CLOSE UP: Blood-red cowboy boots stride confidently down a tiled hall.
CAMERA PANS: A sage green Nudie suit is revealed. Bejeweled cacti and wagon wheels glitter up and down its legs and sleeves; a Conestoga shimmers on the jacket back.
VOICE: "Direct from Nashville, Tennessee...Here's The Porter Wagoner Show! Starring...Porter Wagoner!"
The star is tall and crazy-straw thin, and the old television color renders his tanned face and blond hair an orangey hue. He sports two-inch-long sideburns, and his pompadour -- a flat-top gone wild, actually -- is piled high. Porter tells us that today's show will be all duets, by card-and-letter request, and then he and his current "girl singer," Dolly Parton, launch into one of their earliest hits, "Holding On To Nothin'". Next Porter calls out Speck Rhodes, a little man with theatrically blacked-out front upper teeth wearing a glove-tight check'd suit. Speck tells a few old jokes, then joins the peach-clad Wagonmasters for an old-timey number.
Tune in another week, though, and it might be Porter in a slate blue Nudie and a matching rhinestone-studded cravat, greeting viewers with the square-dance thump of "Howdy Neighbor, Howdy". Or maybe the suit's candy-apple red. It blinks in the TV lights like big city neon, and the song he sings is the ballad "Green, Green Grass Of Home" or maybe "The Carroll County Accident". After that, Porter and Dolly might sing a gospel number, or perhaps their most requested duet, the sentimental number about parents whose daughter asks never to be buried because "Jeannie's Afraid Of The Dark". The song ends with one of Porter's specialties, the solemnly spoken lines known as a recitation.
"I think we always knew we'd never see Jeannie grown," he admits before the hushed and teary-eyed studio audience. "But on Jeannie's grave we placed an eternal flame...and on the darkest night, there's always a light, 'cause Jeannie's afraid of the dark."
This is what people used to call a country music show. It's what generations of country fans loved about their music, and what so many of today's country fans dismiss as corny and swollen with emotions that have been deemed excessive or inappropriate -- sentimental.
What an appropriate emotional response to the death of a child might now be isn't clear. Best not to talk about dead babies at all, then, or about any of what one of Wagoner's best-known recordings identified as "The Cold Hard Facts Of Life". Those facts are, specifically, infidelity and murder, but elsewhere in Wagoner's catalogue, the grim realities include alcoholism, insanity, sexual abuse, poverty, homelessness, hunger, tornados, nightmares, "blood-soaked" battlefields, incarceration, and suicide.
Such traumas, and the empathy they generate, were once a cornerstone of the mainstream country sensibility, but they've mostly disappeared amidst the anthems of perpetual uplift that dominate the format today.
Porter Wagoner is having none of it. Produced by Marty Stuart and backed by Stuart's world-class country trio, the Superlatives, Porter's new album Wagonmaster (released June 5 on Anti- Records) is filled with old-school hillbilly virtues -- sincere gospel warnings such as "Satan's River", story songs of heartbreak and redemption, honky-tonk shuffles, even recitations. Wagoner, who turns 80 on August 12, sings or recites each track with a twang weathered and wise. He's a walking-talking-sparkling exemplar of an all but extinct country music archetype: Hillbilly deluxe.
Hillbilly, but not Appalachian. Not like Loretta or Dolly, the Carters or the Stanleys. So perhaps there's no more telling observation to begin with than this: Porter Wagoner is from the Ozarks.
Bounded, more or less, by the Arkansas, Missouri and Mississippi rivers, the Ozark Mountains roll across southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, a stubbornly bucolic watershed of densely wooded hollers and limestone hills. "It looks a lot like east Tennessee," Wagoner explains over the phone from his home near Nashville.
That geography helps explain why some Scots-Irish left the Appalachians of eastern Tennessee and Kentucky and began settling in the Ozarks even before the Louisiana Purchase made the region part of the United States. Yet Wagoner goes out of his way to make a distinction:
"It's like Tennessee, but it's not Tennessee," he says. "The Ozarks is its own place."
In hindsight, Porter Wagoner's birth on August 12, 1927, in Howell County, Missouri, feels prescient. Or at least it's a nifty coincidence. Just days earlier, Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family had famously recorded for Ralph Peer, also a Missourian, in Bristol, Tennessee. Peer was at that time employed by Victor Records, a predecessor to the RCA-Victor label where Porter would become a country music icon.
In 1927, though, little Porter Wayne was simply the fifth child of Charley and Bertha Wagoner. They raised cows, hogs and chickens on a modest Ozark farm near the Arkansas border.
"People that was raised up in those mountains, well, I think there was just more singers all around because there was so much less to entertain ourselves with," Porter recalls, referring both to the Appalachians and to the Salem Plateau of the Ozarks where he grew up. "I can still see my dad out working in those fields, just yelling a song at the top of his lungs," he says of the man who inspired his 1972 LP The Farmer and in particular that album's gospel recitation, "My Dad". "We'd hear him singing two, three miles away!"
"Folks back then," he continues, "their entertainment was pie suppers and cake walks, those type of things, and there'd always be singing while those were going on. And I guess we all had a pretty good echo chamber in those hills."
The Ozark Mountains are far smaller than their better-known eastern cousins, in area and elevation. Whites settled there much later than in the Appalachians, so the region was "discovered" by the rest of the country later still. There was, too, less of an African-American influence in the Ozarks, or at least the influence was less immediate because fewer African-Americans have lived there. One effect of this history is that Wagoner, as Ozark as they come, has often played music ready for a rompin'-stompin' good time, but, compared to his contemporaries from the Carolinas or Georgia, or from Texas, his music tends not to swing.
On the other hand, memories of the region's various Indian cultures were much fresher, both from the tribes who were indigenous to the region (the Missouri, of course, and the Osage among them) and from those tribes forced by the United States government to relocate in Oklahoma or some other for-the-moment-unwanted spot further west. Each of the various paths trod by the Cherokee during the infamous Trail of Tears, for instance, passed directly through the Ozarks.
Wagoner's home was a place apart, then, but hardly pure or isolated. The radio saw to that. "I'd listen to a station out of Springfield, Missouri -- KWTO [as in, Keep Watching The Ozarks]. It had all kinds of shows. I liked [country singer] Slim Wilson, and the Goodwill Family were a gospel quartet I really enjoyed.
"That was my first real exposure to country music," Wagoner says, then laughs. "My first exposure to the 'big time,' I mean. I was actually never exposed to anything that wasn't country music. The radio we had was for weekends mostly, but during the week sometime we'd listen to a thing called 'The Suppertime Frolic' on WJJD in Chicago. 'Course on Saturday night we'd tune in the Grand Ole Opry."
During the years bookended by the start and end of World War II, big country stars still visited little country towns. Anywhere in the Ozarks was near enough to Nashville that members of the Grand Ole Opry could play dates there during the week and still drive back in time for Saturday night Opry commitments. The Opry's biggest star at the time, for instance, Roy Acuff, came to nearby West Plains, Missouri, in 1942. The concert he put on taught the young Porter a lesson he never forgot: It's a show.
"He had one of the best-rounded-out shows I've ever seen," Wagoner says of Acuff, though he could as easily be describing his own shows for the last half-century. "Acuff had a girl singer, and a comedian, everybody was cutting up and joking. I liked that very much."
The Wagoners were big fans of another Opry star, Bill Monroe, and of bluegrass music generally (typical of mid-century Ozarkers). "Back in those early days, Monroe came through a lot with his tent show and his baseball team," Porter recalls. "My mom and dad would always take me to see Bill Monroe & His Blue Grass Boys. [Monroe] told me in later years that he remembered me from then. He said, 'Porter, you come to just about every show I ever did 'round there.' I'm not sure if he really remembered me or not, but I was sure glad to hear him say it.
"He also told me that if I ever washed up in country music, he'd hire me as a bluegrasser," Porter laughs. Perhaps Big Mon appreciated the singer's square-dance-ready take on "Uncle Pen", the Monroe-written standard that became Wagoner's fifth charting single in 1956.
"My mom and dad had a record player since as far back as I could remember," he continues. "It was one of the old kinds that you crank up and play the big records -- the 78s. I learned a lot of Bill Monroe songs that way. And I learned some of the real old Stanley Brothers songs, too. I learned [Carter Stanley's] 'White Dove' off the big record...I remember years and years later I went into the studio to record it with Ralph [for 1998's Clinch Mountain Country], and he handed me a copy of the lyrics. I said, 'Ralph, I don't need the lyrics. I know the words.'"
He was learning to be a master of ceremonies as well, though these lessons were self-taught. In a story he's told often, the young Porter liked to stand on a stump in the front yard and imagine he was hosting the Grand Ole Opry. He'd introduce Ernest Tubb, say, then hop quickly off the stump to make way for his guest star. Then, when Porter bounced back atop the stump, he was Ernest Tubb ("Thank you, Porter. I'm glad to be on the show with you.") -- singing "Walking The Floor" while strumming the chords his older brother Glenn had taught him on a mail-order National guitar. Then he'd introduce another guest.
Once, a neighbor boy overheard Porter playing "Opry" while the would-be MC was plowing the family fields. Busted, Wagoner confessed what he was up to, but the kid just laughed. "He said, 'You're as close to the Grand Ole Opry as you'll ever get,'" Wagoner told writer Dale Vinicur in 1991. "'You'll be looking these mules in the rear-end when you're 65.'"
Nineteen and forty-three was a cold, hard year for the Wagoners. Porter's father had long suffered with arthritis, and as it worsened, it became impossible for him to work in the fields. Porter and his brother Glenn picked up the slack as best they could until Glenn, too, fell ill. The doctor in town diagnosed an enlarged heart, and that summer, after a lengthy hospital stay, Glenn died. The family buried their loved one, auctioned the farm, moved the ten or so miles to West Plains, and tried to pick up the pieces. Porter was 15.
Wagoner landed a gas station job almost before the family had unpacked. According to Steve Eng's A Satisfied Mind: The Country Music Life Of Porter Wagoner, the young man would, over the next several years, deliver groceries, sell Jeeps, work at a Dr. Pepper plant, and cobble on an International Shoe Company assembly line. He also worked (during a brief relocation to Peoria, Illinois) at a Caterpillar tractor factory.
All this to help his parents, of course, but there were new mouths to feed, too. Porter married at 16 but divorced before his 17th birthday. He married his second wife, Ruth, when he was 18, and not long afterward became a father. Still, Wagoner made time in his hectic new life for music. He performed at the Howell County Jamboree with his own group, the Oak Street Pals, and now and then he'd sing a couple of numbers on local station KWPM (Keep West Plains Moving!).
On a few occasions, he even traveled to Nashville to see the Grand Ole Opry. In the summer of 1949, Porter witnessed Hank Williams bring down the house with "Lovesick Blues" during what likely was Hank's Opry debut, a story retold to Stuart during a conversation included at the end of Wagonmaster.
Williams certainly impressed the young singer. Wagoner recorded "Lovesick Blues" twice while still in West Plains -- initially, along with "Just A Closer Walk With Thee", at his first "recording session" (which yielded a pair of $1 acetates). The second session produced 78s ("the big records"); he then road-tripped with musician friends to St. Louis to place them in Howell County jukeboxes.
Wagoner's first break arrived when he was working as a meat cutter's apprentice in West Plains. Porter sang while he worked -- usually older numbers his mother or his sister Loraine had taught him, like "An Old Log Cabin For Sale" or "Jimmie Brown The Newsboy", but Williams songs too. His boss enjoyed the apprentice's musical gifts and thought others might as well; he also saw a way to move some meat. His "singing butcher" began hosting a morning program on KWPM.
That radio exposure soon led to a one-song audition -- "Lovesick Blues", naturally -- at KWTO in Springfield, and just like that, Wagoner was in the music business, a full-time employee, $35 a week, at the biggest country station in the Ozarks.
Wagoner lived and worked not quite eight years in West Plains, not much longer than he'd reside in Springfield, and he hasn't lived in the region at all for half a century. Still, Wagoner considers West Plains his hometown and a key to his performing identity. Wagoner is "The Thin Man from West Plains," per Ralph Emery, the Nashville DJ who gave him the nickname. What the flooding Mississippi was to Johnny Cash, what the south San Joaquin is to Merle Haggard, that's what the Ozarks mean to Porter Wagoner.
Of course, the only road to becoming a favorite son is the one out of town. Not even a week after his KWTO audition, and with his wife and son dropped off at his folks' house, Porter hit Missouri State Highway 63 and headed to Springfield. Today, the stretch of Missouri 63 that runs through West Plains is called "Porter Wagoner Boulevard."
Wagoner returned home in 1964 to record Porter Wagoner, In Person, one of country music's earliest live albums. He was a big man then: an Opry member with nine top-10 country hits and the host of his own syndicated TV show. But when he left West Plains in 1951 and moved the 110 miles west to Springfield, he was just another Ozark hillbilly come to town.
Porter Wagoner screams "hillbilly," from his cadence to his clothes to his decor. And not just for fans who wear that badge with honor, either, but for those assorted snobs who still deploy "hillbilly" like it was a rock they were slinging at something not quite human.
In his pointed and hilarious working-class polemic, The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks And White Trash Became America's Scapegoats, Jim Goad remembers:
Standing there beside impossible-breasted hillbilly belle Dolly Parton...stiff and stilt-like in his rhinestone red peacock suit, wearing a gilded pompadour on a head thinner than a peanut, Porter Wagoner made me feel ashamed.
No wonder. City dwellers have long derided the "hillbilly" (a term invented, of course, by urbanites, first appearing in a New York magazine in 1900) as randy and lazy and taciturn, ignorant and primitive, inbred and dangerous. Concurrent with those images, however, the Appalachian mountaineer is idealized as innocent and independent, admirably stoic, and just more down-to-earth authentic than city folk. There may be Ernest T. Bass and Deliverance types in them thar hills, but there's also always been Sgt. Yorks and Davy Crocketts.
The Ozarker, by contrast, is a more recent hillbilly stereotype -- and one notably stripped of positive attributes. To the extent that Ozarkians reside as a distinct type in the nation's popular imagination at all, it's as the butt of the joke on TV sitcoms and in the funny papers. The Clampetts lived near the imaginary Ozark village of Bugtussle before they struck oil and moved to Beverly. Li'l Abner Yokam and Dasie Mae Scragg, of Dogpatch, Arkansas, fussed and feuded in the comics for decades, just across the fold from that notorious layabout Snuffy Smith. Today's best-known real-world Ozarker is probably Springfield native John Aschcroft.
The Ozarks have more to offer than such benighted stereotypes, particularly when it comes to country music. From gospel songwriter Albert E. Brumley ("Turn Your Radio On", "I'll Fly Away") to Ferlin Husky ("Wings Of A Dove", which has the wooden but ebullient rhythm of many of Wagoner's recordings) to 21st century hitmaker Joe Nichols, the Ozarks' tradition of country music and comedy thrived long before Branson emerged as the "Hillbilly Vegas."
In this Ozark Hall of Fame, Porter Wagoner looms above the rest. Throughout his career, Wagoner has mined Ozark subject matter: "Forty Miles From Popular Bluff", "Big Wind", "Indian Creek". He's used Ozark songwriters like Jimmy Driftwood ("Howdy, Neighbor Howdy") and producer Bob Ferguson ("The Carroll County Accident"). And in his own songs, he's memorialized characters from his Howell County youth: "Albert Erving", "Wake Up, Jacob", "Barlow Chapin", "Katy Did", "My Dad".
Maybe most of all, signature Wagoner sides such as "Company's Comin'", "Misery Loves Company", "Sorrow On The Rocks" and "A Good Time Was Had By All" sound like the Ozarks: An up-and-down beat meant for swinging your partner, and down-home as dirt.
In the fall of 1951, Wagoner moved to Springfield, Missouri -- "the Queen City of the Ozarks," the hottest spot on Route 66 between St. Louis and Tulsa -- and settled into his new routine: Three quarter-hour programs each morning at KWTO, then a nighttime performance in some nearby Ozark village.
"We'd usually play at a schoolhouse or somewhere like that," Wagoner remembers. "We had a dance we did there regular in Reed's Springs on Wednesday nights -- played square-dance music -- then we'd be back up the next morning to do the radio shows. We were busy and doing pretty good, but not as good as I wanted."
An ambitious young country singer might be expected at this point to pursue the siren call of Nashville. But in a sense Nashville had come to Wagoner.
KTWO's Ely "Si" Siman, Porter's Springfield mentor, was friendly with Steve Sholes, the head of RCA-Victor's country division. Siman helped Chester Atkins land an RCA contract, not long after suggesting to the former KWTO regular that he might want to start calling himself "Chet." Siman now helped place Wagoner there, too.
Wagoner's first single, the optimistically titled "Setting The Woods On Fire", was recorded in the fall of 1952 and, like most of Porter's earliest sides, it was cut at the KWTO studios. Siman no doubt saw that it burned up the airwaves there, but it didn't catch fire anywhere else. No wonder: Both its arrangement and its singer sound too much like Hank Williams -- an especial liability just then as Williams, country's brightest star, had just released a version of the song.
"I loved Hank Williams...I didn't know any other way to sing it," Porter told writer Dale Vinicur. "[I]t was quite a little while after that -- a few years -- before I realized...I need to sing these songs like I would sing them, not necessarily like Hank Williams or Roy Acuff or Ernest Tubb."
Meanwhile, Wagoner's next seven singles sold as unimpressively as his first, though not for cutting bad records. "Trinidad", co-written by Wagoner and Siman, was a delightful if geographically incongruous country novelty: "You can go for a swim with a girl so trim -- in sarongs of plaid!" Another Wagoner co-write, "Trademark", was an honest-to-God hit -- but for Opry star Carl Smith. The pining desolation of "My Bonfire" features Wagoner's most supple and gripping early vocal, but it wasn't even released. RCA didn't renew his contract in 1954.
Fortunately, Wagoner had already cut "Company's Comin'", a song written by Springfield milk truck driver Johnny Mullin. The record kicks off with woodblocks that bring to mind bare feet slapping lickety-split across a wooden porch, then Porter delivers a breathless message: He can't make out who it is just yet, the singer shouts to his Ozark kin, but everybody had better get presentable -- Mama, wring some chickens' necks; Grandpa, get yer fiddle down -- visitors are headed up the mountain! "Company's Comin'" has the drive of the Blue Grass Boys, the humor of Hank Williams, the mountain sincerity of Roy Acuff, and the energetic thump of an Ozark square dance -- and it adds up to Porter Wagoner. The single climbed to #7 nationally.
Siman launched his most ambitious project yet, "The Ozark Jubilee", just as "Company's Comin'" was exiting the charts. Hosted by Red Foley -- tempted from the Opry -- the program joined ABC-TV's Saturday night lineup in January 1955. Before Foley pulled the plug five seasons later, each episode was broadcast live from Springfield, beginning with the host swinging briskly through "Sugarfoot Rag", the show's theme. Then Foley introduced one of an imposing cast of regulars: Webb Pierce, Billy Walker, Wanda Jackson, Ozarker Leroy Van Dyke, 11-year-old Brenda Lee (another Siman protege), occasional guest host Eddy Arnold, and, for the first two seasons, Porter Wagoner.
At its peak, the Jubilee reached 25 million viewers a week -- folks who otherwise would've tuned in the Opry on a Saturday night the way they'd always done. Even city slickers noticed, though sneeringly. As Time put it, KWTO and the Jubilee "gave listeners live, howling hillbillies" allowing Springfield to "lay claim to being the hillbilly capital of the world."
Such condescension must have rankled Wagoner and Foley more than a little. An affable host in the Bing Crosby mode, Foley was known for quipping, "Smile when you call me hillbilly." As far from "howling" as Howell County is from the Big Apple, Foley's smooth croon and ease with an audience impressed Wagoner no end. He especially loved Red's recitations.
"Red always told me when you do a recitation, don't talk too loud, speak in a normal tone," Wagoner explains today. "I remember watching him, and if someone in the crowd was making noise, he'd lighten his voice just a little and everyone would get quiet to hear him.
"The tone you use on a recitation," he continues, "how you say the lines so they don't sound sing-songy even though it has to rhyme -- that's what makes the difference in whether or not it comes off cornball."
Wagoner's most important Jubilee discovery, though, was "A Satisfied Mind", a song he introduced on the program. As solemn a record as "Company's Comin'" was high-spirited, the single kicks off with trio harmonies like church folk lining out a hymn, a calling card of the early Wagoner sound. "When I leave this old world, when my time has run out...I'll leave...with a satisfied mind," he avers, without ever sounding entirely consoled.
"A Satisfied Mind" bumped Faron Young's "Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young" -- a quite different exit strategy -- from atop the Billboard C&W charts in June 1955, not long after Wagoner signed again with RCA. With increasingly itchy feet, he stood with Siman and the Jubilee another year and a half before deciding in 1957 he needed to move on -- to Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry.
Wagonmaster includes a song called "My Many Hurried Southern Trips", co-written by Wagoner and Dolly Parton, where a bus driver recounts the sometimes tragic, always poignant stories of folks who have to get out of town quick. Wagoner first recorded it in 1971, opening that version with a telling announcement over a bus station loud speaker:
"May I have your attention please. Southbound bus loading, gate number eight. All aboard for Willow Springs, Kabul, Rodgersville, Koshokong, Ravenden, Williford, Jonesboro, Marked Tree, Memphis. All points south, all aboard please!"
You pass those towns if you're leaving Porter Wagoner's neck of the Ozarks, Tennessee bound.
In Nashville over the next decade, Wagoner established himself as an Opry favorite, a country music television pioneer, and one of the genre's biggest stars. He became a savvy businessman, too. Warden Music, for instance, begun in Springfield with his manager and pedal steel player Don Warden, owned the publishing to Jimmy Driftwood's "The Battle Of New Orleans", a monster chart hit -- C&W, pop and R&B -- for Johnny Horton in 1959.
But all that came later. As historian Bill Malone observes in Country Music U.S.A., Wagoner was at first "a hillbilly in a time of artistic cloudiness." At RCA, Atkins now headed the country division and was famously (infamously, some say) helping to invent the Nashville Sound, country's pop-inflected rejoinder to rock 'n' roll. Wagoner stood out on a roster dominated by crooner Eddy Arnold, folk-pop trio the Browns, bluesy singer-songwriter Don Gibson and, of course, Elvis Presley.
Unsurprisingly, Wagoner's early Nashville sides fit the country-pop mold. "I Thought I Heard You Calling My Name" features fiddle and pedal steel guitar, but Wagoner's voice is swathed in echo -- people stare because "I'm talking but there's no one beside me" -- as the Anita Kerr Singers aptly haunt his every delirious step. It climbed to #11 in the fall of 1957, but that was it. Wagoner wouldn't have a record nearly as successful for four years.
Listen today to his records from this dry spell, however, and it's plain that Wagoner wasn't such a bad fit for the Nashville Sound after all. His 1960 take on John D. Loudermilk's "Falling Again", for instance, didn't sell a lick, but it's a swell little country-pop single nonetheless, as is its flip, the rustically themed but pop-beautiful "An Old Log Cabin For Sale". Perhaps Wagoner simply didn't get the promotional push of his big-name colleagues. Still, these sides remind that Wagoner is at base a crooner, not that dissimilar from another RCA Nashville Sounder, "Gentleman" Jim Reeves.
As with most country singers, from Gene Autry to Floyd Tillman to Red Foley and beyond, the Thin Man from West Plains doesn't bend notes like his contemporary George Jones, nor does he swing and soar like Ray Price. Rather, he hits his notes square and holds them, often quite tenderly. Wagoner sings with great rhythmic and emotional energy, to be sure, and his voice is less self-consciously pretty than Reeves' velvety purr.
Wagoner's voice is riddled with the various supposed imperfections that help create the effect termed "twang." Nonetheless, the croon is his basic vocal attack. Though the sound of his records changed a bit before he sold many of them, Wagoner's Ozark-bred croon never faltered.
Chart success arrived at last when in 1962 Atkins told Wagoner to schedule a session in his absence. The result was "Misery Loves Company", a Jerry Reed song that found Porter slapping backs and buying rounds. Vocalist Kerr and company mock his attempts to party away the blues as Jimmy Day's screaming pedal steel waltzes a tightrope between catharsis and delirium. "Help me get over this love," Porter beseeches. "I'll handle the next love all by myself."
Wagoner produced his own records from then on. Officially, he says, the credit went to someone else -- usually Bob Ferguson -- in accordance with RCA policy. But it was Porter who typically booked the sessions, identified material, hired the musicians and then worked out arrangements with them.
With Porter at the wheel, hits came steadily, a couple of top-10s a year, demonstrating his production and performance gifts -- and an ear for enduring songs. For example, he scored a #4 hit in 1965 with one of country's best-loved prison songs, Curly Putman's "Green, Green Grass Of Home", a key record in the transition from the Nashville Sound to the renewed twang of early countrypolitan.
Likewise, he rode Bill Anderson's "I've Enjoyed As Much Of This As I Can Stand", so pathetic it's funny, into the top-10 in 1963, and in 1966, he eerily embodied the narrator of another Anderson song, "The Cold Hard Facts Of Life", the quintessential modern revenge record and a #2 hit.
Two more hits, "Sorrow On The Rocks" and "I'll Go Down Swinging", stand with "Misery Loves Company" among the most indelible tear-in-your-beer numbers in all of country music. Pretty good for someone who's all but a teetotaler.
"I never really drank in my life, not even beer," Wagoner explains. "I had a brother who was an alcoholic, my older brother Oscar, and I seen my mama embarrassed when he'd be drinking. He'd drink in front of her or anyone. When he had to have a drink, he had to have a drink. And that really turned me around."
Witnessing Oscar Wagoner's decline -- he committed suicide a few months after seriously injuring himself in a 1965 car wreck -- was partial inspiration for the first and best of Wagoner's several theme albums, Confessions Of A Broken Man, in 1966. From its opening recitation, an exquisitely imagined version of Hank Williams' "Men With Broken Hearts" through the grim musical question "How Far Down Can I Go?" to the funeral preparations in the concluding recitation "My Last Two Tens", Confessions is a concentrated dose of alcoholism and grief, misery without company.
Its most arresting moment is yet another recitation, "Skid Row Joe", a #3 hit written by Freddie Hart in which Porter spots a "one-time real famous singing star, one of my favorites." "Joe" is now a homeless drunk in "the dirty part of town," volunteering his story to strangers and pledging unconvincingly, "I'm gonna quit. Yes sir, I'm gonna quit." On the Grammy-winning album cover, Porter is Joe himself, huddled in rags on the steps of the Ryman Auditorium.
"Bob Ferguson came up with that idea," Wagoner recalls. "And he did the makeup on me, too. He [modeled it after] an old-man character he used to do himself, Eli Possum Trot."
"One time I wanted to see what the Skid Row people were like and went to this place up in Chicago," he recalls. "Boy, I didn't like what I seen at all. People that were down and out and hungry, people who'd just turned their back on society. It was really a sad thing. I was glad I did it, but I didn't want to do it no more."
In 1960, Wagoner began his television program -- "bringing you your favorite stars and songs from the Grand Ole Opry" -- a syndicated series that didn't go off the air until 1981. Per Acuff, its emphasis was on "show." There were gospel songs and novelties, instrumentals and recitations, cheating songs and drinking songs and working songs and murder ballads. Fellow Ozarker Speck Rhodes slapped bass and told the corniest jokes he could steal.
The other Wagonmasters shined, too, all brilliantly bedecked in matching Nudie suits -- Warden on pedal steel, Mack Magaha on fiddle, and Buck Trent wanging away on electric banjo. "Get the banjo off the wall...," Wagoner instructs Trent in their top-20 version of "Howdy Neighbor, Howdy", the show's theme. "Play a good ol' country tune like grandpa used to play." But of course grandpa didn't have electricity.
Porter and his boys might break into impromptu jigs at any moment, and they'd crack up at their own flubs. Then "Pretty Miss" Norma Jean would sing a number.
"She was real nice, and women liked her as well as men did," Wagoner recalled of his fellow Jubilee alum in a 1984 interview with journalist Glenn Hunter for The Journal of Country Music. "I think it was the clean, wholesome appearance she had....And she was really popular on the TV show -- actually more popular on the show than Dolly would ever become."
Nearly all country acts of any consequence in the '60s and '70s -- Roger Miller, Bobby Bare, Haggard, Jones, Atkins, Tillis, Lefty, Kitty, Willie, Waylon, dozens more -- eventually made their way to the WSM studios to perform before Wagoner's live audiences ("I perform better eye-to-eye with folks."). In 1972, Lester Flatt showed up with a 13-year-old mandolin picker named Marty Stuart.
Wagoner was unnervingly busy in these years. He was recording more than 70 episodes a year of "The Porter Wagoner Show" for different markets. He released a trio of album-length, Grammy-winning collaborations with southern gospel's biggest act, the Blackwood Brothers. In 1962, he released a brass-meets-fiddle duet album with Skeeter Davis. There was a bluegrass tribute in '64, a prison-themed set (Soul Of A Convict) in '67, and three concert LPs, a by-product of playing more than 200 shows a year.
And all of this before anyone outside of Sevier County, Tennessee, had ever heard of Dolly Parton.
And before Porter was committed to Parkview.
Porter's son Richard left for the Army in December 1965 and only a few days later, according to biographer Steve Eng, Wagoner moved out of the home he shared with his second wife, Ruth. (He has never remarried.) At the same time, Norma Jean ended her nearly seven-year affiliation with Wagoner's show.
"Norma Jean and I had a love relationship," Wagoner told The Journal of Country Music. "But then our affair got to be a problem. She wanted to get married and I didn't. I was legally separated from my wife Ruth, and I just didn't want to get a divorce and marry again. I felt Norma Jean started putting that in front of our business....With me business comes first; any kind of love affair is much farther down the line."
Richard, Ruth (and the two daughters he'd left behind), Norma Jean, his brother Oscar's wreck weeks before, the TV show, the road...it was too much. Just after New Year's in 1966, Porter checked in to Parkview Hospital.
"My doctor had me admitted," he says today. "I had just worked so hard that I just wore myself out." According to Eng, Wagoner was hospitalized at least twice more before the decade was out.
Wagoner wasn't nearly in the sad shape of characters he later portrayed in song -- the madcap madman in songwriter Dallas Frazier's "The Man In The Little White Suit", say, or the only intermittently lucid narrator of his "If I Lose My Mind". But he was bad enough.
"Hope I never have to go there again," he admits on his new album, introducing "Committed To Parkview".
"Johnny [Cash] wrote that song and told Marty [Stuart, who was in Cash's band at the time] to give it to me back in the '80s," Wagoner explains. "He thought it was something I could really do. Well, Marty lost it. But when we got together to do this new album, he was telling me about it, how good it was but that he wasn't sure where it was exactly."
Wagoner laughs at the memory. "I said, 'Well, why don't you try to find it?' He did, of course, and I learned it from the tape of Cash singing it." (The Man in Black actually had ended up recording the song himself twice, first for his 1976 album One Piece At A Time and then with Willie Nelson on 1985's Highwayman.)
"Parkview" finds Porter in his hospital room, telling us about his neighbors on the ward. One man "thinks that he's Hank Williams," and "a superstar's ex-drummer [is] trying to kick Benzedrine." Another patient, "a bum from down on Broadway," might be Skid Row Joe himself.
"When they're taking my blood pressure, they ask me how I feel/And I always say 'Fan-tastic! Why, there ain't nothin' wrong with me,'" Wagoner swears, but he's only conning himself, if that. "Then they give me my injection and I go right back to sleep."
"I tell you, I didn't think [Cash] knew I'd been in there," Wagoner continues. "I didn't know he'd been in there. But turns out we were in there almost, not at the same time, but during the same year."
Cash acquired a reputation in his last years for emotionally twisted material, though actually songs such as "Committed To Parkview" are relatively rare in his catalogue. Wagoner, on the other hand, has specialized in tales of murder and madness. His body of work is overrun with body counts. The unhinged mind is nearly as common in his work as the satisfied one.
In "The Cold Hard Facts Of Life", Wagoner stabs to death his wife and her lover, then sits in his prison cell, envisioning hellfire and demanding to know, "Who taught who the cold, hard facts of life?" In his very next single, a version of Waylon Jennings' "Julie", he again murders his betrothed and her lover before turning the gun on himself. And in "I Just Came To Smell The Flowers", he finds himself drawn repeatedly to the funerals of strangers. Call him an Ozark Ishmael.
"It was the dark side of me," he says when asked about "Rubber Room", "Cold, Dark Waters", and all his other embodiments of men with broken minds. "The dark side, you know? And that's a real side."
Once out of Parkview, Wagoner threw himself into his work, recording Confessions Of A Broken Man and auditioning replacements for Norma Jean. For a time, it looked as if Jeannie Seely might get the nod; she toured with the Wagoner show before "Don't Touch Me" launched her solo career. Porter also talked about the job with Tammy Wynette, Dottie West, and Connie Smith.
Instead, he chose a charismatic 21year-old singer-songwriter named Dolly Parton.
"When Dolly first came on the show," Wagoner remembers, "I mean really early on, '67 and in there, she wasn't nearly as good as she would be later, of course. She talked real fast and sang so high. She was completely different from Norma Jean, the way I wanted. But Norma had been so popular and I felt it would be really important to do some duets together to get [Dolly] established good and solid in the show, get people warmed up to her. And it did.
"It also got her on RCA-Victor. They didn't want to sign her at the time. Chet [Atkins] told me once he just didn't feel like she'd sell any records. Her voice was pretty high and so forth. 'Course later he thought a lot different than that. Everybody did. But on our duets she just sang so different...because they were in different keys, more country, and we did them with my phrasing."
Wagoner hadn't sung duets with Norma Jean, though country singers had infrequently recorded male-female duets before Wagoner did with Parton -- George Jones and Melba Montgomery, Merle Haggard and Bonnie Owens, Ernest Tubb and Loretta Lynn. But none of those pairings were as persistent or successful as Porter and Dolly. Indeed, the popularity of their records for RCA inspired other labels to team their stars -- Lynn with Conway Twitty at Decca, Jones and Wynette at Epic. The result was a golden age of country duet singing, albeit a frustratingly brief one.
The records Wagoner produced over the next several years for himself, for Parton, and for the two of them together -- over 40 top-20 hits, two dozen of them top-10s, and more than 40 albums in just seven years -- also amounts to a golden age for Porter Wagoner. From "The Last Thing On My Mind", the Tom Paxton song that marked the pair's debut hit in 1968, until their split in the mid-'70s not long after Dolly's chart-topping "I Will Always Love You", a bittersweet declaration to her mentor that the days of their partnership were numbered.
Wagoner's work in this period is traditional in the best sense of the word. In theme and sound it's clearly in conversation with the country music that Porter grew up with, but it's also impressively up-to-date. And varied: The pair's mournful take on Jack Clement's "Just Someone I Used To Know", the camp-revival stomp of "Daddy Was An Old Time Preacher Man", the Elvis-in-Vegas rhythms and brassy fanfare of "Better Move It On Home" -- each is sonically distinct from the others, each arrangement emotionally appropriate to the song.
"I had a lot of great ideas then because it was all I thought about," Wagoner confirms. "I'd have in my mind what I'd want the record to sound like. I didn't have a studio to work the songs up in, but we'd go to Bobby Dyson's -- he had a studio in his house. Bobby was the finest bass player I've ever known in my life. He was the leader on most of my sessions those years. We'd just start throwing ideas around, and he had lots of great, great ideas.
"[Dyson] came up with that arrangement on 'We Found It'," Wagoner says, referring to the tickled-pink 1973 duet that may well be the funkiest record ever spun on country radio.
As is the case with so many of his singles in these years, "We Found It" wasn't just produced and performed by Wagoner, but also written by him. Indeed, more of Porter and Dolly's duet hits came from the Wagoner songbook than from any other source.
Parton's own critically acclaimed songs, such as "Coat Of Many Colors" and "My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy", fired Wagoner's creativity and competitiveness. "Dolly was as good a writer as I've ever been around in my life," he says. "Her example made me want to write. And her encouragement helped me a lot -- to where I felt, well, I am a writer."
In 1971, Wagoner released Sings His Own; the next year, Parton released My Favorite Songwriter, Porter Wagoner. It's a testament to just how prolific a writer Wagoner became in the early '70s that these albums include just one overlapping song, the haunting "Lonely Coming Down". It's a testament to Wagoner's presence as a singer that his version plumbs the lyric's depression even more deeply than Parton's.
After the Grand Ole Opry moved from the Ryman to Opryland in 1974, the opening sequence of "The Porter Wagoner Show" included a shot of the pair plummeting down the watery slope of the amusement park's log ride, every hair of her wig and of his pompadour precisely in place, with both Porter and Dolly sporting Howdy-Neighbor-Howdy grins.
Beneath the happy surfaces, tensions percolated almost from the start. Parton had pop ambitions. Steve Eng says soul singer Aretha Franklin was one of her models, and tellingly the duo's first album includes a heartrending version of "The Dark End Of The Street". Wagoner, meanwhile, who Waylon Jennings quipped "couldn't go pop with a mouth full of firecrackers," was focused on solidifying his position atop the country world -- the summit he'd been advancing upon for twenty years. Both wanted to be the boss.
Even Porter and Dolly's "impromptu" stage patter grew peevish. On one TV show episode late in her tenure, Dolly sings her lines in "Run That By Me One More Time", one of their several fussin'-and-feudin' numbers. The camera cuts to Porter to finish the verse but, off camera, Dolly keeps singing, adding a long bluesy yodel where Wagoner's part should be. "I just thought I'd throw that in," she tells the laughing audience and a seemingly startled Porter. "Well," he snaps, "I'm throwin' it out!"
"Porter dreamed of me staying with his show forever, and I dreamed of having my own show...," Parton writes in her autobiography. "We couldn't agree on what I should do, what I should sing, what I should write, if I could write, and who would publish the songs I did write.
"Back then, she worked for me," Wagoner says today. "'The Porter Wagoner Show' was what she was working for. She accepted that well and that was important to me that she did. And of course she added a lot to my show."
It might be assumed today that Wagoner, just another hillbilly after all, held back Parton, the great harbinger of modern country music. What seems fairer is that the conflicts which eventually led them to file suit and countersuit were the same tensions that helped make Parton's work smarter and more powerful with Wagoner than it has ever been without him. And if time hasn't yet healed all their wounds, it's made a good start.
"She did a thing here awhile back, about a year or so now, that was completely uncalled for," Wagoner says. "There was nothing in it for her other than the fact she wanted to do it. Quite awhile ago I'd sold her some of my songs because I needed the money. I'd gotten behind on my IRS payment. So I just sold them outright to her, a little less than 200 songs. That just hung over me for...years, and I told Dolly one day, 'Boy I'd love to have those songs back. I'll pay you what you paid me for them.' I felt like that'd be pretty fair, you know, as she'd made money off them during those years.
"Well, she wrote me a letter back that said, 'You won't pay me nothing for those songs because they are yours. And they're yours free of charge.'
"And that's Dolly Parton."
In the late '70s, writer Dave Hickey wondered if Porter Wagoner wasn't "The Last Great Hillbilly." Here in the 21st century (and with apologies to Wagoner's longtime fishing buddy, Little Jimmy Dickens), there no longer seems any question about the matter.
Wagoner dazzled with Nudie suits long after other country performers had abandoned them for sports jackets and turtleneck sweaters or, later still, for Stetsons and self-consciously torn jeans. He stubbornly keeps the corny Ozark comedy in his shows. He sings the now passe duets with a new partner, Pam Gadd (the onetime Wild Rose). And he persists with that most solemn and out-of-favor country style, the recitation. Most hillbilly of all, Wagoner is unwavering in facing the cold, hard facts of life, those subject matters that once marked country as "music for grown-ups." No doubt about it, the Thin Man from West Plains is the last of his breed.
Wagonmaster -- on the hip Anti- label and with Cash's institutionalized song at its center -- promises Porter the most attention he's received since the late '70s and early '80s. That's when, in quick succession, he stunned the staid Opry with a booking for James Brown, reunited with Parton for a #2 duet ("Making Plans"), and appeared in Clint Eastwood's Honkytonk Man. He's since primarily served as the public face of the Grand Ole Opry, an honor previously bestowed upon Acuff and Tubb, the heroes he once imitated atop the humble heights of an Ozark stump.
For a long time, though, he didn't do much recording at all. Wagoner sighs: "I got to where if I couldn't make records the way I wanted, then I didn't want to make records."
But Wagoner's love for making records has lately returned with a vengeance. He's released eight new albums since the turn of the century, including The Best I've Ever Been (not nearly so overstated as you'd guess) and four gospel discs. And now Wagonmaster, which, besides the Cash cut, includes a dozen Wagoner compositions, including new versions of sorrowful early '70s gems such as "The Late Love Of Mine" and "The Agony Of Waiting".
At the end of Wagonmaster, he even includes a snippet of a Hank Williams recitation, "Men With Broken Hearts", that he learned as a boy in West Plains and first recorded 30 years ago. He included it in his sets, too, when he and Stuart played together in New York and Los Angeles recently.
"These young people who've come out to see us, they've really made me a believer," he enthuses. "Honestly, it gave me a new lease on life to see these kids respond so well to what I was doing....They listened to every word I sang and when I did the recitation, 'Men With Broken Hearts', they listened hard to that. Just wonderful!"
He's off then, reciting that very number. His Ozark twang writhes with pain -- the farm, the brothers, the marriages, the partnerships all gone -- but his heart seems almost bursting:
Now you've never walked in that man's shoes
Or saw things through his eyes
And stood and watched with helpless hands while the heart inside you dies...
Before one track on Wagonmaster, Porter tells a boyhood tale, recalling how he made his way "across the Gundy Hills to Chapin holler," to the dirt-floor cabin of a family acquaintance, Albert Erving, who had lived alone for years. In a song named for Erving -- from Wagoner's 1971 LP Sings His Own and re-recorded for Wagonmaster -- Wagoner sings of a beautiful picture, titled "Kathleen," that Erving had carved in wood. "She's not real," Erving tells him when he asks about the woman. "Then came the tears," Wagoner says, and it sounds as if he might be tearing up himself at this sentimental Ozark memory. "She's just someone I've dreamed of all these years."
In a contemporary country song, Albert would meet his Kathleen and die happily, or at least win the lottery. In Wagoner's song, though, Erving's ending is ambiguous but very likely bad. The song concludes with Porter reminding us, his voice cracking slightly with empathy, that Erving's cabin floor "was just the earth worn down, where Albert's lonely feet had walked around."
Today this sort of storytelling is derided by some as too sentimental. But it used to be what people called music for grown-ups, country music.
ND senior editor David Cantwell lives in Kansas City, Missouri. His family comes from the Missouri Ozarks, too, down Morgan County way, and his wife's people are from Stone County on the Missouri-Arkansas border.
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