Back at the Burger Boy, Waylon could buy his pills from dealers who hung around nightly and choose from the girls who stopped in when they saw the big cars out front. If the stars were looking for women, they manned the three pinball machines in the dining area. “Waylon one day was playing pinball and this guy came in there with his wife or his girlfriend,” says George. “His dream was to have Waylon record a song; he called himself a songwriter and as far as I know he never got anything recorded. He was asking Waylon to come up to his apartment and listen to a demo tape and Waylon said he would go, so Waylon went over there. After about twenty or thirty minutes, this guy came back and had three or four rolls of quarters. I said, ‘Where’s Waylon?’ He said, ‘He gave me these quarters and told me to come down here and play pinball.’ I thought, ‘This is a little odd.’ This guy’s wife or girlfriend came in later in the day and she was talking to me and she said, ‘Waylon wanted to get rid of him, so we could be alone.’ He sold his wife for a roll of quarters is what happened.”
The most wretched Burger Boy sight may have been a woman named Helen who was obsessed with Waylon and had followed him back to Nashville after she met him on tour. Terry George remembers her as “Hurricane Helen,” but Waylon called her “Crazy Helen.” She haunted the street behind Hillbilly Central, he wrote in his autobiography, always trying to slip in the door: “We tried to bar her from the building, but occasionally she’d slip through and lock herself in the bathroom. I didn’t know what to do with her. I tried to give her money to get back home, but after two or three days, she was back.”
George, too, recalls her persistence. “I came in the Burger Boy one morning, and I saw this girl sitting here. It was early in the morning, and she’d obviously been there all night. We were open twenty-four hours a day. A beautiful, pretty, pretty girl. She attracted my attention. Well, it turned out she followed [Waylon] down there. She told me this. She was just extremely infatuated with him. The next thing I know this girl was just into all kinds of drugs and seeing things underneath the table. It just kept getting worse and worse. She ended up losing all her teeth and ended up just horrible-looking. Basically, they just used her. Nicknamed her ‘Hurricane Helen’ and you understand why they did that. She would sleep at RCA under an air conditioner out back, and when they wanted to use her they’d use her and then chase her off.”
Waylon wrote later that Jessi gently persuaded Helen to go back home.
AROUND THE BURGER BOY and Hillbilly Central, there was one true criminal outlaw who ran with Waylon and the rest. He matched the musical outlaws quarter for quarter in pinball, and he had been a recording artist, although by the early 1970s he rarely sang anymore. He lurked on the fringes of the Hillbilly Central fraternity, appearing at sessions and then disappearing, lumbering bloodied into the Burger Boy after a scuffle in some back alley. He served hard time, shot a man, abused drugs with manic abandon, and was known to attack rivals with a bicycle chain, like one of those killers depicted in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
His name was Lee Emerson Bellamy, although everyone knew him as Lee Emerson. That’s how his name appeared on his Columbia Records singles released in the 1950s and on the dozens of songs he wrote for other artists. His own records never charted, but he made a lot of money with “I Thought I Heard You Calling My Name,” a hit for Porter Wagoner in 1957, and “Ruby Ann,” a number-one smash for Marty Robbins in 1963. In the early 1970s, he was signed to Fred Foster’s Combine Music, although his mind was often too clouded to do much writing. “He was doing a lot of pills,” says Richie Albright, who frequently saw him at the Burger Boy. “He just stayed up and stayed high, and I think he felt that was the way he had to be to write. Maybe that’s where he got all his good ideas. He was respected as a songwriter, but he was always so out of it that people didn’t open their doors to him. And it really got frustrating for him.”
Emerson hit Nashville in the mid-1950s, recording rockabilly-influenced sides for Columbia and sidling up to Marty Robbins, with whom he toured and recorded duets such as “I’ll Know You’re Gone” and “Where D’ja Go.” Emerson looked out for Marty’s song publishing interests and co-owned a booking agency with him. Memorably, though, the lean, muscular ex-marine took care of Marty’s messy business on the road.
“When Lee smiled sometimes, it was sort of an evil smile,” says Cowboy Joe Babcock, who cowrote with Emerson and sang behind Marty on the road from 1959 to 1965. “He had a big smile but his eyes would sort of bug out. He was a nice-looking man, but he was rough enough that if he held you up in a bank or something, you’d give him everything you had because he had the look that he’d shoot you. You’d know that Lee wasn’t bluffing.”
Emerson the bodyguard hovered close to Robbins, slipping into the audience to find loudmouths or pranksters throwing quarters. “One time we were playing a dance and a drunk was out in the audience heckling Marty, saying he wanted to fight him,” recalls Babcock. “Marty said from the stage, very courteously, ‘Well, sir, I would love to do that, but I have a man who does that for me.’” The fellow hollered that Marty should send that man out into the ballroom. “In the meantime,” says Babcock, “Lee had seen what was going on, and he approached from the back, six foot two with a trench coat on and all kinds of weapons all over him. He tapped him on the shoulder and with that big smile said, ‘I’m that guy. I’m the guy that does Marty’s fighting for him.’ He hit that guy on the elbow with his billy club, popped him on the elbow. You know how that can hurt. The guy dropped to the ground and disappeared under the crowd on his hands and knees.”
Drugs proved to be Emerson’s undoing, breaking up his marriage, fraying his relationship with Robbins, and hampering his songwriting. Babcock recalls Emerson overdosing and his fights becoming more frequent and savage. “One time when Lee went down to Printer’s Alley, he came back to the office all beat up. Somebody had gotten that bicycle chain away from him and worked him over in the face with it. Busted his nose all up. He had his wild and woolly ways. . . . He could have been so much more if he hadn’t gotten into pills, or had found the Lord.”
Donnie Fritts befriended Emerson at Raleigh Publishing, where they both were signed, and then at Combine Music when they landed there. He saw sadness with the danger and recalls Emerson’s grief when a woman left him to become a prostitute in Birmingham, Alabama. Sure, says Fritts, his friend set out to pummel the man who lured her away, but while she turned tricks, he checked into the hotel room next to hers just to be close by. And she never knew.
In 1965, Robbins and Emerson parted ways. Robbins sold the Emerson songs in his publishing company and left him at home when he went on the road. Three years later, Emerson shot a man in Memphis named Willie Joyner. The bullet only injured its target, but Emerson ran from the police as if it were murder, says son Rodney Bellamy. He jumped bail and fled to Florida, where the police finally hunted him down. Back in Memphis, he received a three-year sentence, and in 1971 he resurfaced on the streets of Nashville. He signed a writing contract at Combine, which proved a direct conduit to the world of Hillbilly Central, where he ran with Fritts and tagged along from time to time with Waylon and Tompall. “I know that he hung with Johnny Cash some,” adds Hazel Smith, “and it might have been because he was a pusher or something. He probably was. No doubt. I don’t know how the hell he made a living if he wasn’t.”
Emerson relied on forged prescriptions, according to Jim Casey. He explains that John Harris with the band Barefoot Jerry had gotten his medical license and gone into practice to make sorely needed money after a divorce. “John was not writing scripts [for uppers and downers] all over the place. He did not do that. That wasn’t the deal. But I think Lee Emerson knew he had the ability to, and Lee Emerson stole a pad of John’s scripts with his name and numbers and all of that stuff. Eventually the state got on John Harris about it. They came after John, and John was fearful for his career.”
Lee Emerson (right) in the 1950s with Opry legend Roy Acuff.
Courte
sy of Rodney Bellamy collection
Fritts warned Emerson that people all around Nashville wouldn’t mind to see him dead, and if he ever got badly shot or stabbed, not even the police would care. “If somebody kills you, they’ll give him a medal,” Fritts told him.
Waylon and Tompall may have wished for so dark a life outside the law to go along with their white-man Super Fly pose, but they could live vicariously through Lee Emerson, Music Row’s criminal outlaw.
We in Nashville were, of course, provincial innocents.
—Ralph McGill
Nine
* * *
Between Worlds
DESPITE WILLIE’S AND Waylon’s newly gained freedom in the recording industry and the rising youth culture embodied by Kris and the city’s college students and aspiring musicians, the old order would not release its grip on Nashville. A few judges still barred women from wearing pants in their courtrooms, the city banned ads for birth control, and private clubs that excluded racial minorities were happily tolerated. Indeed, the heavy smell of frying chicken frequently obscured the earthy aroma of patchouli.
Nixon had smelled the hot grease burning and brought his southern strategy to Tennessee in 1970, when he backed Republican William E. Brock III of Chattanooga against incumbent Democrat Albert Gore Sr. for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Brock outpolled Gore by almost fifty thousand votes in an election that also saw the rise of a Republican governor and the defection of many Nashville-area Democrats to the other side. Democratic mayor Beverly Briley had led that dash to the GOP, endorsing Nixon in 1968 and setting the stage for a Republican presidential candidate to carry Davidson County, Nashville’s home, for the first time since Reconstruction.
In the wake of city-county consolidation in the early 1960s, which created what is known as Metro government, Nashville’s conservative voting base had moved to the suburbs and then beyond to outlying counties such as Sumner and Williamson.
Rosanne Cash with father Johnny Cash.
Courtesy of Rosanne Cash Collection
Rosanne Cash—whose lone outlaw star may be her cover of Kristofferson’s “Broken Freedom Song,” which she contributed to one of her dad’s 1974 albums—didn’t need a political map to tell her about conservatism in the Nashville area. In 1973, at the age of eighteen, she moved away from her mother in California to her father’s home in Hendersonville, in Sumner County, about eighteen miles northeast of Nashville. It was far away from the verdant West End, and stuck in the pre-Woodstock era. “The counterculture was really visible in L.A., obviously, and it spilled over into Ventura [County, California, where I grew up],” she says. “You know, we’d go to the beaches in Los Angeles and Malibu and Santa Monica and just hang with all of the kids. So the counterculture was what I identified with. And then I got to Nashville and it was like it never happened. I mean, girls were still curling their hair and wearing pretty, frilly blouses, and things were really slow. And it was just very different. I think I actually tried to change myself at first. Like, I’m going to fit into this and slow down a bit, kind of narrow down a bit. But I couldn’t. It was too hard.
“In my dad’s house there were elements of the Old South. He had the black staff. Not totally. He had half and half. But Miss Leatha, this elderly black woman who cooked for him, it was as if she was still Civil War era: the way she thought, the way she acted with this great deference and kindness. So those Old South divisions were still really palpable.”
Old South divisions aside, there were days when Nashville’s authentic hillbilly culture echoed throughout the city like a rebel yell. Newspapers reported about the bride kidnapped the night before her wedding by a jilted lover, the shoplifter caught with six packages of country ham stuffed in his shirt, and the man shot over one dollar in a game of craps.
A far more serious story that nonetheless cast something of a rural prewar patina over Nashville was the brutal murders of Grand Ole Opry star David “Stringbean” Akeman and his wife, Estelle. Cousins John Brown and Douglas Brown stalked and killed the banjoist and rube comedian at his rural home north of Nashville late on November 10, 1973, after the weekly Opry broadcast. The city was thrust into the national headlines, becoming part of a tragic 1970s American narrative whose murdering characters also included Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Gary Gilmore.
The couple’s deaths also illustrated the dramatic convergence of old and new in Nashville. In life, Stringbean attracted network television producers and concert dates at folk-crazy colleges and universities, yet his personal life seemed more nineteenth century than 1973. News coverage of the murders and the subsequent investigation revealed a couple who lived in rusticity, leery of the modern world, preferring quaint hiding places for their money over banks and letting checks pile up as if they were junk mail. Furthermore, Stringbean relied on Estelle to drive him everywhere, suggesting a certain rejection of new technology, not to mention an old-world view of the role of women.
WHILE NASHVILLE WRESTLED with Stringbean’s murder, another institution forced the city to contemplate its past and its inflexibility. Since 1943, the Ryman Auditorium had played host to the Grand Ole Opry, but in 1970 its owners, the National Life and Accident Insurance Company, broke ground on the venerable radio show’s future home: Opryland USA, Nashville’s Disneyland on the Cumberland River. Moving the symbol of Nashville’s country music heritage up the river and out of town to the middle of an amusement park offended many, but performers unanimously welcomed it. Consensus inside the music business was that the Ryman was old, rickety, and ill-suited to host the growing number of country-themed television shoots invading the city. “Why, I’ve stood on that stage down there doing a matinee and looked up and could see the sky,” complained Roy Acuff, who was the Ryman’s leading critic. “It’s definitely a fire hazard and even the bricks are falling off the walls.” The plush new Opry House, its bricks firmly mortared together, would be state-of-the-art when it opened in the spring of 1974, akin to any venue in New York or Los Angeles.
But the transition was hardly quiet. When the last note from Acuff’s fiddle disappeared into the ether on the Opry’s final broadcast from the Ryman, National Life was planning to raze the old tabernacle and use some of the debris to build a new chapel at Opryland. But preservationists, led by Ada Louise Huxtable at the New York Times, howled: “That probably takes first prize for the pious misuse of a landmark and the total misunderstanding of the principles of preservation. This travesty has convinced a lot of people that demolition is an O.K. thing. Among them are Billy Graham and Tennessee Ernie Ford, who is reputed to be waiting to sing the first hymn.”
National Life blinked, agreeing to study the matter for a year. But then more bad press climbed into the church pews of the Opry. A standoff between the show’s management and longtime cast member Skeeter Davis demonstrated that intolerance and double standards still lived in Nashville. The city seemed determined to make people forget that Diane Nash and John Lewis had ever lived there.
The Davis debacle began to take shape on Saturday, December 8, 1973, as Metro police fanned out across the hills and dells north of Nashville looking for Stringbean’s killers and National Life fended off barbs from the Ryman’s protectors. Skeeter Davis, known for her earnest religious convictions as much as for her sublime 1960s pop hit “The End of the World,” kicked off her segment on the Opry that night by criticizing the arrest of several traveling Christians who were proselytizing at an area shopping mall. By the following Saturday night, Opry manager Bud Wendell had indefinitely suspended her from the broadcast.
Artists who appeared on the Opry knew of no official policy banning them from making political or religious statements, but they obediently adhered to an unwritten rule to that effect. Those who were interviewed about Skeeter’s suspension sympathized with her but, careful not to criticize management, suggested that she should have known better. Management, however, was not careful in enforcing its unwritten rule. A Billboard magazine reporter based in Nashville told the Tenness
ean that he could remember at least three performers who spoke out from the planks of the Ryman: Billy Grammer, who preached a sermon; the Wilburn Brothers, who endorsed George Wallace; and Ernest Tubb, who touted other Democratic politicians; a more thorough survey would have revealed the Opry appearance of Nashville-area congressman Richard Fulton, who sang a song called “Poor Little Paper Boy” during an election year. When reporters asked Wendell about the Wilburns and Wallace, he refused to comment.
Years later, Wendell confirmed that he’d booted Skeeter because her remarks had shown disrespect for the police, who were working so hard to solve the Stringbean case. And Skeeter—who finally returned to the Opry—admitted to scheduling an apology to those police who had arrested her but had balked after reading about the indictment of five cops on vice charges. “Evidently these officers had been using their power and official capacity to solicit sexual favors,” she wrote in her autobiography. “With this new development exposed, I found it impossible to apologize.”
DURING SKEETER’S ABSENCE, the Opry had shown that the right kind of political posturing could always find a home on its stage. After closing down the Ryman Auditorium with the last Friday Night Opry on Friday, March 15, 1974, management unveiled the show on Saturday at the new Opryland digs. A front-row space awaited Alabama governor George Wallace, paralyzed in 1972 from an assassination attempt, who’d be watching the stage appearance as guest of honor President Richard Nixon.
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