Porter Wagoner – Hillbilly deluxe
Witnessing Oscar Wagoner’s decline — he committed suicide a few months after seriously injuring himself in a 1965 car wreck — was partial inspiration for the first and best of Wagoner’s several theme albums, Confessions Of A Broken Man, in 1966. From its opening recitation, an exquisitely imagined version of Hank Williams’ “Men With Broken Hearts” through the grim musical question “How Far Down Can I Go?” to the funeral preparations in the concluding recitation “My Last Two Tens”, Confessions is a concentrated dose of alcoholism and grief, misery without company.
Its most arresting moment is yet another recitation, “Skid Row Joe”, a #3 hit written by Freddie Hart in which Porter spots a “one-time real famous singing star, one of my favorites.” “Joe” is now a homeless drunk in “the dirty part of town,” volunteering his story to strangers and pledging unconvincingly, “I’m gonna quit. Yes sir, I’m gonna quit.” On the Grammy-winning album cover, Porter is Joe himself, huddled in rags on the steps of the Ryman Auditorium.
“Bob Ferguson came up with that idea,” Wagoner recalls. “And he did the makeup on me, too. He [modeled it after] an old-man character he used to do himself, Eli Possum Trot.”
“One time I wanted to see what the Skid Row people were like and went to this place up in Chicago,” he recalls. “Boy, I didn’t like what I seen at all. People that were down and out and hungry, people who’d just turned their back on society. It was really a sad thing. I was glad I did it, but I didn’t want to do it no more.”
In 1960, Wagoner began his television program — “bringing you your favorite stars and songs from the Grand Ole Opry” — a syndicated series that didn’t go off the air until 1981. Per Acuff, its emphasis was on “show.” There were gospel songs and novelties, instrumentals and recitations, cheating songs and drinking songs and working songs and murder ballads. Fellow Ozarker Speck Rhodes slapped bass and told the corniest jokes he could steal.
The other Wagonmasters shined, too, all brilliantly bedecked in matching Nudie suits — Warden on pedal steel, Mack Magaha on fiddle, and Buck Trent wanging away on electric banjo. “Get the banjo off the wall…,” Wagoner instructs Trent in their top-20 version of “Howdy Neighbor, Howdy”, the show’s theme. “Play a good ol’ country tune like grandpa used to play.” But of course grandpa didn’t have electricity.
Porter and his boys might break into impromptu jigs at any moment, and they’d crack up at their own flubs. Then “Pretty Miss” Norma Jean would sing a number.
“She was real nice, and women liked her as well as men did,” Wagoner recalled of his fellow Jubilee alum in a 1984 interview with journalist Glenn Hunter for The Journal of Country Music. “I think it was the clean, wholesome appearance she had….And she was really popular on the TV show — actually more popular on the show than Dolly would ever become.”
Nearly all country acts of any consequence in the ’60s and ’70s — Roger Miller, Bobby Bare, Haggard, Jones, Atkins, Tillis, Lefty, Kitty, Willie, Waylon, dozens more — eventually made their way to the WSM studios to perform before Wagoner’s live audiences (“I perform better eye-to-eye with folks.”). In 1972, Lester Flatt showed up with a 13-year-old mandolin picker named Marty Stuart.
Wagoner was unnervingly busy in these years. He was recording more than 70 episodes a year of “The Porter Wagoner Show” for different markets. He released a trio of album-length, Grammy-winning collaborations with southern gospel’s biggest act, the Blackwood Brothers. In 1962, he released a brass-meets-fiddle duet album with Skeeter Davis. There was a bluegrass tribute in ’64, a prison-themed set (Soul Of A Convict) in ’67, and three concert LPs, a by-product of playing more than 200 shows a year.
And all of this before anyone outside of Sevier County, Tennessee, had ever heard of Dolly Parton.
And before Porter was committed to Parkview.
Porter’s son Richard left for the Army in December 1965 and only a few days later, according to biographer Steve Eng, Wagoner moved out of the home he shared with his second wife, Ruth. (He has never remarried.) At the same time, Norma Jean ended her nearly seven-year affiliation with Wagoner’s show.
“Norma Jean and I had a love relationship,” Wagoner told The Journal of Country Music. “But then our affair got to be a problem. She wanted to get married and I didn’t. I was legally separated from my wife Ruth, and I just didn’t want to get a divorce and marry again. I felt Norma Jean started putting that in front of our business….With me business comes first; any kind of love affair is much farther down the line.”
Richard, Ruth (and the two daughters he’d left behind), Norma Jean, his brother Oscar’s wreck weeks before, the TV show, the road…it was too much. Just after New Year’s in 1966, Porter checked in to Parkview Hospital.
“My doctor had me admitted,” he says today. “I had just worked so hard that I just wore myself out.” According to Eng, Wagoner was hospitalized at least twice more before the decade was out.
Wagoner wasn’t nearly in the sad shape of characters he later portrayed in song — the madcap madman in songwriter Dallas Frazier’s “The Man In The Little White Suit”, say, or the only intermittently lucid narrator of his “If I Lose My Mind”. But he was bad enough.
“Hope I never have to go there again,” he admits on his new album, introducing “Committed To Parkview”.
“Johnny [Cash] wrote that song and told Marty [Stuart, who was in Cash’s band at the time] to give it to me back in the ’80s,” Wagoner explains. “He thought it was something I could really do. Well, Marty lost it. But when we got together to do this new album, he was telling me about it, how good it was but that he wasn’t sure where it was exactly.”
Wagoner laughs at the memory. “I said, ‘Well, why don’t you try to find it?’ He did, of course, and I learned it from the tape of Cash singing it.” (The Man in Black actually had ended up recording the song himself twice, first for his 1976 album One Piece At A Time and then with Willie Nelson on 1985’s Highwayman.)
“Parkview” finds Porter in his hospital room, telling us about his neighbors on the ward. One man “thinks that he’s Hank Williams,” and “a superstar’s ex-drummer [is] trying to kick Benzedrine.” Another patient, “a bum from down on Broadway,” might be Skid Row Joe himself.