how to play guitar. We had met when he used to come to Littlefield to perform at the Palace. I’d do a few songs, he’d do a couple more, and then we’d sing “It’s Been a Blue, Blue Day” and collect our ten dollars.

  We were all coming out of the woodwork. We’d seen most of us at the small-town talent contests and country music shows in the area, and when KDAV in Lubbock started hosting Sunday Party, as early as August 1953, we got to meet each other on a regulee, regularily, uh, regularlee scheduled basis.

  KDAV was located in a small shack outside of town, with a big tower rising beside it and 580 KC. painted on the side. On Sunday afternoons at about two all the local teenagers would drive out and park around the station, radios tuned to KDAV, sitting on their cars and watching us play through the station’s glass windows. It was kind of a free-for-all.

  Everybody had bands, and whoever booked the gigs would mix and match musicians. I had a band with a steel guitar player, Bill Clark. I didn’t get as much into the Elvis thing as I did Bill Haley’s sound, because of the steel. There was Hope Griffith, who was about fourteen and dressed like a cowgirl, and had appeared on a local television show in Lubbock; I played rhythm guitar in Hope’s band, alongside steel guitarist Weldon Myrick, who became one of the best pedal players in Nashville. Later on a singer from Wink, Texas, named Roy Orbison would turn up. Nobody thought Roy had a chance with his high voice.

  One night I was in a restaurant in Lubbock over on Avenue Q, with Sonny Curtis and Weldon. We didn’t have any money, and I had hitchhiked to Lubbock. Sonny took the only nickel that was among us and put it in the jukebox and pressed Chet Atkins’s “Poor People of Paris.” Sonny could play in that finger-picking style. I admired him so much, I wanted to change my name to Sonny. I even tried to stand like him.

  There was one other musician with us at the restaurant. His name was Charles “Buddy” Holly. He was only a year older than me, but he seemed to have a lot more experience. He had been born in Lubbock, and was half of a group called Buddy and Bob, later expanded to include Larry, and I’d seen him every now and again. He sang mostly country songs with Bob Montgomery, in classic Delmore/Louvin Brothers fashion; but after Elvis came through like a whirlwind, he added Larry Welborn on bass, so he had his Scotty and Bill. Sonny Curtis sometimes joined them on fiddle.

  He was a highlight of the Sunday Party. He didn’t look like the type of guy you’d expect to turn on the crowds, but I always enjoyed him as a performer. He wasn’t as impressive a singer in country music. But man, the minute he hit that rock and roll, he was something else.

  Buddy called it Western and Bop, which could include everything from the “Annie Had a Baby” rhythm and blues he heard coming out of Stan’s Record Rack on KWKH in Shreveport, Louisiana, to the country and western that sprouted from the same town on the Louisiana Hayride. Much like the western swing of Bob Wills, when rural string band music started colliding with the big band jazz of the early thirties and the Hot Club sound of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, this new breed of country crossed all boundaries. It was called rockabilly, bay-buh.

  KDAV was the first full-time country music station in the country, and Pappy Dave Stone, the Man with a Smile in His Voice, ran it along with disc jockey Hi Pockets Duncan. They were kind of a team. Dave was the businessman. He knew how to make money out of these things. Hi Pockets was the guy who came up with ideas. He was a tall, walking encyclopedia of country music, kind of a ladies’ man, and his favorite food was chocolate cake with cream gravy. Is that rich enough for you? He had a winning smile, and a brash, self-confident look about him. In those days, disc jockeys were stars. If a singing star came to town, the disc jockey was probably the bigger of the two.

  Hi Pockets would do voices on the air, real slapstick country stuff. He’d be Herkimer, or speak high and scratchy like an old woman. His theme song was the “I.H. Boogie,” a guitar shuffle that he said stood for “Introducing Hi Pockets.” He was a natural-born emcee. For t
he live shows he would dress up and do comedy. Later, when Buddy, Bob, and Larry got to be so popular that they had their own scheduled slot on the House Party, he became their business manager. He was always good for a glad hand and some discreet advice. Hi Pockets would always talk to you where Dave might have been talking down to you.

  There was some question whether this new rockabilly was country, but that’s a question they’re always asking. Though they gave him a hard time at the Grand Ole Opry, KDAV came down on the side of Elvis being country, and even instituted a Rock ’n’ Roll Hit Parade for a time. For Dave Stone, it was rockabilly with an emphasis on the billy. Buddy not only appeared with Elvis at the opening of a Pontiac dealership when he was just starting out in early 1955, but supported him on a package show with Ferlin Husky headlining later that year. Buddy’s big break came at a Bill Haley concert in October 1955, at the Fair Park Coliseum, when “Lubbock’s own Buddy, Bob, and Larry” were discovered by Eddie Crandall of Decca Records. Rather, Buddy was. Decca was probably looking for their own version of Elvis, who had just been signed by RCA Victor, and Buddy was it, even though they clearly didn’t understand rock and roll judging from Buddy’s experiences in Nashville. I thought about that in years to come when I made my first records there.

  He went to Nashville with Sonny Curtis and a new rhythm section, drummer Jerry Allison and bassist Don Guess; the rest is his story.

  In the meantime, I was busier than a three-peckered goat. People have always said that I “attack” work, and I guess I can’t help it. I was always doing something. I’d play at a parade or the community center and then go do my radio program before trying to win a trophy in a talent contest. After I got fired from KVOW I went over to KLVT in Levelland, where I had a country show. I’d start making up these little songs about the radio station—jingles set to the tunes of the day. I’d do imitations of Hank Snow, which sounded like Waylon trying to imitate Hank Snow, or John Cash, or George Jones. It was attention-grabbing, and I was noticed by the Corbin family, whose dad, A.G., and two of his sons, Slim and Sky, were about to buy a station in Lubbock, atop the highest, most prestigious building in town: the Great Plains Life. They were pretty tall themselves; each Corbin brother stretched about six feet five inches, and their mom wasn’t far behind.