As astronomers will tell you, stars often come in pairs, one obvious to the eye, the other unseen. Telltale evidence of interactions between the two is often spotted first in photos -- the obscure binary companion detected in changes in the brighter, noted star.
For over 75 years, the hand-tinted photo on the previous two pages -- nattily-dressed jazz-age swells partying on a small yacht -- had gone unnoticed, left in a decaying frame somewhere in the archives of the Jimmie Rodgers Museum in Meridian, Mississippi. It has never been published.
Most prominent and identifiable, in that collegiate bow tie, glistening white shirt and snappy sailing cap, is Jimmie Rodgers himself; he'd just emerged as a star of the earthbound variety. His first Victor recording, "T For Texas", had become a brand new sensation, south and north, in the weeks just before this excursion on the Potomac River. They'd begun to bill him, in a nod to his hit's other name, as "America's Blue Yodeler".
This is a historic boat ride, one that Rodgers' wife Carrie (seen in the scarlet dress toward the right, behind all those contraband Prohibition-era shipboard bottles) would describe in her memoir in some detail. It's the Fourth of July, 1928.
And that's not Jimmie Rodgers' yacht.
As the words "Blue Heaven" stenciled on the life preserver suggest, the owner of this luxurious vessel is the heavier-set man in the middle, arm draped over his first wife, Kathryn, enjoying his own time of singular domestic bliss and stardom. The photo's focus on Rodgers leaves this man's face obscured, and so he remains today: pop crooning sensation Gene Austin, Rodgers' idol and new friend.
Austin's Victor recording of "My Blue Heaven" was, at the time of this photo, a hit of gargantuan proportions. With millions of copies eventually sold via multiple pressings, it would be ranked as the highest-selling single in all American recording history until 1942, when Bing Crosby, another Gene Austin fan and acolyte, would top it with "White Christmas".
More than 30 years later, when the genre and industry that eventually dubbed itself "country music" got around to building a Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Rodgers would be its first inductee. The plaque there reads, in part: "Jimmie Rodgers' name stands foremost in the country music field as the man who started it all...starting a trend in the musical taste of millions." The unsuspecting Mississippi vaudevillian is today immortalized as "the father of country music."
Largely because his style and interests were something else again, Gene Austin is rarely mentioned in the history of country music. But he had continuing impact on the genre for over 45 years -- from his immense popular success in the late '20s and early '30s, right through to his death in 1972.
The year after the "Blue Heaven" photo was taken, a teenager Austin hired to work for his publishing company regularly entertained partygoers on that same yacht, when it was anchored in New York, by playing a jazzy, dampened-string banjo. As he recalls now at age 91, he'd regularly be called on, too, to dive into the Hudson to retrieve the Austins' French poodle.
The ambitious teen was Ken Nelson, who would go on to record Buck Owens and Merle Haggard and much of California country at Capitol Records, and wind up in the Country Hall of Fame himself. Back then, he was helping to market the Austin song that would give Gene a telling nickname through the '30s: "the voice of the southland."
Austin fathered and fostered a style of pop music that recognized its roots and its audience in the middle-class suburbs -- especially in the south. There is, of course, no "Suburban Music Hall of Fame" with a plaque for Gene. And he's never been memorialized as the founder of a genre called "southern pop," since it's a category that's not been studied, anthologized, or generally acknowledged to exist.
The standard reference Encyclopedia Of Southern Culture simply suggests, in passing: "Pop musicians and singers associated generally with mainstream sounds tend not to reflect regional identities."
"Except when they do," might be the reply of many pop artists with southern ties -- from Johnny Mercer to John Fogerty, from Dinah Shore to Kid Rock -- who, knowingly or unknowingly, hitched their wagons to Gene Austin's invisible companion star to country.
The Birth of Southern Pop
Jimmie Rodgers' contributions to establishing a definition for country music are indisputable: the forceful introduction of a "hillbilly blues" style that would prove adaptable again and again as country evolved; an honest, even confessional detailing of health and other personal issues that would set singer-songwriter evolution in motion; an emphasis in many of his songs on the work lives of Americans who don't get much time on pleasure yachts; an early fusion of hillbilly content and jazzy arrangements that would lead to western swing; and even his adoption of a cool cowboy "look and feel" despite his southeastern origins. Perhaps most lastingly, this hoboing rambler who sang about his "rough and rowdy ways" virtually invented the image of the romantic guitar-slinging, solitary country bad boy, an image cemented by his early death from tuberculosis in 1933.
Gene Austin's important contributions to pop music were of a different, less-recalled order -- in part because he led an American vocal revolution we've long since come to take for granted. He was among the first recording artists to dump the sound of arty, stodgily enunciated, semi-operatic "refinement" on the one hand, and the over-the-top vaudeville minstrel histrionics of an Al Jolson on the other. Austin favored an intimate singing style based on a recognizable American way of talking; he had an up-close relationship with the microphone. He was singing that way even before those mikes first "went electronic" in 1925.
Austin's much younger cousin, protege, and eventual country music hitmaker Tommy Overstreet vividly recalls a question Austin would ask him decades later: "What's the most important instrument when you're singing, kid? Think about it! What's the most important instrument for you as a singer? The microphone. You've got to learn how to hold that microphone, and caress it, and sing to it -- so you can get the emotion through to the people. If you don't do that, everything else is whistling 'Dixie'. It won't work! And you've got to pronounce your words -- articulate them and breathe properly. You've got to phrase. It has to come from the way you talk, and with emotion, sung from the heart."
Austin, you see, knew what he was doing.
When Victor Records chief Nat Shilkret first heard Gene sing in 1924, he was astonished by his original, intimate approach. In to the sometimes dubious memoir Gene Austin's Ol' Buddy (edited and published after his death by his third wife LouCeil and two fast-talking literary hucksters who got the singer's friends to finance it), Austin explained, "Well, Mr. Shilkret, when I came to New York, all the singers were tryin' to follow the great Al Jolson. I knew I could never sing as loud, or perhaps as good. Since he was always talkin' about how his mammy used to 'croon' to him -- I just croon like his mammy."
So "crooning," as Austin suggests, implied singing soft and low, murmuring sweetly, right to the listener -- "like a mammy." With its vulnerability and tenderness, the crooning style dared to risk transgressing the long-prevailing American idea of masculinity.
The female audience responded in massive numbers. They responded even to Austin contemporaries Rudy Valee and Nick Lucas, who do tend to sound effete and fey to the modern ear -- the stuff toyed with in camp '60s parodies such as the New Vaudeville Band's "Winchester Cathedral" and Tiny Tim's entire act.
Austin himself, while undeniably masculine by standards of that and any other day, often breaks into a high and wistful, hurtful but hoping falsetto, an effective pop analog to Jimmie Rodgers' bluesy yodel. (One of Austin's first great hits, nailing the mood in its title, was "Yearning, Just For You".)
If he could sing blues well ("Got The Railroad Blues"), and had regular success with fast Charleston numbers ("Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone"), the key source for Austin's new pop sound was secularized -- and clearly southern -- black spiritual sounds. His self-penned classic "Lonesome Road" remains a prime example of the genre -- at once similar in style to "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" and in content to "Old Man River", with which it was introduced in productions of Showboat. The combination of the southern ballad with that high and wistful style would last. A long time.
In the celebrated "Elvis Presliad" essay in Mystery Train, Greil Marcus describes Presley's Sun sessions take on Rodgers & Hart's "Blue Moon" -- the one odd side out, neither country nor R&B-derived -- as an attempt to give his audience "something it could accept -- a Valentino love scene with heavy breathing...[and] clippetty-clop hoofbeats worthy of Gene Autry, [sung] like a swamp spirit...He turns this old standard into a combination of a supper club ballad and an Appalachian moan."
All of which is an excellent delineation of the southern pop style Gene Austin created.
Overstreet recalls Austin himself putting it bluntly, "I may sing high -- but my voice has balls." The impact of this sound was unmistakable. Gene Austin was easily the #1 pop star of the late 1920s and early '30s, in a whole other, broader league, different from anyone labeled "hillbilly."
He introduced and had hit records with such lasting, simple and direct songs as "Bye Bye Blackbird", "Sleepy Time Gal", "Ramona", "Melancholy Baby", "Who's Sorry Now?" and "Love Letters In The Sand". He wrote or co-wrote, in addition to "Lonesome Road", such hot rhythm numbers as "Why Do You Do Me Like You Do Do Do?", and "When My Sugar Walks Down The Street".
Austin's music business savvy was, as Carrie Rodgers recalled, what Jimmie sought that July 4; Austin would help him get lucrative live gigs that even rising record sales weren't bringing. Add to his show business sense a gift for spotting potential hits among piles of incoming sheet music or pitches by song pluggers, and you had the ingredients for America's first pop heavyweight.
Researchers have shown that sales of most of Austin's dozens of singles in his hitmaking years were typically in the 150,000 to 450,000 range -- extraordinarily high for the time. RCA chieftain Steve Sholes (an inductee in the Country Music Hall of Fame himself) presented Austin, during a comeback and return to the label in the 1950s, with a singular golden Nipper dog statue, citing his total sales of "86 million records" a figure inflated by nostalgia and a bit of hype, but indicative of a spectacular run.
Nevertheless, in 2004, it's inevitable that many reading these words will not have heard of the man -- let alone realize the impact he has had on pop and country. But following even the trail of one early Austin hit alone, "Carolina Moon", would suggest that something was up.
Austin recorded the song in 1928, when it could compete in the marketplace with Rodgers' "Mississippi Moon" and a lot of other state moons. It was a catchy, updated turn on the "missing the south and my girl there" theme that could be traced well back into the minstrel era. The Austin hit would go on to be covered by down-home pop artists Patti Page and Kate Smith on the one hand, and Jim Reeves and Jimmy Dean on the other, marketed as country, with only small changes in orchestration to differentiate them.
Austin's material made it very clear from what region he hailed, and where his greatest audience was to be found. One 1930 release had "Alabama Lullaby" on one side and "A Vision Of Virginia" on the other. He recorded "Dear Old Southland" and "There's A Cradle In Carolina" and many more tunes with references and tones from the south.
His records and songs matched perfectly the fast-emerging "new south" sensibility, as outlined, for instance, in W.J. Cash's The Mind Of The South. Lyric after lyric emphasizes modernity, strong attachments to the current community, to middle-class (not backwoods) life, and to the small, nuclear family new to much of the region.
The songs implied rising prosperity, and a bit of new southern bustle. Austin's hits came amidst the mania of the Florida land boom (he even had a record, "Tamiami Trail", about the route there), as massive building of suburban middle class bungalows began and investors clamored for the dot-com-like bubble stocks of the day -- hot ones like radio start-up RCA.
The overwhelming nostalgia for a lost, idealized past that's so omnipresent in southern-oriented songs from the Stephen Foster era to World War I is replaced -- in Austin's pop, but not in the era's traditional country music -- with a sort of sentimentalizing longing for the present, notable in every wistful vocal sigh. That's the stuff of the Walter Donaldson/George Whiting lyric which was lying around unsung until Austin saw the hit potential in its talk of hurrying home to where it's just Molly, me, and the baby, to the shelter of a cozy little nest with a fireplace and rosebushes, whippoorwills calling and a little white light marking the spot -- a safe, new, self-owned (or at least, comfortably mortgaged) "blue heaven."
For us, Austin pop song titles through the early '30s are often strikingly similar to those of country songs. A 1931 Victor 78 paired a tune called "Blue Kentucky Moon" with a B-side called "Guilty"!
If Jimmie Rodgers aimed his music at feisty working-class rural residents and rural refugees who were missing the country, Gene Austin's music targeted the more satisfied and optimistic, up-and-coming -- if fragile -- middle-class folks in the towns and suburbs, especially in the south. It's golf sweater music.
But Austin's relationship to country could be closer than chance passing encounters -- much closer. To begin with, it happens that the first records he ever made, back in 1924, before Rodgers and the Carters had recorded anything -- were outright country.
From Hillbilly to Cowboy Crooning
He came by the music naturally enough. As he told noted writer and friend H. Allen Smith, Austin spent his early childhood near Gainesville, Texas, close to the Chisholm Trail, and could hear real cowboys singing high as they drove herds up through the Panhandle. Born Lem Eugene Lucas in 1900, he became Gene Austin after his mother's divorce and remarriage to blacksmith Big Jim Austin, who moved the family to the swampy town of Yellow Pine, Louisiana, not far from Shreveport, when Gene was 7.
The musically inclined boy was soon paying a black girl his own age who played organ in church "two bits" to teach him the basics of piano. How "country" was this Austin family? Tommy Overstreet recalls that during Austin's successful years, he sent his mother one of those new gas ranges to improve her life -- and Gene found it on the front lawn upon his next visit home, because she just couldn't get logs to catch fire in the thing at all.
That was not Gene's destiny. Escaping from a home he found stifling, he hoboed through the south, then joined the circus as a calliope player, took a tramp steamer to Shanghai, joined the army to fight in the expedition in Mexico against Pancho Villa (only to be "outed" as underage by future cowboy movie star Tom Mix of the same unit), played piano along with the keyboard "professors" in New Orleans whorehouses, and went off to World War I in France -- all by the age of 18.
By 1924 he was in New York's Tin Pan Alley working as a song plugger when he was approached by Vocalion records about helping out with a little problem. A blind Tennessee mountain singer and guitarist, George Reneau, was in the city to record sides for the nascent hillbilly market sparked by instrumental successes from Fiddlin' John Carson and vocals such as Vernon Dalhart's "Prisoner's Song" ("If I had the wings of an angel").
Reneau's vocals were too rough for their needs -- on the muddy, deep side for acoustic mikes that captured high singing better -- and the guitar ace was disconcerted by the equipment in the room. Austin was hired to ghost the vocals for several dozen Reneau records of 1924-25 -- such country classics (some covers, some new to recording) as "Wreck Of The Southern 97", "Little Rosewood Casket" and "Little Brown Jug", all in a voice adopted for the occasion that was distinctly southern. Austin sounded more twangy, in fact, than others of the moment, and sang with a clarity and jaunty rhythm that approached swinging beyond that of nearly all old-timey recordings.
The details of these sessions remained mysterious until, in 1939, Austin outlined them for Jim Walsh, a reporter for the Johnson City Press and a groundbreaking record collector in Reneau's northeast Tennessee area. How anybody imagined Reneau was doing the singing while playing harmonica is anyone's guess, but the secret was maintained, even when Edison Records recorded new, longer versions of the same numbers clearly labeled "The Blue Ridge Duo -- George Reneau and Gene Austin."
These often fetching 78s are long out of print, and some reissue house would be wise to get them out on disc. Only old-timey specialists know them at all today, even if June Carter was still doing a version of the Austin/Reneau side "Bald-Headed End Of The Broom" in the 1950s.
Some of those 78s did pretty well, and Austin clearly enjoyed the experience. While avoiding identification with hillbilly music, he went on recording country sides for several years, quietly, even as he hit it big as a pop star. He made lean, catchy versions of "Old Liza Jane" and "Sally Gooden" with fiddler Uncle Am Stuart; a fascinating urban-meets-country hybrid called "Way Down Home" sung with Carson Robison; and two sides, including a breezy early version of the folk favorite "Get Along Cindy", under the pseudonym Bill Collins.
When The Gene Austin Story was dramatized on network TV in 1957, the blind hillbilly street singer (Reneau) transmogrified into a blind delta blues singer. Overstreet, who was on the set, says the producers had decided it was "cooler" for Gene to have begun with blues than country. "And don't they always," he laughed.
Austin's early old-timey sides show how thin the line between "hillbilly" singing and pop could be, and predict future country vocal directions. But they had little impact on country music. Yet Austin's pop crooning hits -- free of accent, twanging strings and railroad wrecks -- would.
By the early '30s, Austin's five-year run of massive pop hitmaking was about over. His carousing started to get in the way, there was a divorce, the Depression had nearly killed the whole record business -- and baritone Bing Crosby, who incorporated more jazz-like playfulness and was more of a leading man for the movies, dominated the remaining market. (One of Crosby's earliest hits was the Austin-penned "Ridin' Around In The Rain".)
Austin's simple songs of the good-time present didn't quite fit on 1930s pop charts, which tended toward either the sadder ("Buddy, Can You Spare A Dime?"), or the blatantly manic ("We're In The Money!"). But the wistful southern pop singing style he'd created and the sentiments he'd expressed nevertheless found a growing home. They were applied to the simple life of an imaginary and musical Hollywood "west," where cowboy radio crooners ran around on horses chasing bandits with fast cars and modern conveniences. The key star who rode that horse, was, of course, Gene Autry, the main challenger to Crosby for record sales in these years.
Autry rarely discussed his musical influences, but he's on record as having first met and worked with Gene Austin in New York, just as he switched from being one more Jimmie Rodgers hillbilly blues imitator to what he became -- a clean, clear, often wistful pop delineator of songs such as "Blueberry Hill" and the very Austin-sounding "Mexicali Rose". No predecessors for this sound are spotted even in an authoritative volume such as Doug Green's Singing In The Saddle, perhaps because only country music and earlier cowboy movie singers get considered as the source.
In the '30s, Eddy Arnold was a Tennessee farm kid, a teen "ploughboy," as they'd call him later on, who ordered Jimmie Rodgers and Gene Austin records "right out of the Sears Roebuck catalogue," as he recalled in a recent interview at his office near Nashville. (It would be nice to think that one of the Austin 78s he ordered was the one that went, "Dream on, little ploughboy; make believe you're a cowboy...")
Arnold, who recorded "Lonesome Road" decades ago (among many country-meets-pop records that would sell in Austin-like millions), played a tape of a mellow, simple, soulful version of "My Blue Heaven" that he recorded just a few years ago (and is thus far unreleased). A friend of both Genes, he related this unrecorded bit of Austin-Autry connection:
"Gene Autry was a friend of Gene Austin's, too. He told me of how he was foolin' round in New York in the late '20s; he hadn't happened yet, and was trying to get a record deal, but he already knew Gene Austin. He got a call from Austin saying he wanted him to come to his office. So he went -- and when he arrived he found Jimmie Rodgers sitting there. That's how Gene Autry met Jimmie, because of Gene Austin -- which he said was the biggest thrill in his life."
There were, as the late country singer David Houston told a Texas reporter, even occasions where the pre-stardom Autry played guitar behind Austin. Autry would have a hit with the self-penned "You're The Only Star In My Blue Heaven", and he actually sold more records in the Austin-influenced pop mode than with most of the sagebrush songs out of the movies. Autry would write that Austin "was always a very kind person, especially to a newcomer...a close personal friend, and without a doubt one of the finest artists I ever knew."
Austin took advantage of this crooning cowboy trend himself by penning songs such as "Give Me A Home In Oklahoma" and "Rootin' Shootin' Tootin' Man From Texas". But the early '30s were dominated, for him, by a Hollywood career, performing in Sadie Mckee with Joan Crawford and in Klondike Annie with his far-from-down-home friend Mae West, for whom he wrote songs such as "I'm An Occidental Woman In An Oriental Mood For Love".
At the same time, Gene was developing close relationships with some of the leading African-American lights of the emerging swing sound. Fats Waller was now a close Austin friend and partner; he wrote "Ain't Misbehavin'" for Gene after Austin bailed him out of jail in New York, where Waller was being held for failure to pay alimony. Austin recorded that classic and also "Rollin' Down The River" before Fats did himself; he also included Waller in then-rare racially integrated recording sessions, and got him signed to Victor Records. Austin also worked with swing arranger Fletcher Henderson and, uncredited, as researchers Don Peak and Tor Magnusson have shown, provided Duke Ellington words for the vocal version of "Mood Indigo".
Austin's own live and recorded singing career was less hot at this point but still a working operation, often featuring the sophisticated, stripped-down bass and guitar backing of a talented pair called Coco and Candy. Of lead guitarist Otto ("Coco") Heimel, Austin would say, with some reason, "it was this man from whom, in my opinion, all the great guitar players...learned." Candy (Johnny Candido) would later be the voice of countless singing characters in Walt Disney and Ralph Bakshi feature cartoons. This ritzy Gene Austin often appeared in a top hat and tails, just like a sly singer of the same day who showed more than a touch of the wistful Austin approach -- Fred Astaire.
Austin was southern enough to miss the region, so he and second wife Agnes relocated to Charlotte, North Carolina, in the mid-'30s, and named their daughter Charlotte for the place. (As an adult actress, Charlotte Austin would star with Marlon Brando in the Napoleon bioflick Desiree.)
As Roy Acuff was recording "Great Speckle Bird" and the eastern end of country music was becoming increasingly focused on songs of sin and redemption, North Carolinian Austin was joining Mae West in Klondike Annie (a send-up of hustlers passing for evangelists in the Alaskan Gold Rush) and cavorting in Harlem with Louie and Fats. Though Roy Acuff's publishing partner Fred Rose had been a Gene Austin crony back in New York, Austin's territory could not, in 1936, have seemed further from mainstream country music. But in the Texas-to-Louisiana Third Coast where Austin started, his impact within the more swinging reaches of country was actually growing.
As Bob Wills chronicler Rich Kienzle has noted, Austin's vocals were already a special favorite of that young Texan in the '20s; the vocal style and range were right within his reach. If the more complex styles of Crosby and urban or rural blues artists were adopted in the great western swing vocals of Milton Brown and Tommy Duncan, Wills himself always had some of that high, wistful Austin sound in his singing, very noticeable in early outings such as "Mexicali Rose" and the sentimental ballad "Old-Fashioned Love". Wills' Texas Playboys and Brown's Brownies both started off incorporating strong elements of the pop that Austin's records had helped make the standard.
Steel guitar master Leon McAuliffe told an oral history project in the '80s that as the Playboys' sound became more sophisticated, Wills had McAuliffe and guitar ace Eldon Shamblin listen to Austin records, among just a few others, to hear where the sound should go next. Those records would have featured the piano, bass, and sophisticated, chorded guitar sound of Austin with Coco and Candy -- material such as "Blue Sky Avenue", which the trio performed in the 1934 movie Gift Of Gab. Later in the '30s, both Wills and Cliff Bruner's Texas Wanderers would make Austin' first big hit "Yearning" a western swing standard.
The Austin vocal honey was having an impact on emerging country sounds well beyond western swing and crooning cowboys. Jimmie Davis, soon famous for "You Are My Sunshine" and getting elected governor of Austin's home state of Louisiana, started out with a slavish cover of Austin's huge hit "Ramona".
Shreveport manager, booker, composer and bass player Tillman Franks, who worked with everyone from Hank Williams to Elvis Presley and came to know Gene Austin, too, suggested in an interview for this article that, through his direct influence on Davis, "Gene Austin helped start country music. Jimmie Davis' first records were imitating Austin as often as they were Jimmie Rodgers."
Up in Canada, another country mainstreamer, who would name his only son after Jimmie Rodgers, was listening closely to Austin, too. Franks recalls Hank Snow showing up at a Gene Austin show in Medford, Oregon, in the late 1960s and declaring that "way back then in the '30s, his hero was Gene Austin. He couldn't believe he was getting to meet him. Snow was usually standoffish, but he followed Gene around like a little kid! Gene couldn't get rid of him; he was the one that had inspired him."
Snow describes this encounter in his own 1994 autobiography, adding that Austin was astonished when Snow sang him his own old song, "I'm Coming Home", one of several Austin numbers Snow had written down and saved in the '30s from radio transcriptions he'd had access to while on the air in Halifax.
Austin's closest encounter with cowboy crooning came when he starred, in 1938, in a limited release movie called Songs And Saddles -- riding a horse, singing cowboy numbers. Ironically, many apparently showed up for this picture thinking they were going to see Gene Autry; only a few years before, Austin told Tommy Overstreet, Autry had asked for his blessing to use such a similar name. (Autry had been born Orvon Grover Autry, after all, not Gene or even Eugene.) Characteristically unpossessive, Austin had said, "If the confusion helps you reach a few more people, go for it!"
A bit paunchy in the movie at 38, Austin spends more time chasing bad guys on a live-in tour bus than on a horse. Such elaborate motor homes, inevitably dubbed "The Blue Heaven", would often be his real home from this point on -- whether they were parked in Louisiana, Las Vegas or Hollywood. The fast-living Austin, Overstreet says, liked to live in a style where he could leave town fast.
Songs And Saddles was presented as a "road show" attraction, booked into individual small towns from Texas to Virginia, with Austin playing live at the same performance. Audiences in these places, usually ignored entirely by uptown pop artists, responded well, even though there had not been many very recent hits from Austin.
That's how the idea emerged to put Austin on the road with a traveling, multi-act tent show appealing to audiences in backwater southern towns. The tour would be called "The Star-O-Rama Of 1939" and the show "Models And Melodies," setting out with dozens of ballroom dancers, chorus girls, one act that featured a California country girl who played a mean slap bass, and starring Austin -- soon backed by a new band of note.
To promote this tour, Austin's manager mentioned a guy who had advanced carnivals in the same areas, if never before musical acts. He was working as the dog catcher in Tampa, Florida. Gene met him, and they found instant personal and promotional hustling rapport.
The man called himself Colonel Tom Parker.
Austin, the Colonel, and Hillbilly Jazz
"In a short while," Austin says of Parker in his memoir, "he had the show going full blast; attendance was great." The man he called "Tommy" was plastering towns with posters saying "Gene's Coming!" and nothing else, for days before they arrived. News stories were planted in daily papers such as Tennessee's Johnson City Press that interviewed Gene when he arrived. Elephants would march into main streets heralding the show. But this was still the Depression and it wasn't always easy going.
Bass player Red Wooten, who was on the tour, recalls, "I sat in the trailer that Gene lived in, sitting and talking with Tom Parker for about an hour while Gene made breakfast. Parker kept asking Gene what part of the country he wanted to go to next, and Gene would say, "Well, wherever the loot's good!"
In practice, they were showing up at hard-hit towns throughout the heart of the south, playing for fans who were now often followers of "hillbilly music," as it was called. Austin was doing a radio promo on the powerful WDOD station in Chattanooga, Tennessee, when he heard a band from the Knoxville area that had a regular midday show there: the Fidgety Four. Wooten was their new bass player, and the hot guitar playing lead was Roy Lanham.
All the members had backgrounds as hillbilly string band musicians and had been raised singing in gospel choirs, but they were just beginning to play a sort of hot swing pop that retained eastern hillbilly trace elements. Austin hired them and changed their name, in another "Blue Heaven" reference, to the Whippoorwills.
The track listing of this hot band's Soundies CD Hard Life Blues: Roy Lanham & The Whippoorwills, recorded a decade after the tour (with the band relocated to California), indicates the permanent influence of Austin and his followers. Austin's "When My Sugar Walks Down The Street" and "Carolina Moon" are joined by outright jazz tunes, Autry's "Tweedle O'Twill", Wills' "Stay A Little Longer", and fast electric-picking turns on the old-timey "Arkansas Traveler".
Wooten, who cites Austin as a main influence, would go on to be the Academy of Country Music's bass player of the year three times for his work with Hank Thompson and Eddy Arnold, and on California sessions at Capitol Records during Ken Nelson's tenure. He'd also be the bass player on the famous Red Norvo jazz-backed recordings of Frank Sinatra.
"Roy Lanham had been doing hoedowns -- fiddle tunes," Wooten recalls. "But everything we did in the tent show was pop music mostly Broadway tunes that got big -- and we'd bring that to this country audience. Gene would then turn around and do something like 'This Train Don't Carry No Gamblers' -- the very kind of thing that's right in the middle between pop and country; he could do that great. That's what breaks down that barrier, to me -- that gospely in-between music."
By this point, multiple firsthand observers note, Austin himself was a remarkable, commanding live entertainer, with hundreds of songs at his disposal that might be called up without notice, depending on how he read the crowd or what was requested. He had a charming, semi-comical style of laid-back piano playing -- on the black keys only -- punctuated with sudden hand lurches reminiscent of Chico Marx's novelty bits.
Eastern Tennessee, George Reneau's old stomping grounds, was now a hotbed of rising new-generation country instrumentalists. Lanham's radio replacement when he left with Austin would be a very young Chet Atkins, and Jethro Burns was transforming mandolin playing.
Another young area guitar player was Merle Travis, who in 1981 recalled how impressed he was with and Austin and the Whippoorwills' show when he went to check out this latest thing. "Three young fellers were playing along with Austin," Travis wrote in Guitar Player magazine. "A boy with a mandolin, a bass player, and the kid with the guitar. 'We gonna pee on th' fire and turn th' dogs loose,' Gene Austin would say, chuckling, 'and we gonna turn Roy Lanham and his Diddlin' Duo loose on this ol' gut-bucket, hooked-joint blues that I wrote back when I needed money." Travis and Lanham would remain close friends after that encounter, as Merle went on to become a key guitar stylist of the century.
The late Roy Lanham, belatedly, is increasingly being recognized as an electric hillbilly jazz lead guitar innovator. Though he always thought of himself as a jazz musician, for many years he was lead instrumentalist for the cowboy Sons of the Pioneers. With less fanfare, he was also the hot proto-rockabilly guitarist on a good many cuts by the Delmore Brothers and Grandpa Jones, and on Loretta Lynn's first single, "Honky Tonk Girl".
His widow Marianne, herself a jazzy singer with the latter-day Whippoorwills, recalls the Lanham family's continuing closeness to Austin for years to come. Because of occasional reunion shows with Gene, they'd keep his small traveling piano on hand at their Hollywood house, which he'd pick up to take on the road. In the early '60s, there were still ongoing jam sessions at the Lanhams' place: The Whippoorwills would play, Merle Travis and friends would join in, and Austin would sing increasingly jazz-like leads -- all with the likes of the Bonanza cast on hand to catch the music.
Wooten, in an interview for this story, was very explicit about the specific Austin influence in this hillbilly jazz arena. "We walked onstage with him without a sheet of music," he recalls. "He'd just start singing -- and this is just how fantastic Austin was -- and do a medley of twelve or fifteen different songs in one tempo and keep that going. All kinds of tunes, and we'd have to follow whatever he played, piano-wise! My ears had to grow up about twenty years just working with him that year!"
Wooten compares the instrumental method the band developed for jumping into the Broadway and southern pop songs Austin would bring up without warning to the loose-but-ready latter-day Nashville session player "head chart" approach. "That's exactly the way we did it!" he affirms. "Have you ever heard of that word called 'S-O-U-L'? That's where my playing got soul -- hearing Gene Austin sing. When he'd do a song, you'd remember it. It wouldn't come out like it was written on paper, it would come out like he did it himself -- and like nobody else."
Taking that method and style to country sessions under classic California producer Cliffie Stone, Wooten developed a way to note oncoming chord changes so that the head arrangements could be shared with incoming backup musicians -- in direct parallel to the "number system" that would come to be used by Nashville cats.
Another obvious after-effect of the 1939-40 tent show tour is that it got Colonel Parker thinking. He saw the vague outlines of upside commercial potential in finding some uniquely attractive entertainer who might work that fuzzy crossover space between country and gospel-influenced southern pop. If you could take a guy like that into the movies, as Austin had started to do, that might be a very big deal.
He soon found a first nominee for the role in Nashville -- a virtual unknown named Eddy Arnold. "It was Gene that had suggested to Parker, 'Why don't you go up there to Nashville?'" Arnold recalls. "Well, I was a young kid at that time, and Parker came up here and walked up and extended his hand."
The Colonel's previous work with Austin -- and the suggestion that the young "Tennessee Ploughboy" could travel in such circles -- was a key part of his pitch. "I loved Gene Austin," Arnold says. "He had a style -- which wasn't melodic in the way a Caruso was, but in a different way. And he was a good guy, too, which I found out later, as I got to know him. He didn't read music, you know; played by ear. But what a showman he was; when he sat down at the piano, he'd have the audience in the palm of his hand."
The troubled years of World War II and its readjustment aftermath were great for Austin. He was married briefly to wife number three (a young singer named Doris Sherrell), tried running a night club, and did a lot of less-heralded gigs. But the era was the first of several really good times for Eddy Arnold, as he scored hits such as "Bouquet Of Roses" and "I'll Hold You In My Heart".
Arnold would, of course, reach monster sales proportions in the 1960s by infusing country music sounds with a strong dose of southern pop style, blurring the distinction. But he was already a crooner, influenced specifically by Austin, Autry and Crosby, when he had his first smash hits of the '40s. And his essential singing style, he readily agrees, was already in place then -- if with arrangements that were more obviously traditional country.
His requirements of the musicians he played with had elements formed in understanding of individualized, swinging southern pop music like Austin's -- just outside the country mainstream, musicians with the knack of a Red Wooten. "When I use a musician," Arnold acknowledges, "it's not just a guy who can play three chords on a guitar. I'm a stickler for tempo -- tempo for me, that tells me where I can phrase, and what I can phrase."
By the '60s, Arnold had massive country hits on the scale Parker had dreamed of, with songs such as the crooner ballad "Any Time" (first associated with protean '20s singer Emmett Miller). RCA Victor could bend the song just a little, at Arnold's suggestion, to get a pop hit with Eddie Fisher. Crossing over had become a new marketing possibility as early as 1950, when those Hank Williams songs could cross over toward pop without trouble. The American music world was now enthralled with southern pop.
And it was time for a Gene Austin comeback.
The '50s, Suburban Pop and Rockabilly
The mixing of sun belt farm boys and the general population through the war years, and the exposure of northern boys to country sounds on southern military bases, set up a situation predisposed for southern pop success. Audiences who loved country music went for this stuff, as on the Austin tent show tour -- but then, so did many, many others.
The jive of Phil "That's What I Like About The South" Harris was finding great popularity on radio. Hits by Les Paul & Mary Ford furthered the hot guitar and southern rhythm song sound, and Jimmy Wakely (an often Austin-like former sidekick of Autry) had hit duets with Margaret Whiting that married languid cowboy crooning and pop. Austin himself did some sides with Les Paul in the late '40s.
By 1950, a pop song such as "Dear Hearts And Gentle People" -- built on those "in-between gospely" rhythms and tunes, and sentimentalizing home and hearth as directly as "My Blue Heaven" had -- could be working for golf sweater country artists such as Red Foley, Ernie Ford and Jim Reeves, but also for Bing Crosby and new, clearly southern-identified pop stars Dinah Shore and Kay Starr.
The postwar yearning for security in new suburban homes; the strong emphasis on the tidy nuclear family (and some edgy mid-'50s freedom-seeking reactions to that Ozzie & Harriet life which were even sharper than Mae West's had been); the broad belief in an inevitably prosperous future; wondrous Space Age innovations -- all made this period comparable to Austin's Roaring Twenties.
There was an announcement in Variety, around Christmas 1956, of a major Hollywood musical featuring Austin's life and music to be written by swamp humor "Pogo" cartoonist Walt Kelly. That didn't happen, but The Gene Austin Story did, airing on prime-time network television. Austin appeared at the end to introduce a new song, "Too Late", which came out on a new LP -- marking his return to what was now RCA Victor Records. (Tommy Overstreet recalls celebrating in New York after the broadcast, with Austin and Eddy Arnold trading hilarious, and scabrous, show business stories that had him and "Green Door" country singer Jim Lowe in stitches.)
Major stories in the Saturday Evening Post and The New York Times marked Austin's comeback; his music was again permeating the air. Gene appeared several times on "The Ed Sullivan Show", performing his hits; covers were making a lot of them generally familiar again.
There was Fats Domino's new charting version of "My Blue Heaven"; Austin found the beat on that one too regular for his liking. Pat Boone did "Love Letters In The Sand"; it was suggested for him by bluegrass star and A&R man Mac Wiseman, who'd covered it previously. "Tonight You Belong To Me" was a hit for school-age sister duo Patience & Prudence; Gene Vincent recorded "Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang Of Mine"; the rocking Collins Kids revived "Lonesome Road"; and Ricky Nelson did "Cindy".
Boone might seem a more obvious place to find Austin's influence than all of those rockabillies. But Austin had, after all, also been that high-energy Charleston-era rhythm singer, and still could be. He proved quite accepting to that new genre-fusing sound. He spent seven years on the road with the young son of his first cousin, Tommy Overstreet, who, in keeping with Austin's penchant for snappy new names, he dubbed "Tommy Dean from Abilene."
Overstreet, who is usually referred to as Gene's nephew, first recorded in Clovis, New Mexico, and knew Buddy Holly, Buddy Knox, the Fireballs and other rising southwestern rock acts. Overstreet recalls vividly that Austin, by then in his late 50s, would announce slyly, after charming the audience with his own hits: "Now, ladies and gentlemen; you know I have a nephew who's come along with me, from Abilene, Texas. So many of these young people are shaking their legs and doing that stuff -- but not my nephew. He's a good kid. Would you please welcome -- Tommy Dean from Abilene!"
"And I'd come out," Overstreet continues, "and before I'd sing a thing he'd say, 'I've told these fine people about you, and how sweet and kind you are, and nice, and how you don't believe in that rock 'n' roll. Why don't you sing us a song and show them.' And I'd go 'Hey Baby!' -- and slam into Roy Orbison's 'Ooby Dooby' like mad, and he'd shrug -- and join on the piano!"
Overstreet, in the early 1970s, would become an international country hitmaker with big-voice ballad singing on numbers such as "Gwen, Congratulations" and "Heaven Is My Woman's Love". He'd later record a disc's worth of Austin songs, and is capable to this day of a spot-on Austin imitation.
Austin's influence in rockabilly inevitably reached its King -- arguably the all-time king of southern pop as well -- as Colonel Tom Parker regaled Elvis Presley with tales of life on the road with Gene Austin, then introduced the two legends. They got along very well. Elvis found this man who'd gone back to hotel rooms and found four women waiting under his bed, 30 years earlier, easy enough to relate to, according to both Overstreet and Tillman Franks.
Along the way, the somewhat incongruous, obscure 1920s number among Presley's hits, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?", got there, the Colonel always said, because, in just that one case, he asked Elvis to do it. Parker's wife Marie had loved the way Austin did it in clubs.
Austin's own beloved fourth wife of seventeen years through the '50s and '60s, LouCeil, told Parker chronicler Alanna Nash that during the filming of Viva Las Vegas in 1963, the Colonel brought Austin onto the set, -- supposedly to offer pointers to Elvis on singing. Using the situation to embarrass his one and only client, he then took the insults further. LouCeil has Parker saying, right in front of them all, "Now, Elvis, I don't like about eight bars of that. Call David Houston and sing it to him; he'll give you the Gene Austin licks for those bars."
Houston, singer of the classic country near-cheatin' song "Almost Persuaded" and the first duet partner of Tammy Wynette, had toured with Elvis and Hank Snow in the '50s. And it was via Houston that Gene Austin had one more key bit of influence in country music, in the '60s era of the pop-leaning Nashville Sound.
A last close encounter
Gene Austin's best boyhood friend in Louisiana, oddly enough, had been a boy named Gene Houston; they'd sit on the curb smoking cigarettes together at the age of 10. As adults, they'd own an auto dealership together, and Austin would be godfather to Houston's son, David. Gene first began showing David how to become a showman when he was just 4 years old.
Tillman Franks, for many years David's manager, bass player and songwriter, knew the Houstons well -- and the musical impact of David's lifelong relationship with Austin.
"David's daddy wasn't a musician, so Gene Austin taught David how to play the piano, his style, how to hit the licks on his voice, and to hit those high notes," Franks explains. "David's voice was a lot like Gene's anyhow, and Gene really worked with him and taught him.
"How David had learned to play the piano like Gene when he was very little used to bug me, in fact, because he would play behind the beat sometimes, a pop beat, and did that even when he was playing guitar in a country band. He would drag the song down!"
Houston's string of '60s-'70s hits often show the Austin vocal training, among them "Have A Little Faith" and "A Loser's Cathedral". And his song themes were often right out of the Austin playbook; "You Mean The World To Me", co-written (as were the aforementioned two) by his producer Billy Sherrill and Glenn Sutton, references bluebirds singing in the yard and heaven at home in a house.
By the late '60s, Austin was in a down cycle again. His marriage to LouCeil was over, and drinking problems were reappearing; after an unsuccessful run for governor of Nevada, he was living, for the first time, in Nashville, Tennessee, in a small place with rented furniture and a piano. He was married to his fifth wife, Maxine, known as "Gigi." He hadn't had a record released since cutting some sides for Dot in 1960.
David Houston took the idea of recording with his godfather to Epic/Columbia Records Vice President Larry Cohn, in New York, who knew American music history well and excitedly approved the idea. Sherrill would produce the session, which, as records at Sony/Epic in Nashville show, took place on the morning of May 20, 1969. Sherrill has no special recollections of the occasion now, other than that it was set up by David.
Houston and Austin recorded a song Gene had written. Unusually for him, it had an outright religious message, "His Arms Around You". It seems fitting that Houston sings in a straightforwardly Austin-like crooning style, and Austin seems, at times, to add just a bit of country twang to his delivery. A pop chorus swells behind them, in keeping with the more-pop-than-ever Nashville Sound. Austin also recorded two unreleased solos that morning -- "I Cried For You" and "If I Had My Way", opposite sides of one 78 from 1936.
The "His Arms Around You" duet was eventually released on Houston's Epic LP A Man Needs Love. And so it was that the very last released record of Gene Austin, like his very first one, 45 years before, would be marketed as "country music." Austin died, after battling lung cancer, on January 24, 1972.
In 2004, the audience for country is less and less rural-based and poor, increasingly middle-class and suburban (or even hipster urban), to the point that Johnny Cash pondered aloud in his 1997 autobiography whether the future of rural-derived sounds and songs might be in doubt.
For more than a decade, much radio-played, pop-like country music has focused on the relentlessly upbeat, on songs fixated on affirmations of family happiness and the life experiences and point of view of the suburban sun belt -- and sounds that amount to the further reaches of southern pop. At this writing, the former Nashville FM radio outlet of Grand Ole Opry broadcaster WSM has just introduced a format mixing contemporary pop-toned country sounds not with early country music, but with undisguised earlier pop said to appeal to the same audience.
This may be crass, brilliant, brilliantly crass, or turn out to be a bad business decision. But the only reason to call such music "country" (and they do) is marketing. It is in fact a different form of music, one that has been handily rolling along nearby right from country's birth, an established, uncredited tradition of southern-born pop that often appeals to the same audiences -- and sometimes even changes country sounds.
Gene Austin was its father.
ND senior editor Barry Mazor's previous exercise in music history re-examination, concerning Little Miss Cornshucks (ND #45), is featured in the new volume Da Capo Best Music Writing 2004.
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