San Antonio, 1954
THE NEON SIGN on the Laredo Highway blinked “AL’S COU TRY CL B.” A hand-painted signboard leaning on the front of the windowless building advertised “Live Band.” Willie and Cosett Holland pulled over. They’d found the place they’d been looking for on the south side of San Antonio, the oldest and third-largest city in Texas, which looked more like Mexico than any part of Texas Willie had seen.
Al’s Country Club was where the Mission City Playboys were playing. Willie and Cosett, who worked together in Bud Fletcher and the Texans back home, had already approached Easy Adams, the leader of the Texas Tophands, the hottest Western Swing dance band in South Texas, but Easy didn’t have any work to offer.
“Well, then, who’s the second-most popular band in San Antonio?” Willie asked. Easy Adams’s answer took them to Al’s. “They wanted to know if they could sit in,” Dave Isbell, the bandleader, said. “I told them, ‘Come on.’ At the end of the night, I asked Holland if he wanted to join the band, because I was looking for a fiddle player. He said he wanted the job. Then the other guy came up to me and said, ‘We’re working together. We’d like to be together.’”
The band agreed to add Willie Nelson too and to give him a split of whatever money they made. Dave Isbell said Willie’s timing was good. “My lead guitar player was at Lackland AFB and got transferred to Germany. Willie stepped right on in.” Cosett Holland played fiddle, Johnny Bush played drums, Lucky Carajohn played piano, Carl Walker played steel, Frog Isbell played bass, and Dave Isbell led the band, much like Bud Fletcher led the Texans. Willie played lead guitar but never sang.
Willie moved Martha and his baby girl, De Lana, born in Hill County on November 11, 1953, into the back half of a rent house on Labor Street, just southeast of downtown San Antonio. Carl Walker lived with a woman in the front of the house. Cosett Holland slept on a cot in the dining room in between. When they weren’t playing dances, they were checking out other dances and the nightlife of San Antonio, which was not unlike the nightlife in West and Waco. “Same music, same people, only more places to play,” Willie said.
San Antonio was the biggest small town in Texas. Between its reputation as a trade center for rural folks, ranchers, and farmers across South Texas from the Wintergarden to the Rio Grande Valley, and the city’s curious mix of Anglos, Mexicans, and blacks, and its distinctive Latin flavor, San Antonio was more exotic than Hill County or McLennan County. Nowhere but in San Antonio did Mexicans play polkas with as much zeal as the Germans and Bohemians did. Audiences measured music by how danceable it was. If you could do the two-step to a song, it was worth playing.
JOHNNY Bush, the Mission City Playboy who drummed and sang, wasn’t that impressed by Cosett Holland. He’d heard too many hot fiddlers around his hometown Houston, like Cliff Bruner and Harry Choates. But Johnny took an immediate shine to the little red-haired cat with Cosett. There was something about the glint in his eye that suggested a fellow mischief maker, which became apparent the first time he went to visit the Nelsons at their rent house on Labor Street.
“As I drove up, Willie was running out the back door, and this iron pot was following him,” Johnny said. “It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. He outran that pot. Then he turned. When he did, that pot hit the garage. He stood there with that grin and said, ‘She loves me. You got a cigarette? I need a match. What time is it?’ They’d be fighting one minute and be laughing about it the next.”
Dave Isbell liked Martha well enough, but he encouraged her to stay home like the other women attached to members of the Mission City Playboys. “We didn’t want the gals coming out,” Dave said, fearing the women would chase away prospective fans. But Martha’s case was special, since she was as adept with a knife as she was with a pot.
“She was beautiful. She was an Indian gal, so she was pretty mean to him when she got pissed off,” explained Dave, relating how she threw a knife at Willie as he was walking out the door once and almost hit Holland. “I’m gonna find the meanest goddamn girl in the world and I’m going to marry her and I’m going to move in with you,” Cosett growled at Willie.
“I already found the meanest goddamn woman in the world,” Willie informed him.
Johnny Bush kept his distance. “She was hostile, it didn’t matter if she was drunk or not,” he said. “She liked me and my wife, Jean, all right. But she wanted Willie to get a job, she wanted some money coming in, just like all women did.”
Willie preferred playing music. “If he needed money, he’d go hock his guitar,” Johnny said. “If he got a gig, he couldn’t play the gig because he didn’t have a guitar. If his guitar was in hock, he’d hock the bumper jack he carried around with him in his green ’forty-seven Ford. The gas tank was always empty, but he could pull the choke and get the last drop of gas from the tank. He was always hustling until he could land on his feet.”
The Mission City Playboys played the Walter Ranch House, the Texas Star Inn, Mugwam’s, the old Al’s Country Club, Charlie Walker’s club, the Barn, out on the Houston highway, the Skyline in Austin, the Cherry Springs dance hall out on the Mason Highway near Fredricksburg, and clubs in Houston every once in a while.
One trip to Houston took them to ACA Studios, on Washington Avenue, a recording facility where a band could make a record by playing a song and having it recorded on audiotape. The Mission City Playboys’ recordings became seven-inch 45 rpm singles released by Sarg Records, a small label in Luling, east of San Antonio. Charlie Fitch, the owner of the label, chose the tunes “Satisfied or Sorry,” “No Longer Afraid,” and “Let’s Do It Up Brown,” hoping one would become popular on the radio and on jukeboxes, a hope unrealized.
When Dave Isbell quit so he could look after his sick wife, the band morphed into the Mission City Playboys led by Carl Walker, then Johnny Bush and the Hillbilly Playboys, with “exclusive management by Willie Nelson,” according to the posters printed up by Johnny’s father. Willie had played long enough to know that if he was going to make money playing music, he needed a piece of the action, like managers and booking agents got. But there was precious little action to get a piece of, which made it hard to keep food on the table and Martha off his back.
Willie didn’t give a shit. He was playing music and having a good time honky-tonking, and San Antonio was made for drinking, drinking songs, and drinking songwriters like himself. The city was sprinkled with icehouses, informal open-air social centers where beer drinking was a year-round pastime. The Lone Star and Pearl breweries, the biggest regional brands in the Southwest, were based in San Antone. Both breweries sponsored large Western Swing bands—Adolph Hofner’s Pearl Wranglers, which featured a jazz fiddler named J. R. “Chat the Cat” Chatwell, and Lone Star’s Texas Tophands, the first band Willie tried to sit in with in San Antonio, which featured fiddler Easy Adams and Big Bill Lister, at six foot seven the tallest guitar player in Texas. The Pearl Wranglers performed on 50,000-watt KABC radio every weekday at 1:15 p.m. and regularly appeared on KABC’s Parade of Stars live show. Each band was considered the best dance band in South Texas, depending on what brand you drank, and frequently engaged in battle dances that concluded with an inebriated audience.
Adolph Hofner was San Antonio’s Bob Wills, a singer and bandleader well versed in swing and blues who also played to the local Czech, German, and Mexican communities by working in popular ethnic dance numbers such as the “Paul Jones,” “Herr Schmidt,” “Put Your Little Foot,” “Julida Polka,” “El Rancho Grande,” and “Jalisco.”
Willie was good enough and bold enough to ask to sit in with the Wranglers and to continue to do so in case Hofner needed another musician. But before Adolph had the need, Willie found a better home thirty-five miles southeast of the Alamo in a rolling pasture between Poteet and Pleasanton, at the base of the transmitter for KBOP radio 1380. The station was licensed to broadcast during daylight hours and serve the small farming community of Pleasanton, but its 50-watt signal reached into parts of San Antonio.
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Aaron Allan had just left KBOP to take a job at WOAI in San Antonio, and word reached Dave Isbell. “My sister wanted me to take that job,” Dave said. “I told her I wasn’t interested, so Willie stepped up and proposed he interview for the position. He lied like a dog and said he’d been a DJ before.”
Willie drove to the door of Dr. Ben O. Parker, who owned the station. Dr. Parker was the dean of the Texas Chiropractic College in San Antonio, pastor of Harriman Place Christian Church, and a community leader in Pleasanton. The station had gone on the air in 1950 and was one of three owned by Dr. Parker and his wife, Mona. He was operations manager, doing the hiring and firing. Mona was the station’s business manager and chief engineer—the first woman in the United States to receive her First Class Radio Operator/Engineer’s license from the Federal Communications Commission.
KBOP looked like KHBR in Hillsboro, where Willie had performed with Bud Fletcher’s Texans. The red-haired, brown-eyed man with the winning personality proceeded to sell himself to the Parkers—selling being a fundamental element of radio, of making music, and of going through life.
Doc Parker had Willie go into the broadcast booth and read the tongue-tangling copy he gave him. “Pleasanton pharmacy, where your pharmaceutical needs are filled precisely and accurately...” He flubbed some of the lines but acted like he’d read the copy perfectly, flashing a confident smile at the end of the reading. Parker hired him for $40 a week, and Willie moved Martha and Lana into the Palm Courts, a small apartment complex in Pleasanton.
He proceeded to learn the ins and outs of radio by performing any and all duties required—signing on in the morning, playing records, reading the news, entertaining the folks at home, keeping logs, selling advertising time, recording commercials and announcements, whatever was called for. The Parkers quickly determined that signing on the station at sunrise was Willie’s weak hand. “My parents would get up and wait to hear the signal come on,” said Charlotte Ramsey, the Parkers’ daughter. Too often they were greeted by silence. Willie was a slow riser, usually because he’d been out the night before singing and playing. The Parkers liked him so much they moved him to a later shift.
Pleasanton was close enough for Willie to listen to Aaron Allan on WOAI, the 50,000-watt station in San Antonio that carried the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights, Charlie Walker on KMAC, Stan Cox on KONO, and the on-air talents who performed live, like Red River Dave, the Singing Cowboy, on WOAI, Big Bill Lister on KABC, and Adolph Hofner on KTSA. Charlie Walker was a role model. An engaging, charismatic radio host whose folksy speaking manner was said to have been influenced by his habit of dipping snuff, Walker was also a performer who recorded for Decca, eventually recording the Texas two-step classic “Pick Me Up on Your Way Down.” Charlie Walker worked radio, ballrooms, and recording studios with equal panache. He befriended Willie and they used their microphones to tease one another on the air.
Willie wanted to be like him and like Aaron Allan—a performer, not just a disc jockey playing the performer’s song. “I can write better songs than the ones I’m playing on the radio,” he would complain to Manuel Davila, who hosted the conjunto radio show in Spanish, which aired for two hours before Willie came back on the air to sign off the station at sunset. “Then do it,” Davila would tell him.
Taking advantage of the electronic equipment around him, he made a recording of two of his songs in his spare time and sent the tape to Charlie Fitch, the owner of Sarg Records in Luling, who’d put out the recordings he did with Dave Isbell and the Mission City Playboys. Willie recorded on an old tape that Dr. Parker had used to record stock reports on, and in an eager, convincing voice made his pitch:
“Hello, Sarg, you probably don’t remember me. My name’s Willie Nelson. I cut a session with Dave Isbell down at ACA in Houston the Sarg Record label was going to release. I talked to you about a recording contract and I was supposed to send a tape over but I never got around to it till now. I work down here at KBOP in Pleasanton, Texas. I got a few minutes, I thought I’d put down a couple on tape and let you listen and see what you thought about it.”
He’d been singing both songs since he was a kid. “When I’ve Sang My Last Hillbilly Song” was sung in a voice that almost mimicked Lefty Frizzell as he whined, “I hope and I pray you’ll forgive me and remember...”
“The Storm Has Just Begun” was equally heartfelt, evoking sorrow in the line “when those teardrops start to flow, I realize the storm has just begun.”
When he finished singing, Willie signed off.
“Well, there they are. See what you think about them. If you like them, let me know about them, will you? I work down here every day. I’m off Saturday. And if you don’t like them, well, let me know that too. It won’t hurt my feelings a bit. Thank you a lot, Sarg.”
His voice was followed by Dr. Parker’s voice reading the stock report: “... Seventeen and three-quarters, we have some food lockers selling . . .”
Charlie Fitch did not respond.
WILLIE Hugh Nelson wasn’t making progress. Johnny Bush and the Hillbilly Playboys weren’t getting many bookings. Johnny Bush allowed how he really liked Willie’s guitar playing more than he liked his singing, a comment Willie never forgot. “Willie didn’t really give a rat’s ass what I thought, or so I believed at the time,” Johnny said. “But evidently he really did. He didn’t say anything directly to me, but he let me know.”
Johnny became a KBOP regular. When records were playing, Willie and Johnny would compare opinions about what it took to make it. “We’d sit in that studio in Pleasanton and talk about it. We knew to make it you had to have a distinctive style so if people heard you, they knew immediately who you are. Willie already had his style, but he was covering it up.”
They figured out they should take advantage of the radio station, so Johnny, Willie, and KBOP’s engineer, Red Hilburn, took turns hosting their own shows back-to-back. “Red had a fifteen-minute show and I would be his guest,” Johnny said. “I would have my show and have Willie as my guest. Then Willie would have his fifteen-minute show and have Red as his guest. Between the three of us, we had forty-five minutes of playing time.”
In early December, Willie and Johnny pulled over in Leming, about ten miles north of Pleasanton, to talk to the lady who owned a club there called the Red Barn. She immediately recognized Willie as the disc jockey at KBOP. “Y’all have a band?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am, a great band with fiddle and steel,” Willie replied, looking her straight in the eye. Johnny Bush could scarcely believe what he was hearing. Willie was lying his ass off, but the woman was buying every word.
“I need a band for Christmas Eve and Christmas night,” she told him. “What would you charge?”
“One hundred dollars a night,” Willie told her without hesitating.
When they got back in the car, Johnny looked at Willie like he was crazy. “What are we going to do? We don’t have a PA. We don’t have a band.”
“Don’t worry,” Willie assured him with the smile of a confidence man. “We’ll think of something.”
Willie found a pedal steel player named Dale Watson. They pulled off the gig, but when Willie was settling up, the club owner confronted him.
“Where’s your fiddle player?”
Willie told her the fiddler was sick and couldn’t make it, a better excuse than telling him the truth.
“If you don’t have a fiddle player tomorrow night, you’re not going to get paid.”
As they walked back to Willie’s car, Johnny Bush was worried. “What are we going to do? We don’t have a fiddle player.”
“Something will happen,” Willie said with a shrug. He didn’t seem worried at all.
Willie’s father, Ira, had driven down from Fort Worth in a brand-new Ford to see his son, his daughter-in-law, and his baby granddaughter for the holiday, and he’d brought his fiddle with him. “Ira could only play two hoedowns on fiddle,” Johnny said. “There was a popular dance called the Paul Jones
where everyone would go ’round in two circles until a whistle blew and you danced with the person standing in front of you. Every time the club owner would look up at the stage, we were playing the Paul Jones while Ira fiddled. It was a great crowd and we got paid. Willie never gave anything like that a second thought. He just knew things would work out, and they did. He was fearless. He conned that lady and she didn’t even know it.”
Despite Willie’s persuasive powers and Johnny’s belief in him, the two were having a hard time making ends meet. Johnny was so desperate, he had hitched a ride to Houston on a Central Freight Line truck, looking for gigs, and went to his mother’s house way out on Humble Road. “I heard this noise and went into the living room, and there was Willie on the couch, looking through the phone book.”
Johnny asked what he was doing.
“I wanted to make sure I was in the right house,” Willie said. “You have a job?”
Johnny told him he was broke and stranded.
“I’ve got a car,” Willie said. So they went out looking for gigs. At the Chuck Wagon, a little-bitty joint out on North Shepherd, the club owner informed them he had an opening for Friday. “We can do it,” Willie volunteered.
“How are we going to do the gig?” Johnny asked.
“Hell if I know,” Willie replied.
They borrowed a beat-up Fender amplifier and a microphone from Johnny’s uncle, Smilin’ Jerry Jericho, and a National guitar from Johnny’s dad. Johnny found a pedal steel player named Joe Brewer, who’d just been fired from Webb Pierce’s band. Nobody showed. The club owner was pissed. Willie drove Johnny to San Antonio and then returned to Pleasanton.
When he got home, Martha and Lana were gone. Martha had written a message on the mint-green wall of their living room in aerosol fake snow for Christmas trees that read “You Son Of A Bitch.” Johnny and his wife, Jean, came by and found Willie in the room, staring at a television with the vertical picture flipping on the screen.
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