Porter Wagoner – Hillbilly deluxe
Such condescension must have rankled Wagoner and Foley more than a little. An affable host in the Bing Crosby mode, Foley was known for quipping, “Smile when you call me hillbilly.” As far from “howling” as Howell County is from the Big Apple, Foley’s smooth croon and ease with an audience impressed Wagoner no end. He especially loved Red’s recitations.
“Red always told me when you do a recitation, don’t talk too loud, speak in a normal tone,” Wagoner explains today. “I remember watching him, and if someone in the crowd was making noise, he’d lighten his voice just a little and everyone would get quiet to hear him.
“The tone you use on a recitation,” he continues, “how you say the lines so they don’t sound sing-songy even though it has to rhyme — that’s what makes the difference in whether or not it comes off cornball.”
Wagoner’s most important Jubilee discovery, though, was “A Satisfied Mind”, a song he introduced on the program. As solemn a record as “Company’s Comin'” was high-spirited, the single kicks off with trio harmonies like church folk lining out a hymn, a calling card of the early Wagoner sound. “When I leave this old world, when my time has run out…I’ll leave…with a satisfied mind,” he avers, without ever sounding entirely consoled.
“A Satisfied Mind” bumped Faron Young’s “Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young” — a quite different exit strategy — from atop the Billboard C&W charts in June 1955, not long after Wagoner signed again with RCA. With increasingly itchy feet, he stood with Siman and the Jubilee another year and a half before deciding in 1957 he needed to move on — to Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry.
Wagonmaster includes a song called “My Many Hurried Southern Trips”, co-written by Wagoner and Dolly Parton, where a bus driver recounts the sometimes tragic, always poignant stories of folks who have to get out of town quick. Wagoner first recorded it in 1971, opening that version with a telling announcement over a bus station loud speaker:
“May I have your attention please. Southbound bus loading, gate number eight. All aboard for Willow Springs, Kabul, Rodgersville, Koshokong, Ravenden, Williford, Jonesboro, Marked Tree, Memphis. All points south, all aboard please!”
You pass those towns if you’re leaving Porter Wagoner’s neck of the Ozarks, Tennessee bound.
In Nashville over the next decade, Wagoner established himself as an Opry favorite, a country music television pioneer, and one of the genre’s biggest stars. He became a savvy businessman, too. Warden Music, for instance, begun in Springfield with his manager and pedal steel player Don Warden, owned the publishing to Jimmy Driftwood’s “The Battle Of New Orleans”, a monster chart hit — C&W, pop and R&B — for Johnny Horton in 1959.
But all that came later. As historian Bill Malone observes in Country Music U.S.A., Wagoner was at first “a hillbilly in a time of artistic cloudiness.” At RCA, Atkins now headed the country division and was famously (infamously, some say) helping to invent the Nashville Sound, country’s pop-inflected rejoinder to rock ‘n’ roll. Wagoner stood out on a roster dominated by crooner Eddy Arnold, folk-pop trio the Browns, bluesy singer-songwriter Don Gibson and, of course, Elvis Presley.
Unsurprisingly, Wagoner’s early Nashville sides fit the country-pop mold. “I Thought I Heard You Calling My Name” features fiddle and pedal steel guitar, but Wagoner’s voice is swathed in echo — people stare because “I’m talking but there’s no one beside me” — as the Anita Kerr Singers aptly haunt his every delirious step. It climbed to #11 in the fall of 1957, but that was it. Wagoner wouldn’t have a record nearly as successful for four years.
Listen today to his records from this dry spell, however, and it’s plain that Wagoner wasn’t such a bad fit for the Nashville Sound after all. His 1960 take on John D. Loudermilk’s “Falling Again”, for instance, didn’t sell a lick, but it’s a swell little country-pop single nonetheless, as is its flip, the rustically themed but pop-beautiful “An Old Log Cabin For Sale”. Perhaps Wagoner simply didn’t get the promotional push of his big-name colleagues. Still, these sides remind that Wagoner is at base a crooner, not that dissimilar from another RCA Nashville Sounder, “Gentleman” Jim Reeves.
As with most country singers, from Gene Autry to Floyd Tillman to Red Foley and beyond, the Thin Man from West Plains doesn’t bend notes like his contemporary George Jones, nor does he swing and soar like Ray Price. Rather, he hits his notes square and holds them, often quite tenderly. Wagoner sings with great rhythmic and emotional energy, to be sure, and his voice is less self-consciously pretty than Reeves’ velvety purr.
Wagoner’s voice is riddled with the various supposed imperfections that help create the effect termed “twang.” Nonetheless, the croon is his basic vocal attack. Though the sound of his records changed a bit before he sold many of them, Wagoner’s Ozark-bred croon never faltered.
Chart success arrived at last when in 1962 Atkins told Wagoner to schedule a session in his absence. The result was “Misery Loves Company”, a Jerry Reed song that found Porter slapping backs and buying rounds. Vocalist Kerr and company mock his attempts to party away the blues as Jimmy Day’s screaming pedal steel waltzes a tightrope between catharsis and delirium. “Help me get over this love,” Porter beseeches. “I’ll handle the next love all by myself.”
Wagoner produced his own records from then on. Officially, he says, the credit went to someone else — usually Bob Ferguson — in accordance with RCA policy. But it was Porter who typically booked the sessions, identified material, hired the musicians and then worked out arrangements with them.
With Porter at the wheel, hits came steadily, a couple of top-10s a year, demonstrating his production and performance gifts — and an ear for enduring songs. For example, he scored a #4 hit in 1965 with one of country’s best-loved prison songs, Curly Putman’s “Green, Green Grass Of Home”, a key record in the transition from the Nashville Sound to the renewed twang of early countrypolitan.
Likewise, he rode Bill Anderson’s “I’ve Enjoyed As Much Of This As I Can Stand”, so pathetic it’s funny, into the top-10 in 1963, and in 1966, he eerily embodied the narrator of another Anderson song, “The Cold Hard Facts Of Life”, the quintessential modern revenge record and a #2 hit.
Two more hits, “Sorrow On The Rocks” and “I’ll Go Down Swinging”, stand with “Misery Loves Company” among the most indelible tear-in-your-beer numbers in all of country music. Pretty good for someone who’s all but a teetotaler.
“I never really drank in my life, not even beer,” Wagoner explains. “I had a brother who was an alcoholic, my older brother Oscar, and I seen my mama embarrassed when he’d be drinking. He’d drink in front of her or anyone. When he had to have a drink, he had to have a drink. And that really turned me around.”