Charlie Walker – Pick Me Up On Your Way Down
It’s a neat coincidence that this collection arrived on my doorstep just days after I heard that Procter & Gamble, maker of Charmin toilet paper, was going to resurrect Mr. Whipple, the long-retired character who pitched the brand. For those not old enough to remember, Mr. Whipple’s punch line was “Don’t squeeze the Charmin,” and back in 1967 it was the inspiration for Charlie Walker’s last Top 10 hit, “Don’t Squeeze My Sharmon”.
It wasn’t exactly a novelty song — the tag line was the plea of a man with a flirtatious girlfriend — but it was pretty close. Still, it was my first introduction to Walker, and when a DJ at my hometown country radio station played it back-to-back with Walker’s big hit of 1958, “Pick Me Up On Your Way Down”, I was hooked. It was one of the first country shuffles I ever heard, and it’s still one of the very best.
A Texan born in 1926, Walker was playing music in the honky-tonks around Dallas long before he was old enough to drink in them. After the war he landed a job as a DJ in San Antonio, where he built his show into one of the most influential in the country (he was inducted into the Country Music DJs Hall Of Fame in 1981).
The connections he made in the process served to get his recording career started in the early 1950s, when he cut 10 sides for the Imperial label. Those songs — competent but generally undistinguished — didn’t go anywhere, and with the exception of one cut that slipped into the top-10, neither did the eight sides he cut for Decca in the middle of the decade, nor the six he cut for Mercury in 1957.
Walker hit it big, though, with “Pick Me Up On Your Way Down”, a Harlan Howard tune he plucked from a box of tapes that Ray Price (then burning up the charts) invited him to dip into after arranging for Walker to be signed by his own label, Columbia. With a classic storyline, slippery pedal steel guitar from Jimmy Day, twin fiddles by Tommy Jackson and Dale Potter, and harmony by Price himself, the song was a smash.
It turned out to be something of a commercial fluke for Walker, who reached the top-40 only a dozen more times in his career, but it wasn’t a musical accident. The other three cuts that emerged from the same session (one, the flip side of “Pick Me Up”, was written by a young Bill Anderson) had the same kind of no-nonsense, nothing-but-country sound, with Walker’s stolid, deceptively easygoing vocals delivering the lyrics with a winning simplicity.
The success of “Pick Me Up” and its follow-up, “I’ll Catch You When You Fall”, guaranteed Walker was going to be cutting honky-tonk shuffles for a long time; indeed, the second CD of the four-disc set is almost nothing but. Yet for some reason, nothing Walker did — not even brilliant songs such as “When My Conscience Hurts The Most”, “Who Will Buy The Wine”, or “Facing The Wall” — was sufficient to establish him securely on the charts.
Chris Skinker’s notes to the set suggest that Walker did better at the jukeboxes than on radio, and that, plus a lot of touring, kept his career going and gained him Opry membership in 1967. But for most of the ’60s, Walker was pretty much below the radar, even when cutting early versions of classics such as “Truck Driving Man” and “Close All The Honky Tonks”.
When Walker moved from Columbia to sister label Epic in 1964, Billy Sherrill became his producer, holding the position right through Walker’s last recordings for the label in 1971. Sherrill sometimes experimented with Walker’s sound, with mixed results; there are some pretty embarrassing cuts here (the worst a remake of the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women”), but also some pleasant surprises.
Though Walker wasn’t generally much of a balladeer, Sherrill elicited some wonderful performances from him in that vein, among them Cindy Walker’s lovely “You’re All Dressed Up (With Somewhere To Go)”. But honky-tonk predominated, and Sherrill brought in some great songs by writers such as Howard, Anderson, Cindy Walker, Dallas Frazier and Autry Inman. He served them up, and Walker knocked them out of the park.
Pick Me Up On Your Way Down constitutes a fine, if not very wide-ranging, body of work, not only offering a big heap of underappreciated, stone country material, but also a wonderful 1969 set of live tracks from Dallas’ Longhorn Ballroom that reveals a musician who knew just what he was there for. “Everybody dance” was his refrain that night, and the set concludes with a dynamite version of “El Rancho Grande”, identified by Walker as a polka and sung in Spanish.
I suspect he’s not spent a lot of time thinking about artistic integrity, at least not in those terms, but Charlie Walker came out of the Texas dance halls, and he never forgot it — and keeping that close to your roots might just define artistic integrity as well as anything.