Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville Page 2

  But a few Nashvillians chanced to show themselves when it counted most. Despite the dismissive magazine articles that appeared in national magazines, and the conservative leadership at Vanderbilt University, a modest social awakening took hold in Nashville in the 1960s. Some middle-class white kids joined protests organized by the scrawny Nashville Committee for Alternatives to the War or slipped out to North Nashville, the center of black life, to see why riots flared up there in 1967. Their black counterparts joined voter registration drives, and sat in and boycotted in pursuit of civil rights.

  Contrary to popular memory, Nashville had long been relatively progressive on race, especially compared to Memphis, to the west, a city shaped by plantation traditions. The Nashville Tennessean newspaper had successfully railed against the poll tax, and blacks served on city council and the school board. And when public schools finally began desegregating on September 9, 1957—three years after Brown v. Board of Education—Nashville avoided most of the mob rule and political posturing that had descended on Little Rock, Arkansas, one week earlier. Still, mixing of the races in schools would plod along at the rate of one grade per year. A few segregationists in Nashville harassed black students, and on September 10, somebody in the night dynamited an integrated school in East Nashville, but nobody was killed or injured. Unlike Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, Nashville mayor Ben West publicly discouraged obstructionists who vowed to fight Brown to the last.

  Some tied Nashville’s relative tolerance in those days to its river-city tradition and hilly terrain, which means it accommodated newcomers and never depended on slavery as much as its neighbors to the south and west did. As author and one-time Nashville newspaper reporter David Halberstam pointed out, the city’s segregation “was largely a soft kind, administered, it sometimes seemed, not with the passion of angry racist officials but more as a cultural leftover from the past.”

  While Nashville’s schools desegregated, young civil rights activists, many of them students at the traditionally black Fisk University and Meharry Medical College, believed the dimes they spent on socks and chewing gum in Woolworth’s, Walgreens, and other stores bought them a stool at their lunch counters, too. But those lunch counters shooed away black customers. So on February 13, 1960, John Lewis, a student from American Baptist College, Diane Nash from Fisk, and James Lawson from Vanderbilt began staging lunch-counter sit-ins that would last for months. At first, Nashville resisted. Cruel whites seemingly uprooted from the streets of Little Rock gathered to intimidate and attack, while a few stores closed their counters rather than offend white customers. But black Nashville persisted: when police dragged away one band of would-be diners, another took its place.

  As Nashville’s winter disappeared into spring, the sit-ins became as regular and expected as the L&N freight trains that rumbled through town every day. But then a segregationist tossed a bomb onto the lawn of Z. Alexander Looby, a prominent black lawyer, inflicting only minor injuries. But the explosion made up in inspiration what it lacked in lethality. Alarmed by the violence, leaders of the sit-ins led thousands to the courthouse steps, where they met Mayor Ben West, who in front of newspaper reporters and photographers unexpectedly endorsed the righteousness of integration.

  On the courthouse steps: Mayor Ben West (in bow tie) and, left to right, civil rights workers Curtis Murphy (wearing sunglasses), Diane Nash, C. T. Vivian, and James Bevel.

  Courtesy of Nashville Public Library, The Nashville Room

  By the end of 1960, most stores in downtown Nashville had integrated their lunch counters. And then segregated movie theaters and hotels budged. In the wake of such progress, Nash and Lewis graduated to the dangerous enterprise known as the Freedom Rides, which tested the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that had struck down segregation in interstate travel. Their activism rooted in Nashville, Nash and Lewis invigorated the national civil rights movement. Indeed, they were among the city’s first outlaws.

  A FEW MONTHS before President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in August 1965, Captain Kris Kristofferson set down his duffel bag on the hot sidewalk outside Nashville’s airport and looked around for his ride. Women in their pencil skirts glanced admiringly at him, as if William Holden in an army officer’s uniform had just landed in middle Tennessee. Kristofferson neither knew nor cared about Nashville’s recent civil rights progress; to him, the city was a songwriting mecca and nothing else.

  At the moment, he was between commissions and had dispatched his wife and young daughter to family in California, so he could meet Marijohn Wilkin, a Nashville music publisher who also happened to be his platoon leader’s cousin. He had little time to spend. A teaching assignment in British literature at West Point awaited him.

  During his childhood in Brownsville, Texas, and later in California’s San Francisco Bay area, Kris dreamed of Nashville while listening to Hank Williams on the Grand Ole Opry show, which beamed out of Nashville on the 50,000-watt radio station WSM. One can hardly imagine jet-age Californians communing with the Opry’s old-mountain sound, so Kristofferson must have been one of the few. “I had eleven years of growing up in Brownsville,” he says. “They thought I was a shit-kicker.” He wrote songs after hearing Williams and wrote more of them in an extraordinary career as a student at the exclusive Pomona College in California and then at Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship.

  At the airport, Kristofferson slid into a gleaming Alfa Romeo driven by Bucky Wilkin, Marijohn’s son, and headed downtown. “I checked into this hotel,” says Kristofferson, “and in my uniform walked up Demonbreun to Music Row, to Marijohn Wilkins’s publishing house, and it was just like a magic day for me.” Wilkins owned Buckhorn Music on Hawkins Street in Music Row and had cowritten one of country music’s classics, “The Long Black Veil,” a hit for Lefty Frizzell in 1959. She had taught school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, before coming to Nashville to play piano in Printer’s Alley, the city’s muted incarnation of Bourbon Street. She also drank like a man. One almost had to in Nashville’s music business. It was like a nonstop fraternity party.

  When Marijohn stood up to greet her visitor, she introduced him to three colleagues in the room: songwriters Billy Swan and Chris Gantry, and singer Johnny Darrell. Darrell had come around to show off his new record, “The Green, Green Grass of Home,” a Curly Putnam composition controlled by one of Marijohn’s competitors, Tree Publishing. “It was his first record,” recalls Kris. “We sat there at Marijohn’s listening to it, and then went over to Cowboy Jack Clement’s and played it over there. We were walking out of there, and this guy said [to Johnny], ‘Porter’s in the studio right now covering your record.’ I didn’t even know the significance of it at that time.” The bandit, of course, was Porter Wagoner, whose RCA recording would snuff out Darrell’s new release. Only later would Kris realize the lesson: the big artists in town, like sharks in the ocean, snatched up the plumpest songs no matter who first laid claim to them.

  After a few drinks at the Professional Club, a music industry hangout on Sixteenth Avenue South, Marijohn and Johnny left the newcomer in Clement’s care. He couldn’t have been in better hands: the producer and songwriter knew every back door and bar stool in town. “After everybody else fell off and went home,” continues Kris, “he took me down to—now, this is my first day in Nashville—Audrey Williams’s place, right next to the Professional Club.” At this point, Kris probably deduced that everybody in Nashville owned a publishing company, an astonishing possibility. More astonishing, though, was the sight in front of him: the lanky Cajun fiddler Doug Kershaw hawking the rights to his hit “Louisiana Man” to the widow of Hank Williams. “I’m thinking, ‘Wow, I’m here. This is happening.’ And then Cowboy [Clement] took me down to the train station because he just loved trains. He’d get on them and ride to New Orleans and back, just to write. But it was pretty magical. I was so excited about it. I think I probably right then decided I was coming back here. It was so much, that little Professional Club, those two st
reets, the whole shooting match was right there.

  “It seemed like every place we turned there was somebody I’d listened to since I was little,” he says. Backstage at the Ryman Auditorium, the Opry’s home base, Kris squirmed as Clement introduced him to his dark, lean friend born in the cotton fields of Arkansas. “I shook his hand,” says Kris of meeting Johnny Cash. “And it was like shaking hands with lightning. He was so wired up or something at the time. But he was what I imagined Hank Williams was like.”

  Captain Kristofferson left town after a few days, resigned his West Point commission, and arranged his family’s move to Nashville. Marijohn warned that the business gobbled up wide-eyed rookies like Kris, and Jack saw only faint potential in his writing. It was “poetical stuff, and unsingable,” he remarked.

  When Kris returned for good in the summer of 1965, he gravitated to Willie Nelson, whose songwriting could seem as abstruse as his own. “We happened to be the guys who were just absolutely disciples of Willie Nelson,” Kristofferson told writer Robert K. Oermann. “Every one of Willie’s songs would be sung and analyzed for his emotion and his delivery and all this. It was a training ground for a whole bunch of us. We said, ‘Willie will never make it because he’s way too deep. He’ll never make it because they don’t understand him.’”

  WILLIE CAME FIRST to Nashville in 1960, after a decade of deejaying, door-to-door sales, and playing the honky-tonks and dance halls in Texas. Down there, he had already written “Family Bible” and “The Party’s Over,” which nestled into his repertoire like princely cats, and “Night Life,” later to be recorded by everybody from Ray Price to B.B. King. By the time Willie packed his wife, Martha, and three children into his old Buick and drove toward Nashville, “Family Bible,” as recorded by Claude Gray, was soaring on the national country charts. Which put no cash in Willie’s pocket. He had sold the rights to the song outright to a studio owner in Pasadena, Texas. All he could do was shrug, which is how Willie handled adversity. “The way I looked at it, songs for a songwriter were like paintings for a painter,” he wrote in his 1988 autobiography. “You finish one and you sell it for whatever you can get and then you do another.”

  Willie told everybody he met in Nashville about “Family Bible,” and he soon fell in with the city’s songwriting pack, men like Harlan Howard and Roger Miller, who served up much of the raw material—the songs—fueling Nashville’s explosion as a recording center. Howard’s “Heartaches by the Number” and “I Fall to Pieces” and Miller’s “Invitation to the Blues” and “When Two Worlds Collide” ranked among the solid building blocks in Nashville’s rise. Mississippi-born songwriter Hank Cochran, a sometime cowriter with Howard, introduced Willie to Pamper Music, a song publishing company that hired Willie as a staff writer. He got fifty dollars a week against future writing royalties, enjoying for the first time a stake in music he composed.

  In less than a year, Willie wrote three country-pop classics: “Crazy,” “Hello Walls,” and “Funny How Time Slips Away.” The songs rode high on the country and pop charts and were recorded by the likes of Patsy Cline, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, and Faron Young. That meant Willie could move from a trailer park to a farm in Ridgetop, Tennessee, about thirty miles outside Nashville. Willie also got himself a new woman, dropping Martha, with whom he savagely fought, for a singer named Shirley Collie, who was the wife of a deejay friend and happened to have caught his eye out in Nevada.

  The Texan’s songwriting also attracted recording contracts. In 1964, Fred Foster’s Monument Records recorded Willie in a setting that predicted his spare Red Headed Stranger album of 1975, long considered Nelson’s masterpiece. With only classical guitarist David Parker and three other musicians, Willie taped five songs, including the cold and mysterious “I Never Cared for You.” Foster released it as a single, but against the rollicking honky-tonk sounds and string-laden arrangements popular in those days, its sparseness and poetic lyrics frightened the radio disc jockeys who could have made it a hit. The sun is filled with ice and gives no warmth at all / The skies were never blue.

  Willie’s stubborn streak—one of his core outlaw traits—emerged at Monument when a trade magazine ad that Foster had promised to run for Willie got bogged down in production. “I didn’t get to tell him that his ad was going to be a week late,” says Foster. “I tried to call him but I couldn’t find him. Now some say he picked up the Billboard and saw that his ad wasn’t in there and he got upset. I don’t know. In his mind, his obligation to Monument was to come in and do the sessions he did. In his mind, he was free to go to RCA.” Indeed, like one of those old delta blues singers, never bound by contracts, recording for whomever might pay him for sessions, Willie left Monument and ambled down the street to RCA.

  Too fond of the scamp to sue him, Foster merely rolled his eyes while RCA rushed out Willie’s self-penned single “Pretty Paper,” the heart-tugging Christmas song about a blind man selling pencils, which Roy Orbison had released on Monument in 1963. If Willie’s version was meant to undercut Orbison and Foster, his blade was dull and late to the game: Orbison’s version reemerged on the Christmas charts in 1964 while Nelson’s new release foundered. The fumbling new beginning predicted Willie’s abysmal career with RCA.

  For the next seven years, his appearances on the charts seemed like bit parts. Despite creating some of the smartest country music records to ever roll out of Nashville—“Healing Hands of Time” (1965), “The Party’s Over” (1966), and “I Gotta Get Drunk” (1969) among them—he remained a second-tier artist. Perhaps some of his beer-drenched creations offended the new breed of country fan lulled by the syrupy Nashville Sound, or the lyrics proved too wry next to the Brill Building–like rhymes so common in country music. Or maybe it was RCA’s fault, which was Willie’s theory: “I couldn’t get anybody on the executive end of it interested in promoting me as an artist,” he complained in 1975. “They might have been hoping that one of my records might accidentally do something on its own without their having to spend a lot of money promoting it.”

  A FEW MONTHS after Willie’s anemic debut on RCA, Waylon Jennings motored into town with an RCA contract just like Willie’s. The two men had first crossed paths not long before in Phoenix, where Waylon dazzled the club audiences and Willie had stopped while on tour. “I went to catch his show,” wrote Willie, “and afterwards we shared a bottle of tequila and he asked my advice on his career. ‘Whatever you do, Waylon, stay away from Nashville,’ I told him. ‘Nashville ain’t ready for you. They’ll just break your heart.’ Upon hearing my advice, Waylon did what any good songwriter would do. He went to Nashville.”

  Waylon and his band had landed that regular Phoenix gig in July 1964 at a club called J.D.’s. There was no place else like it: rock-and-roll music downstairs, country music upstairs, and go-go girls everywhere. And Waylon magnetized college kids and cowboys as if he were the region’s very own Elvis Presley. “He was just king,” said a fan. “From the little girls to the bouncers, it was all Waylon. I mean, he was their star and it was that way. . . . When people found out how great Waylon was—he drew all kinds of people. You would often see elderly people watching him with their shawls on. People were just fascinated by his music.” Waylon’s band packed J.D.’s dance floor with an electric guitar and a bass and rhythm guitar, but the increasingly rambunctious crowd demanded a drummer.

  To answer the cry, Waylon hired Richie Albright, a native of Bradley, Oklahoma, who relished his chance with Waylon after playing for brutal honky-tonk audiences in Prescott, Arizona. “Waylon played lead,” says Albright. “And his style of guitar playing was definitely different. We did Dylan songs. We did Beatles songs. We did all genres of music. Did a lot of country stuff. It was kind of a castoff of Buddy Holly’s rhythm. It wasn’t country really.” They serenaded sweaty fans with a panoply of popular music: “What’d I Say,” “Crying,” “Jole Blon,” “Love’s Gonna Live Here.”

  “My reputation was growing throughout Arizona,” wrote Waylon. “I was the
hottest thing in town. I was making decent money for the first time, and paying the band. The crowds were listening to me, and I was getting to them. I could tell the girls liked me and the cowboys thought I was a good ’ol boy. But most important, in the middle of a set, I’d turn around and look at Richie and we’d be going off on this tangent, jamming, letting the song carry us along, and a smile of satisfaction would spread across our faces. I just knew musically we fit.” Indeed, the fit was brotherly. Albright drummed the beat and held Waylon’s hand for most of the next thirty years.

  At the time, Waylon was signed to A&M Records in Los Angeles, which was also home to poet Rod McKuen and trumpeter Herb Alpert. Alpert was actually the “A” in the company name and his 1962 lounge hit “The Lonely Bull” was the vein of gold that fortified the label. Jerry Moss—who would go on to work with Burt Bacharach, Joe Cocker, and others—was the “M.” Together, Alpert and Moss tempered Waylon’s lion vocals, so prominent on the stage of J.D.’s, for ballads, folk songs, country novelties, and light rock tunes that they had chosen. However, they seemed most interested in folk. They paired Waylon with Ian Tyson’s “Four Strong Winds,” the traditional ballad “The House of the Rising Sun,” and Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” The results were pleasant, but hardly remarkable. Sensing the same, Waylon balked. “Herb kept looking for something in me that he couldn’t find,” he lamented. “It just wasn’t there, really. He truly liked my singing, and he wanted me to make it, but even if you get a bigger hammer, you can’t fit a round peg in a square hole. One night we tried ‘Unchained Melody’ countless times. I never understood . . . what [the song] was talking about. It was too far over my head.”