"Mama said I used to go out in the yard when I was around nine or ten years old. My dad had cut down this big oak tree and left a stump there, and Mama said I'd get up on that stump and pretend I was onstage, and I'd sing a song or two and introduce my special guest, and normally it would be Roy Acuff.
"Then I'd get off the stump, go off and come around the other side, and I'd be him then. I'd sing 'From the great Atlantic Ocean to the wide Pacific shore' -- I'd sing one of his songs, and then I'd say, 'Porter, I'm really glad to be here with you,' and I'd be him for a few minutes. She said I would do that for hours, and she never was worried about me leaving there, you know, because she knew that's just what I was doing, man."
Porter Wagoner has his own permanent dressing room at the Grand Ole Opry, a visible token of the importance he's taken on there since the death in 1992 of the show's longtime presiding spirit, Roy Acuff. It's a comfortable place, with its own bathroom, a small stereo, and -- in contravention of the Opry's general no-smoking policy -- a few ashtrays scattered around to accommodate the singer's heavy cigarette habit.
Except for a few mirrors, the walls are completely covered with photos, most of them showing Porter with country music colleagues -- everyone from Acuff and George Jones to Vince Gill and Travis Tritt. The star is between shows (he hosted a 7 p.m. segment of the Opry and goes back on at 9:30 tonight), and after posing for a few pictures with fans and eating a plate of nachos, he's taken off the jacket of his purple Nudie suit and settled back in an easy chair, ready to talk.
For the best part of the past 20 years, since the end of his syndicated television show and his recording contract with RCA, Wagoner was largely content to put his career on a kind of relaxed auto-pilot, making frequent Opry appearances and playing less-frequent but still regular tour dates. Though compilations of duets he made with Dolly Parton have been issued several times, his own catalog was allowed to fall by the wayside by his former label.
Because he lacks the alt-country cachet of artists such as the Louvin Brothers, Buck Owens or Merle Haggard, domestic reissue houses haven't taken much of an interest in re-releasing his albums, with the inexplicable (though enjoyable) exception of a 1964 live set (In Person, on Koch). Bear Family has issued a comprehensive collection of Wagoner's early recordings, but it ends in 1962, just when things were getting really interesting. The subsequent work of one of postwar country music's most important entertainers has been limited to the second half of one inadequate compilation (The Essential Porter Wagoner, RCA) and an obscure English twofer of late 1960s albums.
Until now, that is, at least in a narrow sense. After a long absence from the studio, Wagoner has a new album on the market, released by a young but already respected Nashville indie label (Shell Point). As a result, while the search for what legendary WSM DJ Eddie Stubbs calls "deep catalog" can still be frustrating, the number of post-1962 original Wagoner recordings easily available on CD has just doubled -- and the new material is, to put it plainly, right up there with the old.
Which brings us back to Porter's dressing room. He's done a number of interviews lately in connection with the release of The Best I've Ever Been (when he looks you in the eye and tells you "that's exactly what it is, buddy," it's hard to disagree), and most of them have covered the same ground: why he's chosen to record again, the origin of the songs, and, of course, his sponsorship of and collaboration with Dolly Parton.
Naturally, then, he assumes we're here for more of the same. But as it becomes apparent to him that there's a wider range of subjects in view, he warms up to the job, telling stories and cracking jokes. After each punchline, he turns around to look at a couple of band members hanging out on the other side of the dressing room, gauging the effectiveness of the story by their laughter as he recalls the early days of his career and some of its many highlights.
Porter Wagoner was born in 1927, not 40 miles from Poplar Bluff, Missouri, as a duet he recorded with Parton had it, but more like 90. His dad was a farmer, but between his arthritis and the Depression and its aftermath, the farm was a losing proposition -- it was sold to satisfy debts -- and the family had moved into nearby West Plains by the time Porter reached his mid-teens. He was already playing guitar, taught by a sister and a brother, and singing both secular country music and gospel songs as he worked various jobs around the town.
Though Roy Acuff was an early influence, as his stump story reveals, he wasn't the only one. "Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe and the bluegrass music that he created, they were both huge influences on me and the kind of music I liked," he says. Bitten especially hard by the bluegrass bug -- "I admired Bill Monroe so much, and I loved the high energy of his music" -- he put together a band, the Blue Ridge Boys, and hit the road in his first effort to make a career in music.
It did not have a happy outcome. Porter had kin in Peoria, Illinois, so the band headed there in an old DeSoto hearse they'd bought. After striking out with the small clubs in the area, Wagoner got the band booked for two nights at a swankier venue, only to discover there'd been a mistake.
"The morning of the day we were going to play, I went down and got a newspaper. There was a big half-page ad: 'Appearing at the Top Hat night club, Porter Wagoner and his Blue Ridge Orchestra.' I could not believe it. My heart just sank, man. I said to the boys, 'There's been a hell of a mistake here.' Well, I went out to talk to the lady, and I said 'Ma'am, we don't have an orchestra.' 'Aw,' she said, 'honey, these people'll love you. Music is music.' Well, I tried to explain to her what the difference was, and there was just no way; she said, 'They'll love you, just come out and start at 8 o'clock.'
"We got out there about an hour before the show and tuned up in the parking lot. There wasn't nothing but Cadillacs and Lincolns sitting there -- I mean, buddy, big time. I walked inside and looked up, and they had tuxedos on and were just dressed to the hilt, and every table was full of people setting there eating. I was so scared, I didn't know what the hell to do. I wanted to just run, to leave, but we didn't have enough money to get out of town on. It was just stay and play, that was the only answer to it.
"Well, we go down to the orchestra pit, that's where we had our microphone set up; no introduction or nothing. So I hit that run to start off 'Watermelon On The Vine' -- we used that as our theme, just like Monroe -- and them people raised up and started looking like they'd been invaded. They thought the damn Martians had come in. Well, we done one of those endings that just cut right off -- and nothing. Not a sound. It just startled me, because I couldn't say 'thank you,' 'cause they hadn't done anything. So I said, 'Well, uh, hey there, we're going to do a little number for you now called 'I'm Going Back To Old Kentucky', and just tore into it.
"Well, the banjo player never looked up, you couldn't see nothing but the top of his head, and you could tell everybody in the band was so embarrassed. So anyway, during 'I'm Going Back To Old Kentucky', I guess maybe a third of them just got up and gently walked out. We ended it, and still not a thing, just a rattle of a fork or a plate here and there. No applause, not a single bit of applause. We done about four songs, and there wasn't but about one table left.
So the lady came out that owned the place, and she said, 'Why, honey, they loved you, they'd already ate.' She was trying to explain why they left, you know. She said, 'I'm going to go ahead and pay you for tomorrow night, you don't even need to come back.'
"I've often wished I had gotten her name, so that later, when I had some success, I could have sent her that $300 back. And that $300 got us out of there," Porter concludes the story, before delivering an unexpected punchline. "And it was so damn cold, we stopped and bought a coal oil lantern for a heater, because that old hearse we had didn't even have a heater in it, you know. It's used for carrying dead people, and you don't need much heat for them."
Back in West Plains, Wagoner went back to more ordinary work, but not for long. By 1950 he'd gotten his first radio show, on local station KWPM, and cut a couple of sides that were getting some local radio and jukebox play. Not surprisingly, he'd decided that, much as he loved bluegrass, something more popular was advisable. He recorded songs such as "Just A Closer Walk With Thee", a big hit for Red Foley, and a Hank Williams smash, "Lovesick Blues". In 1951, he was heard by the program director at Springfield's KWTO and hired by the station shortly thereafter. He moved to the city to begin his new job, appearing thrice daily: two 30-minute shows of his own, at 5:30 and 7:30 a.m., and as part of an hour-long variety show, "The Farm And Home Hour", at 11:30 a.m.
"When I first went there," he recalls, "they were going to pay me $35 a week. I didn't get any mail the first three days, and it really bothered me, man. The third night I didn't get no sleep. I was really concerned, because I'd told everybody at home, 'You really need to write to me,' because that's the way they judged your popularity, whether people liked you or not. And we had this little mailbox as you'd come in and go by the secretary's desk, and the first three mornings, there wasn't a thing in my box, man.
"I believe it was the fourth day, when I came in the secretary was sitting there, and she said, 'Porter, when are you going to pick up your mail?' I said, 'Well, as soon as I get some, I guess.' And she said, 'Honey, your mail's down in the basement, there's six boxes full down there.' There were thousands of letters -- six cardboard boxes that tall [he gestures knee-high], all just packed with letters and cards and such. I just couldn't believe it. I set down and cried; that's probably the most I cried in my whole career. It just touched me so deeply, and it just -- well, it changed my whole life, my whole confidence level and everything, it just went...it changed my whole internal life around.
"I stayed there until it was time for me to go on the 11:30 show, and I was almost late. I went up, and I had to go by the boss's office to where the studio was -- Ralph Foster was the guy that owned the radio station -- and he seen me going by there, and he hollered, 'Hey, come here, I want to talk to you.'
"Well, I thought -- well, man, I looked awful, my eyes were all red because I'd been down there crying for an hour. And he said, 'I see you've been down there and seen your mail.' I said, 'Yeah, I sure did, that's just unbelievable almost.' He said, 'Well, nobody's ever got that much mail here, nobody ever.' And he said, 'I've decided we're going to double that salary of yours.' Well, man, I started seeing Cadillacs and diamond rings and all that good stuff then."
But Wagoner wasn't quite there just yet. The following year, thanks to some hard work by a station manager who became his manager, he auditioned for RCA Records producer Steve Sholes, and was signed to the label. He cut more than a dozen sides for RCA, including his own "Trademark", which went all the way to #2 for the smooth-voiced Carl Smith in July 1953, but there was little to distinguish his records from those made by the artists who influenced him, such as Smith and Hank Williams (his very first one, "Settin' The Woods On Fire", offered an almost uncanny imitation of Williams).
Disappointed with the results, RCA released Wagoner the following year. In order to keep working, he hit upon the then-unusual tactic of offering to play dates in and around Missouri for the door proceeds only, without the usual guarantee of at least a minimum fee.
That was successful, but it was hardly enough for a man determined to make a career out of music. Already convinced of the power of a great song, he realized he had found one on an obscure Starday record. "Great material, that's the key to it," he says, pointing out that the songs on The Best I've Ever Been are what convinced him to do the album in the first place. "It don't make a damn how close you sing the harmony; if you're singing material that ain't great material, it won't work."
The song he'd found was "A Satisfied Mind", co-written by fiddler Joe "Red" Hayes (an old friend and former bandmate of Texan Charlie Walker) and Jack Rhodes (a 1972 inductee into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame). Country music historian Bill C. Malone, in his book Country Music USA, calls it "one of the most finely crafted songs in country music."
"We were going to play a dance down in Arkansas, me and the two guys who were singing with me. They didn't know when to come in, you know, and that's how we come up with that style," Porter explains, referring to the way the first and third lines of each verse in his version of "A Satisfied Mind" are started off by Wagoner's resonant baritone before the harmony singers join in. "In the car, going down there, we just accidentally come up with that.
"Well, we sung the song that night at this dance we played there, at the American Legion, and you know, when you're playing a dance, people don't pay that much attention normally. But boy, they really loved that song, and they listened, and when we finished, man, it just got more applause than all the other songs put together. So when we went back home we got it worked up some more, and just got it to where we could sing it pretty good, and I got the guy at the radio station to record us doing it on a two-track machine, and sent it to RCA."
Sholes also had the sense to recognize a good song, and Wagoner was re-signed to the label. Preceded in release by the jaunty rural novelty tune "Company's Comin'", which crept into the DJs' Top Ten -- "it kind of got them acquainted with me and my music," he says -- "A Satisfied Mind" shot to #1 in the spring of 1955, lasting a remarkable 33 weeks on the charts (there were three of them at the time: airplay, sales and jukebox spins) and spawning covers by Jean Shepard and Red Foley that were almost as successful.
Foley saw enough in Wagoner to invite him to join the cast of his pioneering TV show, the Ozark Jubilee, fed to the ABC network by KWTO's sister television station. "I learned an awful lot about communicating with an audience from Red Foley," Porter says. "Red Foley was a great communicator, a wonderful singer and entertainer. I watched him, and learned a lot from him.
"Probably one of the most important things I learned from Red Foley about communicating with a crowd was, don't ever talk like you're talking to a crowd, because then you come across like a politician," he laughs. "He said, 'Make it like a one-on-one. They'll all hear you, but make it like you're talking to a friend.' And I found that to really work."
While he was honing his performance skills, and taking a good, hard look at how a country music TV show worked -- observations that later informed his own syndicated program -- Wagoner continued to draw airplay and attention with a set of singles that did well on the charts (though none quite as well as "A Satisfied Mind") while revealing his flexibility as a performer and the broad range of his musical interests.
"Eat, Drink, And Be Merry" was an obvious follow-up to "A Satisfied Mind", a midtempo waltz that duplicated the earlier hit's vocal arrangement. He followed it with a rhymed recitation, "What Would You Do? (If Jesus Came To Your House)", which introduced an enduring strain in his music: Its homespun gospel message, and an intimate, almost conversational address to the listener, demonstrated how Wagoner was applying Foley's lesson not only to live appearances, but to recordings as well. Next came a spirited cover of Bill Monroe's "Uncle Pen", and then the bluesy "Tryin' To Forget The Blues" (which harked back to the easy swing of "Trademark") and the mournfully tender "I Thought I Heard You Call My Name."
On the strength of these, Wagoner moved to Nashville and joined the Grand Ole Opry on February 23, 1957. "I was real scared about packing up and moving here," he remembers, "because my roots were [in Missouri]. I knew I could make a living playing music there, but I wasn't sure of the big time yet. And the night I was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry, probably one of the most cherished parts of my career was, when I came off the stage, Roy Acuff asked me to come to his dressing room. He said, 'I'm really glad you joined the Grand Ole Opry, Porter, I think we really need your kind of people here, because you're a great communicator with the fans.' And he handed me a little piece of paper and said, 'This is my home phone number. If you need anything while you're here, or if I can help you in any way, call me.'
"Well, that meant more to me than anything at that time, because it gave me a feeling that I was part of the Opry then, because he was the top man, the King of Country Music, and he meant it. I could tell by the way he told me. So that really gave me a lot more confidence than I had, and I felt pretty much at ease at that time. I felt, if you can get some good songs, you can have a career here."
Porter Wagoner found good songs -- when he didn't write them himself -- and he has indeed had a career in Nashville. He had a solid, if not spectacular, run on the radio as a solo artist; he reached the Top Ten on his own only 11 times after 1956, and had only one #1 by himself, 1962's "Misery Loves Company". More importantly, however, his ability to communicate and his television experience led the Chattanooga Medicine Company, a patent medicine producer, to tap him in 1960 as the host of a syndicated TV show that lasted a remarkable 21 years.
The demands of a weekly production that was geared to reaching the same audience over and over, rather than playing to a different crowd each night in the rhythm of concert touring, pushed him in a different direction than many of his peers. He was responsible not only for his own music, but for the overall balance of the show, and he looked back to the traveling shows of his childhood, in the pre-television days, for inspiration.
"The kind of shows that I wanted to do to be successful came from Roy Acuff and Bill Monroe," he says. "That's how come I got a girl singer; I figured, if I'm going to have a show, you need a girl singer and a comedian. And that was one of the keys: We had a rounded show, a rounded-out show. And I learned that from these men. They were really heroes to me."
The installation of a girl singer, in the end, turned out to be one of the most important moves he ever made. The first to join his show was Norma Jean Beasler, invariably referred to as "pretty Miss Norma Jean." Her strong, direct contralto matched Porter's voice well, and the two frequently sang together on their shows, though never in the recording studio.
The handful of duets between them captured on the three live albums Wagoner released in the mid 1960s -- The Porter Wagoner TV Show: Hits And Highlights, On The Road, and the recently reissued In Person -- reveal an approach to harmony singing that would soon bring Porter and another duet partner greater success than he could achieve on his own. On these songs, as later, rather than have Norma Jean sing tenor to his lead or sing baritone to her lead, Wagoner would sing a low tenor harmony part on the duet passages.
"I just came to it naturally," he says, "and it seemed like it worked real well." It did, indeed, for it captured the power of the traditional country duet -- melody and tenor -- while giving the vocals a bit of the flavor of the pedal steel guitar, which frequently placed the tenor line at the low end of its triads.
The lead/low-tenor combination was a compelling one, especially when Wagoner replaced Norma Jean, who left the show in 1967, with a young woman from eastern Tennessee named Dolly Parton.
Aside from the impact Parton's effervescent personality and style had all on its own, the duo's influence was almost incalculable, their voices blending with an unexcelled perfection well before other popular duets such as Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty or George Jones and Tammy Wynette hit the charts. "The Last Thing On My Mind", a revamped Tom Paxton folk song that set Wagoner's low, almost tender articulation against Parton's tremulous soprano, reached the Top Ten in late 1967, and from then on the pair was an almost continuous chart presence until Parton left the show in the mid-'70s. The partnership ended in a legal struggle that clouded their relationship until the end of the decade.
In addition to being musically untouchable, the Wagoner-Parton duets continued to exemplify Wagoner's interest in "great material." Whether written by him, Parton or someone else, the songs displayed a considerable range in subject matter, evoking a complex working-class reality that had room not only for both happy and sad love songs ("Yours Love", "Just Someone I Used To Know"), but for the intrusions of economic hardships ("We'll Get Ahead Someday"), religion ("Daddy Was An Old-Time Preacher Man"), tender sentimentality about the death of a child ("Jeannie's Afraid Of The Dark"), and sassy, humorous squabbling ("Better Move It On Home").
Between 1967 and 1976, they charted eighteen Top 40 singles, most of them reaching the Top 10. When the lawsuits were resolved and they reunited in 1980 for another duet album, they put Johnny Russell's venerable "Making Plans", recorded by bluegrass Opry stars Bob & Sonny Osborne back in 1965, into the Top Five.
On these recordings, as on his own, Wagoner not only sang, but produced, though thanks to an RCA policy that demanded the use of only in-house producers Chet Atkins, Bob Ferguson and Anita Kerr, he got no credit for the job for most of his career.
"What caused that to happen was, Chet was going to England with Jim Reeves, and he told me, 'You know, I've not had any success producing hits on you, because I have a problem picking songs that you like.' And he said, 'I want you to get you 12 songs together, and hire the musicians that you want to hire, and make an album while I'm gone, and let's see what happens.' Which I thought was great freedom to give me to do that.
"And I got the songs together, and there were three hits that come off that album. It had 'Misery Loves Company' on it, and 'Your Old Love Letters' and 'I Thought I Heard You Call My Name', and those were all really big records for me. And Chet said, 'Well, that's what you really need to do,' and that's what he did."
Though Ferguson's name appeared on most of his albums, as well as the Wagoner/Parton duets, from 1965 on, "he wasn't even there," Porter says, with some sharpness. "He wasn't on the session most of the time. Occasionally he'd come in. I produced all those things, and I'm very proud of them. I wasn't looking to get my name as a great producer, I just wanted to make sure we made the best records we could."
Thankfully for Porter Wagoner, who by this point in our interview is starting to think about his second Opry show of the evening, he's had a free hand in the making of The Best I've Ever Been (and receives full, sole credit as the album's producer). He wasn't, he says, particularly interested in recording again -- his last studio album was done almost 20 years ago -- but he was taken once again by great material, this time from the pen of Damon Black, an Arkansas songwriter turned farmer turned songwriter again.
Black spent some time in Nashville a couple decades ago, writing some fine songs recorded by Bill Monroe ("Tall Pines", "I Haven't Seen Mary In Years"), Mel Tillis ("Veil Of White Lace"), and the Osborne Brothers ("Arkansas") before moving back to Arkansas. A few years ago, he sold his farmland to a company wanting to build a discount store there and returned to songwriting. He worked up about two dozen numbers and sent them to Wagoner, suggesting that the Opry star might want to make an album of them. Wagoner confesses to having been skeptical, but his doubts turned to enthusiasm as he listened to the songs.
He assembled a studio group that included both session players and members of his own band, much as he had in the '60s and '70s, when the distinctive playing of musicians such as electric banjo player Buck Trent helped to define his sound. "These were guys that I really liked their playing," he explains. "I didn't hire them at all out of friendship, I just felt like I wanted great players. Some of the guys that are in my band are players -- Fred Newell on guitar, Gordon Mote on keyboard, he's a marvelous musician -- and on the steel guitar I used Hal Rugg, I've known him forever. He's a great, great player."
Between them and the rest of the crew, which includes young session fiddler Rob Hajacos, the music on The Best I've Ever Been glides effortlessly from a barely-updated version of Porter's classic style to sounds that clearly reflect the developments of the intervening years, especially in the drums. "In the last, oh, probably 20 years, I've just loved drum sounds, great drum sounds," he laughs, fully aware of how at odds this might seem set against his pure country image.
Still, at its heart the new album is not only hard-core country, but also quintessential Wagoner. Its songs stand on their own, and do so memorably, yet each also evokes memories of that "great material" he so assiduously searched out and recorded during his heyday. The gospel sentiments of his sacred recitations such as "Pastor's Absent On Vacation" and "Trouble In The Amen Corner" find an echo on the new album on "Daddy's Old Sayins, Mama's Beliefs"; and the opening "Brewster's Farm" might be just those 40 miles from Poplar Bluff. It's virtually impossible, having once heard the Wagoner/Parton duets, not to recognize their kin in "Watching Eagles Fly", and though the music has its distinctly modern moments, its lyrics are filled with words, phrases and stories that recall now-distant times.
The powerful resonance of the past is a strong part of what makes The Best I've Ever Been such a success, and if he never records again (a big if; he's already messing around in the studio, working on "some different sounds," he says), this album will be a fitting capstone to Porter Wagoner's career. Though "tradition" is a word that has a special weight in country music, a clear-eyed look at its history shows that "transition" ought to as well. The golden era of the music -- the period during which Wagoner began and consolidated his career -- was one that saw profound and rapid change in virtually every aspect of society and music. Think of Porter standing out on that stump on his daddy's farm back in 1937, and then, successively, in front of his first TV cameras less than 20 years later, and hosting (at his own insistence) James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, on the Grand Ole Opry another 20 or so years after that.
The Best I've Ever Been comes another 20-odd years down the line, and Wagoner is looking to the Internet to promote it, even as his diction and accent remain omnipresent reminders of his youth, and his sparkling rhinestone suits a throwback to his heyday. It's a potent mix of a world past and gone with a world now rushing toward us, wrapped up in the music of one thin man -- who now, without unseemly haste, dons his jacket and strolls out of his dressing room toward the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, ready once again to get out there and talk to the crowd like he was talking to a friend, ready to sing some great material. Porter Wagoner has always excelled at recognizing a good song, and he's not about to change now.
ND contributing editor Jon Weisberger lives, writes and plays music in Kenton County, Kentucky.
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