Paul Williams – There’s a higher power
But though the Fiddlers had a major-label record deal, playing bluegrass was a tough way to make a living, even after they moved in 1953 to Detroit, which was home to thousands of displaced southerners. With the Korean War still simmering, Williams decided to join the military.
“I had a brother who was overseas in Korea, in the Army,” he remembers. “And he wrote Mom, and told her, ‘Tell Paul they will probably draft him, and if he wants to be able to pick his career or job, he needs to enlist.’ Well, I thought about that. So I went home, and I went up there to the Air Force recruiting center in Wytheville, and took all those aptitude tests they give you — you know, to see if you’ve got any sense at all is about all it is, see if you know your name, and how to get back home, that’s about what it amounts to. They weren’t too picky.”
Trained as a radio operator, he wound up in Japan. “I was put on flying status over there, that’s where I won my wings. I flew in and out of Korea, Okinawa, Guam, Midway, Enewitak, northern Japan, Philippines, Formosa, and I was in and out of Korea at least twice a week. They were swapping prisoners at Panmunjom, and they were having peace talks, that’s what they called them. And we were flying supplies in on a C-119 troop carrier — the ones with the twin booms. They called them the flying coffin, because so many of them crashed. Every once in a while, you’d have some of those guys in the mountains shoot at you; we’d come back with holes in the booms, or maybe in the fuselage. And a lot in our squadron would fly coffins out, we’d haul the dead out. Our squadron was in and out of Korea so much that we were awarded the Korean service medal.”
Despite the rigors of service, Williams kept up with his music, after a fashion, playing electric guitar with a country band that worked in NCO and airmens’ clubs on and off base. After a year and a half, he returned stateside to Dyess AFB, near Abilene, Texas, and then, on October 9, 1957, to civilian life. In short order, he headed for Pikeville, Kentucky, where the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers were on WLSI. He caught the Asian flu there — “every joint in my body hurt like a toothache, it even hurt to touch my hair” — and had barely recovered when he got a phone call from Detroit.
“I was at the radio station one day, and Ezra and them were about to go on the air when the guy in the control room pecks on the glass and points. So I went in there, and he gave me the phone and said, ‘You got a phone call.’ Well, nobody even knew I was there except my parents, so I thought something had probably happened. I said hello, and the voice on the other end said, ‘Is this Paul Williams?’ I said yeah, and he said, ‘This is Jimmy Martin. I’d like for you to come and sing tenor for me and play the mandolin.'”
Williams had met Martin once back in West Virginia, and they’d both been in Detroit in 1953 — Martin & the Sunny Mountain Boys were on Casey Clark’s Jamboree while the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers worked the Big Barn Frolic. But, Williams confesses, it had been a long time since he’d played the mandolin, and he wasn’t sure what to expect, nor whether he could do the job. He worked on his playing (Crowe “knew exactly what Jim wanted, and he was a big help to me”), and he worked on his singing, and in the end, what would become the quintessential Sunny Mountain Boys sound came together pretty quickly.
“I’ll tell you one thing about Jim, he would work with you,” Williams says. “We would sit and work for hours, and he would tell me what he wanted on the tenor, and I had a pretty good idea how to sing with somebody. You’ll have people, even today, they’ll sing, but they’re going to do their thing, and if there’s any togetherness to be had, you’re going to have to get with them.
“Well, Jim had that knack of wanting to get with you, and wanting you to get with him, so we’d work on that. And I learned a little tidbit from him that I didn’t know from all the time I’d sung harmony, and that was phrasing. And when we got to saying our words alike, and I learned to tone my voice with his, we wound up with a pretty good duet.”
To put it that way is a monumental understatement. The trio went into a Nashville studio just a few months after Williams joined up, and every one of the six songs they recorded in the four-hour session was a classic, as was almost everything they would cut over the next two years. While there was no doubt that Martin was in the driver’s seat, it was the combination — Crowe’s brittle, driving banjo, Williams’ sturdy mandolin, Martin’s booming rhythm and nervy, syncopated runs, and, even more importantly, their tight, hair-raising vocal trio — that made the Sunny Mountain Boys a group for the ages.
That was true even after Crowe departed, his place taken first by a young Paul Craft (who would go one to become one of country music’s great songwriters) and then by Bill Emerson. Each was trained to emulate the Crowe sound — or, better, the Crowe-Martin sound — but the centerpiece of the singing was still the gritty, soulful tension between the voices of Martin and Williams. When they harmonized on a duet such as “Stormy Waters”, a third part was simply unnecessary.
A Sunny Mountain Boy’s life was all-consuming, and while it had its advantages — “I loved being on the radio, I loved being in front of a crowd and seeing people react to what you’re doing,” Williams says — it had its drawbacks, too, and plenty of them. From Detroit, they moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, and the Louisiana Hayride; then to Wheeling, West Virginia, and the WWVA Jamboree; and finally to Nashville. Regular radio appearances anchored their schedule, but incessant touring was necessary to survive, and that was a rough way to make a living.