Paul Williams – There’s a higher power
“When we were working out of Louisiana, we played a lot of auditoriums,” he recalls. “Out in West Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, you played a lot of dance halls. And what you did was a 30-minute show, first. There’d be tables all around the edge of a great big dance floor, and of course, they’d serve drinks and everything. And after 30 minutes, why, you played music they could dance by. That’s all you played from then on until midnight. I started carrying a Les Paul electric guitar with me, and an amp. And I’d lay the mandolin down and pick it some for the dancing.
“Later on, when we moved from the Hayride to Wheeling, we hired Kirk Hansard and Lois Johnson, and they would do country, and I’d switch off mandolin onto the electric. We got to where we were versatile, we weren’t hung up on one thing. We went out to Las Vegas in 1962, and played at the Golden Nugget — seven shows a night. They had a group out there called the Features, and then they had this Tahitian dance outfit, and then they had us. We rotated all the time. Everybody did 20 minutes. When you’d done your 20 minutes, you had 40 minutes and then you were on again, and it just rotated right from 5 o’clock on up until midnight. And I tell you what, that’ll work on you.”
It was dangerous, too. “I remember one time, we were on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, going to play a club in the Bronx. And I had just come out of a tunnel and I blew a right front tire. Jimmy was hollering, ‘Hold it in the road, don’t hit your brake, hold it in the road, don’t hit your brake, hold it in the road.’ So I was fighting that thing, and everybody was hollering instructions, you know, and I finally just let it roll until it got done rolling, and we dug all that stuff out of the trunk and got out the spare. I’ve thought about that so many times. We’d just come out of that tunnel, and if that had happened in the tunnel, I don’t know, it might have been a different situation.”
Williams might have remained with Martin nonetheless, but for a profound, life-changing experience. “In December of 1962, I married Jimmy’s sister,” he begins. “We bought a house out in Donelson Hills in Nashville, and then in August of ’63, we came back up to visit her parents — her dad was Jimmy’s stepfather, Jimmy’s dad died when he was just about four years old. It was on a Saturday night, and they were having meeting there at the church, a little country church, and my wife wanted me to go with her. So I went up there with her, and after they sang maybe three songs or so, this man got up, and he began to preach.
“Well, it seemed like everything he preached was just hitting me right in the heart. And I felt so condemned, I had so much conviction on me that I got to where I couldn’t hold my head up. If I held my head up I just looked at the back of the seat in front of me.
“After the service was over that night, we went back out to the house and sat around and talked a while, and everybody went to bed. I couldn’t sleep. What that man preached was still a-ringin’ in my ears, and I felt so troubled in my heart, I didn’t know what to do. I waited until I was 100 percent certain that everybody was asleep, and I eased out of the bed and went out in the yard. I was going to try to pray. I was so troubled, I was going to try to get rid of this feeling, whatever it took.
“I never will forget it, it was a clear night and it was a full moon. I got on my knees in the front yard, and I looked up, and the Devil said, ‘You look like a dog fixin’ to howl.’ That’s the truth. So I got ashamed, and I eased back in the house, slipped back in the bed. And I don’t believe I ever went to sleep.
“The next morning, my wife was sitting there on the arm of a chair, all prettied up, and she said, ‘Hurry up and clean up, we’re going to go to church.’ So I went in the kitchen, and I was fixing up some stuff there to wash my face and shave, and I just didn’t want to go back. I still had that nagging feeling, and I was doing everything I could not to give in to it. So I could have shaved about nine faces while I was shaving mine.
“We went out there, and there were a couple of people coming out the side door, and I said, Well, it’s over. I sort of felt relieved, you know. And she said, ‘Well, we’ll go in and visit,’ because most of them were her folks, you see. But when we went in, the people were just standing around. And this fellow, he reached out his hand, and he said, ‘Come on in, we’ve been waiting for you.’ They hadn’t even started service. And my heart felt like it fell all the way down to my feet. So I went in and sat down. They sang a couple of songs, and this preacher, his name was Jim Kinsler, he pointed his finger at me, and he said, ‘Young man, don’t you feel like you need to pray?’ And I did. I needed to get rid of that feeling.
“I often tell it like this: I don’t know whether I ran, walked or what, but I wound up on my knees at the altar. And others gathered around me, and were counseling me, and trying to help me reach the Lord. And this one preacher leaned over and said, ‘As soon as you trust Him, he’ll save you.’
“Well, how right he was, because just about that time, I was trying to think of everything I’d done that I wanted God to forgive me — I had an itemized list I was going down — and when he said that, I just turned it all over. I said, here I am. And I felt this feeling come over me, and that gnawing feeling that had been bothering me since Saturday night was gone. I had a good, warm feeling, and I felt it from my feet to my hair.
“I knew then that something had happened, and all of that guilt was gone. And I didn’t know any of those people, but I loved every one of them. I really did. That was the prettiest bunch of people I ever looked at in my life. And that’s when the Lord saved my soul.