Marty Robbins and the El Paso Saga

“Here’s a piece of trivia for you,” said Lee Hazlewood challenging his interviewer, Richard Hawley, “Who covered Elvis Presley and beat him?” Hawley didn’t know. Hazlewood, who had been a DJ in Phoenix at the time, may have felt some sort of local pride as he told him “Marty Robbins! Elvis had That’s All Right on Sun Records and Marty Robbins, he’s from Phoenix, and he came right along and covered it and knocked the hell out of it.”

By December 7th 1954, when Robbins recorded That’s All Right, Presley’s version had sold somewhere in the region of 25,000 copies and Presley’s second Sun single Good Rockin’ Tonight had already been issued. Still the fact remains it was Robbins, not Presley, who steered the song to the charts. Robbins’ version got to number 7 on the Disk Jockey chart and number 9 on the Best Selling chart in 1955.

Robbins had been signed to Columbia Records by Art Satherley, in 1951 on Little Jimmy Dickens recommendation. Dickens had been impressed by Robbins talent after appearing as a guest on a local Phoenix TV show that Robbins hosted.

English man Satherley is widely recognised as one of the architects of country music having brought, in addition to Robbins, Bob Wills, Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe and, Robbins’ boyhood idol, Gene Autry to the Columbia label. Satherley left Columbia the year after signing Robbins, in May 1952. Despite this, except for a three year hiatus in the early seventies, Robbins would stay on the Columbia label throughout his career.

The relationship between label and artist was not always a happy one.

In late 1955, the year that Robbins’ That’s All Right hit the charts, Robbins recorded Singing The Blues, at Owen Bradley's famous studio with Owen Bradley himself playing the piano. It became a country smash the following year and was making in roads on the pop charts when Columbia, to Robbins’ irritation gave the song to label mate Guy Mitchell to record as a pop song. Mitchell went on to sell some 3 million copies.

A lesson learnt, Robbins went to New York to work with Mitchell’s producer, Mitch Miller, and arranger, Ray Conniff. Whilst there Robbins recorded his own teen pop composition A White Sports Coat And a Pink Carnation , which went to number two in the pop charts and The Story Of My Life which gave Burt Bacharach and Hal David their first taste of chart success reaching number one in the country charts and number fifteen in the Billboard charts in 1957.

Also in 1957 Robbins founded his own label, Robbins, among whose first signings were Tompall & the Glaser Brothers'. Robbins was impressed by the brothers’ tight harmonies and duly released their first single Five Penny Nickel which was written by Chuck Glaser. Although the brothers signed with Decca in ’59, Robbins remained a fan.

1959 saw the release of Robbins first foray into Western songs: The Hanging Tree recorded whilst still in New York with Ray Conniff's orchestra for the Gary Cooper movie of the same name. Written by Jerry Livingston and Mack David The Hanging Tree’ hit the charts in March and was nominated for an Best Music, Original Song Oscar in 1960.

Perhaps with a confidence inspired by that records success Robbins returned to Nashville the next month and began work on an album of Western Songs despite the reservations of some senior Columbia record personnel.

Recorded on 7th April 1959 the album Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs contained twelve western themed numbers including one, Running Gun, written by Tompall and Jim Glaser and four of Robbins own compositions Big Iron, In The Valley, The Masters Call and, of course, the Grammy award winning El Paso.

Robbins recalled in the sleeve notes to CBS’ 1982 release Marty Robbins Biggest Hits: "El Paso was a song that I had threatened to write for almost three years. As I was going through El Paso one Christmas I happened to see the sign El Paso City Limits and I thought to myself that’s a beautiful name, I’d like to write a song about it. Then the next year when I went through El Paso the name caught my attention again and I remembered my idea of wanting to write a song. The same thing happened, I forgot about it. So the third year through there I thought to myself, this is the third time I’ve said I’m going to write a song about this city, and the words and the melody just started rolling out of my head… I didn’t stop to write it down; I wrote it in my mind. In fact it was like watching a movie.”

El Paso was released as a single in October 1959, a month after the album’s release, and reached number 1 in the country charts on December 21 that year and the top of the pop charts in January 1960, all this despite a running time of 4.19 minutes in an era when radio stations demanded that songs didn’t exceed three minutes. Columbia was so worried about the songs running time that they did release a special radio only single which had the full song on one side and a shorter “radio friendly” (2.58) version on the other. Most stations had the good taste to play the full version.

It’s hard to imagine how Columbia edited El Paso. So elegantly is it written that not a word or note is superfluous.

“I probably wrote it less time than the songs actual length, which is 4.37, ’cause the words were coming so fast. But it was exciting ‘cause I really didn’t know how it was going to end. I kept waiting to get to the end, and finally, when I did, I remembered it ‘cause it was just like a movie. All of this came to me about nine in the evening, and I sang it over and over in the car all night long until I got to Phoenix the next day where I wrote the words down.” wrote Robbins for Marty Robbins Biggest Hits.

When Gene Autry sang of South of the Border it was a place of Mexicali Rose’s and Gay Ranchero’s. Robbins’ El Paso, is an altogether darker place.

Told in the first person it is the tale of a cowboy who falls for a “Mexican maiden”, Feleena who works as a dancer in Rosa’s Cantina in El Paso. So consumed with jealously is he, and despite his great love, he views Feleena as some kind of wicked Siren.

"Blacker than night were the eyes of Feleena

Wicked and evil while casting her spell

My love was deep for this Mexican maiden

I was in love, but in vain I could tell "

One day she is entertaining another, “a handsome young stranger”; he challenges the stranger to a duel and shoots him.

In the wake of this action Robbins, in the character of the songs protagonist, in a moment of terrible clarity and tells us:

“Just for a moment I stood there in silence
Shocked by the foul, evil deed I had done”

It’s a masterful touch, increasing our sympathy for the killer who we now see as an essentially good, if flawed, man.

Then its back to the action, thoughts of racing and running dominate as the cowboy flees into the “bad lands of New Mexico”.

Unable to return to El Paso and his loved one the cowboy reflects on the emptiness of his life. He pines, before resolving: “My love is stronger than my fear of death”.

So the cowboy, taking his life in his hands he returns to El Paso intent on seeing Feleena again despite the dangers. Sure enough the town’s law enforcement people are waiting, despite knowing this he urges his horse on to Rosa’s until…

“Something is dreadfully wrong for I feel

A deep burning pain in my side”

And the way Robbins sings “side” rising to a falsetto tells us as much as the lyrics about that first bullet finding its way into the cowboys body.

Now fallen from his horse he is staggering to the back door of Rosa’s (the same back door that he had fled through four or five verses earlier, the songs sure sense of place is one of its great strengths.) when a second bullet goes “deep in my chest”.

In the final verse Feleena, “from out of nowhere” finds her dying beau and so the cowboy enjoys (in the songs final line) “one little kiss and Feleena, goodbye”.

Nashville A Team guitar-slinger Grady Martin played the Tex-Mex flavoured nylon string guitar that is so integral the songs haunting quality.

"Grady Martin could play three or four notes, and they'd mean 100 times more than any other person that would play 100 notes, he'd just make so much out of everything he played - the best taste you've ever heard." the Nashville A Team bass player Bob Moore who also played on El Paso recalled in an interview for The Tennessean newspaper.

Expanding on this theme, Bob’s wife, Kittra Moore, told listees at hillbillygroups@yahoo.com “Bob says of all the guitarists he's known and/or worked with, Grady Martin had the most commercial ear of any guitarist EVER. Grady knew what the public could understand and what they wanted to hear. Assertive guitar breaks that made you say "wow" then, back into the meat of the song.”

The Glaser Brothers supplied background vocals.

El Paso must have still haunted Robbins’ imagination and six years later he returned to the story, this time, in the third person, Robbins tells Feleena’s story. Feleena (From El Paso) appeared on Robbins’ The Drifter album and clocks in at a whopping 8.18 minutes, but again not a word is wasted.

This time the supernatural undercurrent that had been hinted at in El Paso is expanded on. We are told that Feleena was born during a stormy night, a storm that ceased at the sound of the childs cries..

“Amid streaks of lightning and loud desert thunder

To a young Mexican couple, a baby was born;
Just as the baby cried, thunder and lightning died.”

The tempest proves prophetic and Feleena grows to be as restless and capricious as the elements themselves;

“When she was seventeen, bothered by crazy dreams
She ran away from the shack and left them to roam”

Arriving first in Santa Fe, Feleena discovers how to profit from her charms but still that fateful restlessness won’t let her be:

“Restless in Sante Fe, she had to get away

To any town where the lights had a much brighter glow
One cowboy mentioned the town of El Paso”

Arriving in El Paso Feleena makes her way to Rosa’s Cantina. With its playful internal rhymes that are just a joy, Robbins’ tells us:

“It was the same way, it was back in Sante Fe

Men would make fools of themselves at the thought of romance

Rosa took heed of, the place was in need of
This kind of excitement, so she paid Feleena to dance”.

And so some 4.30 minutes in and the stage is set for the story we know from El Paso. Robbins’ dispatchs the story in a few verses but if El Paso is a western Othello with the hero brought low by his own jealousy Feleena (From El Paso) is more like a western Romeo and Juliet...

“Quickly she grabbed for, the six-gun that he wore

And screamin' in anger and placin' the gun to her breast

Bury us both deep and maybe we'll find peace

And pullin' the trigger, she fell 'cross the dead cowboy's chest”.

Then in a final mythic flourish Robbins adds:

Out in El Paso, whenever the wind blows

If you listen closely at night, you'll hear in the wind

A woman is crying, it's not the wind sighing

Old timers tell you, Feleena is calling for him

In death Feleena has returned to the elements that raged at her birth and so, together with that of her cowboy escort, Feleena’s restless spirit still haunts El Paso.

Robbins’ returned to the Columbia label in 1976 and for his first single, on his old label, returned once again to El Paso.

El Paso City the final part of the “El Paso Trilogy” apparently came to Robbins in a manner similar to the first. It reminds me of High Plains Drifter, the Clint Eastwood western, released three years previously.

Directed by Eastwood High Plains Drifter revisits the Man With No Name character from A Fistful Of Dollars that had helped to make Eastwood a star, it plays with and complements the myth both of that character and the Leone movies and, like El Paso City it also has a supernatural element to the tale.

El Paso City doesn’t feature any of the previous songs protagonists. Instead the songs first person narrator is in an aeroplane flying over El Paso and recalls Robbins own 1960 hit song:

“I don't recall who sang the song but I recall a story that I heard
And as I look down on this city I remember each and every word”

Despite singing in the first person, as in El Paso, the songs narrator is clearly not Robbins who, after all, could not plausibly have forgotten the song that furnished him with one of his biggest hits.

The narrator character is increasingly troubled by the memory of the song and its subject with which he feels a closer than usual kinship

" My mind is down there somewhere as I fly above the badlands of New Mexico
I can't explain why I should know the very trail he rode back to El Paso"

Talking to himself begins to muse on the possibility of reincarnation:

"Can it be that man can disappear from life and live another time
And does the mystery deepen 'cause you think that you yourself lived in that other time"

El Paso City, unlike the two previous songs in this saga does not end with a death, though the thought of death haunts the narrator as he muses

"A voice tells me to go and seek;

another voice keeps telling me
Maybe death awaits me in El Paso"

We never find out.

Robbins was, perhaps, satisfied simply to have brought the saga into the present with this last mystic musing and was able, finally, to lie to rest the myths of El Paso.

Writing in the sleeve notes to CBS’ 1984 release Marty Robbins Long, Long Ago the Chicago Tribune journalist Jack Hurst complains that in the wake of El Paso there was a “tendency ever after to view (Robbins) primarily as a cowboy balladeer” yet as he goes on to point out “his magnificent voice could handle any kind of music with ease and his mind could devise any kind of song it wanted to sing.”

Mort Goode in the liner notes to Hallmark records 1972 release Marty Robbins Favourites makes the point “(Robbins) has made his success singing Country and Western, ballads, blues Hawaiian, Spanish and gospel and is always able to move emotionally between songs that may be totally different in nature and message”.

Certainly its true that Robbins talent both as a singer and writer was too great to be satisfied with only one style but as I grew up listening to Robbins it was the western songs that really caught my boyhood ears, even songs that had no particular cowboy elements, such as I’ll Be Alright, seemed to me, to come straight from the wild west to our family cars tape deck.

In the very late seventies or early eighties when I was twelve or thirteen years old I was lucky enough to see Robbins at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool, a stop off on the way to a big annual country festival at Wembley. I was uncomfortable at the idea of going to a gig with my parents and was more interested in punk music than western songs by this time. I wore, I remember, a Crass patch on my t-shirt and was generally a sulky unpleasant presence.

A few songs into the show and the audience began to shout out requests and Robbins and the band would play them. On, I think, Mr Shorty Robbins played alone as the band didn’t know it and when he finished he made some remark about wishing his doctors could’ve seen him then!

Even a sulky-snot-nosed-wannabe-punk like me knew when he'd seen a great show (although I didn’t know then that this sort of request taking was a staple of Robbins Grand Ole Opry appearances).

Marty Robbins died of a heart attack on December 8 1982.

Further reading here

Happy Birthday Bob Lind

Born in Ohio on the 25^th of November 1942; singer songwriter Bob is best known in the as the writer of The Elusive Butterfly. Remembering that song Bob said:

“A lot of drugs were involved. Most of my songs of my songs from that period of time came from the line between sleep and wakefulness. That’s where Elusive Butterfly was written.”

Strange then that in the UK, at least, it became best known in a version by becardiganed stalwart of 70’s Sunday night TV, the squeaky clean Val Doonican:

“There were people who were outraged at that. They thought he was stealing food out of my children’s mouths…About a dozen pop stars of the-Cilla Black, Dusty Springfield, Eric Burdon-took out a full page add in one of the trades saying that mine was the real and best version. I thought that was a kind gesture, but really unnecessary; because people can make up there own minds. As it happens, Val Doonican and I both ended up in the charts. The British press built up a rivalry but I had no beef with Val. I never did get to talk to him, but I contacted his managers. His version was different from mine, but I kinda liked that.”

Growing up in Denver with his mother and step father, Bob Lind had been a fan of Hollywood singing cowboys like Tex Ritter and Gene Autry before discovering R&B in seventh grade.

“My first paying gig was in Denver at a used car lot. My friend Jerry and I formed a duo. I played guitar and we sang R&B. Now they call it doo wop but nobody it called it that then. It was rhythm and blues – dark and dangerous.”

On graduating Lind briefly studied theatre at western State College in Gunnison Colorado before dropping out to pursue music in the coffee houses of first Denver then, in 1964 in San Francisco before taking a tape of five songs recorded live at Al Chapman’s coffee house to Los Angeles.

Once there Lind contacted Liberty Records:”I just went to Liberty because it was the first on my list. I gave them the tape and they said ‘Yeah we’d like to sign you’. I was amazed. It was that easy.”

Liberty had also signed Lind to there music publishing company, Metric Music which is how Lind came to meet Jack Nitzsche who was looking for material. Nitzsche liked what he heard:

“He turned to Lenny (Waronker – head of Metric Music) and said: ‘you finally got yourself an honest writer’…So I played a few more and he said ‘Boy, this guys really good’.”

As a result of this meeting Lind and Nitzsche became housemates, friends and collaborators:

“It was an Odd Couple kind of a deal. Jack and I both loved to drink and to get high. We had a beautiful friendship.” recalls Lind.

The two albums they made together are the sound of a coffee house folkie honeymooning with pop nouse on the west coast.

Not so difficult for Lind to take on board anyway, for as he said : "If you wanted to work coffee houses , you had to call yourself a folk singer, but I enjoyed doing pop songs in a folk style"

The first recording session in 1965 yielded four tracks; You Should Have Seen It, my favourite Truly Julies Blues (I’ll Be There), Cheryl’s Goin’ Home and Elusive Butterfly.

In November 1965 Cheryl’s Goin’ Home was issued as a single with Elusive Butterfly on the flipside.

It went nowhere. A Florida DJ started to play Elusive Butterfly and it caught on.

Lind returned to the studio to record the further eight tracks that would make up his classic first album: Don’t Be Concerned:

“I think the Don’t Be Concerned album took about three sessions. The songs were ones I already had for the most part. I knew nothing about writing music, but I had this post- adolescent gush – all this sap and passion.” says Lind.

In May 1966 Verve Folkways released an album, cobbled together from an acetate Lind had recorded as a seventeen year old for Denver based Bandbox label, called The Elusive Bob Lind.

Speaking of it now Lind says: “I should be flattered that some people like the album, but it’s a terrible piece of shit.”

In spring 66 Nitzsche and Lind returned to the studio to record their second album together: Photographs Of Feeling .It was to be the last they collaborated:

“Jack had his demons,” explained Lind, “And he had a hard, cynical side. Just when you’d think he and I would be closest, rifts started forming.”

Without Nitzsche, Lind began to drift:

“I was a drunk, I was an abuser of drugs…I just wanted to go to the desert and get my head straight, but Santa Fe ended up being the place where I did my worst drinking and using so go figure.”

It was during this time that he wrote the songs for his 1971 Capitol released album Since There Were Circles which features Gene Clark on harmonica, Doug Dillard on banjo and Sneaky Pete Kleinow on pedal steel guitar. It was reissued by RPM in 2006.

Sober since 1977 Lind concentrated on writing. This included writing five novels and an award winning screenplay, and features for the now defunct wacky US supermarket magazine Weekly World News:

"I wrote, made up stories and had a wonderful time. There were days when I'd leave that newsroom and my face hurt and my stomach would hurt because I was around funny people." Lind told ABC News recalling his time on the staff of Weekly World News.

In 1998 he purchased a saxophone and was once again bitten by the music bug:

“I learned how to read music and I learned how to make chord charts.” He says “My melodic scope started to open and I started to write more jazz orientated stuff songs. I thought people had to hear these things so I started gigging again.”

Pulp’s 2001 album We Love Life featured a track called Bob Lind (The Only Way Is Down) which has helped to lead to something of a career revival.

Last year Lind released Bob Lind Live at the Luna Star Café available through his website:

“The music business is different now – its not so company controlled. This new CD of mine, Live at the Luna Star Café, there’s no label involved. I just put it out myself. It was never that simple before.” explains Lind.

In June this year Lind played his first UK gigs since 1966 partly in support of Elusive Butterfly - The Jack Nitzsche Sessions, the sleeve notes of which provided most of the quotes here.

I saw him at that most wonderful of venues, The Luminaire, were he played some old stuff and some new stuff including Perspective ,written in January of 2006, a new song every bit the equal of his earlier stuff.

The picture accompanying this piece shows, on the right, Bob Lind whose birthday it is today, and me, and by happy coincidence I am also celebrating my birthday today.

Happy Birthday Pee Wee King

When Carl Perkins’ Blue Suede Shoes became the first ever record to appear simultaneously in the country, pop and R&B charts a slew of cover versions quickly followed. Elvis Presley’s is probably the best known of these but accordion player Pee Wee King with his Western swing outfit The Golden West Cowboys, were there first. King had something of a headstart on rival s having been given a prerelease acetate of the song by Perkins himself when they played the same bill in Memphis. The Golden West Cowboys' version was recorded on February 7th 1956 and featured Walter Hayes, the band's fiddle player, on vocals. It is, in truth, a workmanlike and unconvincing reading of Perkins’ classic.

King made an altogether better stab at rock ‘n’ roll later that same year with vocalist Dick Glasser. Ballroom Baby and Catty Town, both of which Glasser had a hand in writing, are very pleasing examples of early rock ‘n’ roll. Pee Wee King recalled: “(Dick Glasser) was a very good rock ‘n’ roll singer …he fit into our group like the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle. The first two recordings we did with him were a smash. The people at RCA Victor thought I was going nuts with our new sound. I said ‘No. I’m an entertainer and we have to change with the times. Rock ‘n’ roll is changing American music, and that includes country music.’”(from Hell-Bent for Music Wade Hall)

King was not altogether the rockin’ virgin that this would suggest though. Nearly a decade before the Glasser recordings King had, with the band's regular singer Redd Stewart, written and recorded Ten Gallon Boogie which features the rockin’est accordion solo ever. It was the Golden West Cowboys contribution to the hillbilly boogie craze that swept country music in the late forties and early fifties, and which helped to lay the foundations of rock ‘n’ roll. Indeed King’s friend, Bill Haley, had recorded a number of hillbilly boogies before he discovered rock ‘n’ roll. Jolly Joyce, Haley’s booking agent, tried to persuade King to change the name of his act so that he could book him overseas as a rock ‘n’ roll act: “ I said, ‘Nothing doing! I’ve worked hard to make our name mean something and I’m not about to change it. Anyway, why should I want to become a rock ‘n’ roll band? I can play rock ‘n’ roll any time I want and still call our band the Golden West Cowboys” (from Hell-Bent for Music Wade Hall).

However it is not as a rock ‘n’ roll pioneer that King is best remembered, nor as the man whose band introduced the electric guitar to the Grand Ole Opry, nor yet as a pioneer of television, although in November 1948 Pee Wee King’s was the first show on the state of Kentucky’s first television station, but rather as the composer of one of the biggest hits in music history: The Tennessee Waltz.

Pee Wee King was an unlikely candidate for country stardom. Born on February 18^th 1914 in Milwaukie of Polish stock he was christened Frank Julius Anthony Kuczynski and his favoured instrument, the accordion, was not regarded as a ‘proper’ country instrument at that time.

In 1929 the 15 year old Kuczynski formed his first band and in 1930 he met saxophonist and band leader Wayne King, who was himself from a Polish background, who gave him this advice: “You need a catchy name…Now remember: K-I-N-G. Nobody can misspell it. Nobody can mispronounce it. That’s your hook. You say your name is Frank. Call yourself Frankie. It has a better ring. Frankie King that’s a name nobody will forget” (from Hell-Bent for Music Wade Hall). Thus Frankie King and the Kings Jesters were born.

In 1934 a stroke of good fortune brought Gene Autry into King's life. Frankie King and the Kings Jesters were playing the Polish–American Hour on WJRN in Racine. Gene Autry together with his band, The Range Riders and their agent were touring southern Wisconsin when they were forced to pull up at a garage in Racine to have a fender straightened on their car. Whilst they were waiting for the repair to be completed they heard Frankie King’s band on the service stations radio. Autry’s agent, Joe.L. Frank, was impressed enough to ask King to join The Range Riders, for the remainder of the tour.

“I wasn’t with the group long before I got my nickname. There were too many Franks in the band so Mr Frank said we had to have nicknames to tell us apart. He first wanted to call me Shorty, but I didn’t like that one, so we settled on Pee Wee” (from Hell-Bent for Music Wade Hall).

Autry left for Hollywood shortly after the tour ended and the Range Riders disbanded. Joe Frank invited Pee Wee King to join a new band he had put together, the Log Cabin Boys, who performd on WNOX in Knoxville. The steady income it provided enabled King to marry Joe Frank's stepdaughter Lydia Frank in December 1936.

In January the following year King and his new wife moved to Louisville. Joe Frank was already there and organising a new band for King to lead. Pee Wee King and the Golden West Cowboys , as the band were known, auditioned successfully for The Grand Ole Opry in 1937 and were regulars for the next ten years.

Throughout the band's thirty year lifespan, The Golden West Cowboys underwent several line up changes and at one time or another featured such luminaries as Cowboy Copas and Eddy Arnold.

Redd Stewart first joined The Golden West Cowboys in 1940 before being drafted into the Army and Stewart's return from the armed services ushered in what Pee Wee King thought of as the golden age of The Golden West Cowboys.

It was whilst driving back to Nashville from a show in Texarkana, Texas in December1946 that King and Stewart wrote The Tennessee Waltz

“We were getting close to Memphis and had the radio playing…when we heard the disk jockey say ‘I want you folks to hear Bill Monroe’s new song dedicated to his home state of Kentucky. It’s called The Kentucky Waltz’. While the record was playing Redd said ‘Pee Wee, I’ve got an idea for a song. Trade places with me and drive and I’ll get that kitchen matchbox that I light my cigars from out of the glove compartment and we’ll write a song about Tennessee. After all I was born in Ashland City, Tennessee and we both live there now. We can write a Tennessee waltz” (from Hell-Bent for Music Wade Hall).

The melody already existed, King having devised it as the Cowboys theme song though at that time it was known only as No Name Waltz:

“Redd sat there writing the words on the matchbox as we both hummed the melody we knew so well. We’d hum along and Redd would write a word down. Every once in a while he’d say ‘How does this sound?’ and he’d sing the words to the melody. Finally we had the words pretty much the way everybody knows them today”(from Hell-Bent for Music Wade Hall).

It was recorded in 1948 in Chicago and proved a hit for the Golden West Cowboys selling half a million copies. Despite a verbal agreement to the contrary, Cowboy Copas - a former Golden West Cowboy - cheekily released his version on King Records just ahead of Pee Wee King's and had a sizable hit with it too. It seemed almost from the start that Tennessee Waltz was a country music standard.

When Ernest Tubb recorded The Tennessee Waltz and published a sheet music edition, he did so without the permission of either of the song's composers. Not only that but the songwriter's credits on both the record and sheet music went to the Short Brothers (presumably referring to James Erwin Short and Melvin Leon Short - members of Tubb's band in the '40s) .

King recalled: "It was all a big stink and I didn't like it at all...we remained friends with Ernest throughout the lawsuit... We didn't get any damages but we put an end to their pirated record and sheet music. Most important we didn't make enemies out of our friends. I didn't hold a grudge against Ernest even though his company recorded and published the song illegally. Ernest and the Short Brothers made a mistake but I don't think it was an honest one. I believe they knew that they were doing something morally wrong and illegal. They were putting us to the test to see if they could get away with it. I've never heard the Short Brothers recording. I don't know how it sounded and I don't want to know" (from Hell-Bent for Music Wade Hall).

Other covers followed. On hearing Cowboy Copas' version, Tuxedo Junction composer and jazz trumpeter Erskine Hawkins was inspired to record his own version in 1950 . It was this version that caught the ear of a young Billboard columnist and jazz buff Jerry Wexler.

So when in October that year Jack Rael, pop singer Patti Page’s manager, was looking for a flip side for her Boogie Woogie Santa Claus Wexler suggested The Tennessee Waltz.

“‘Patti knew the song’ said Jack. ‘I didn’t. She said ‘That’s my daddy’s favourite song.’ We did it with five pieces. The baritone player from Ellington’s band was on the date. We copied the arrangement from Erskine Hawkins. Joe Reisman wrote it out for us” (from Road Kill on the Three Chord Highway Colin Escott).

Page used an overdubbing technique that she had previously employed succesfully on a her 1948 hit Confess.

"You recorded onto an acetate , then played it back into one microphone while overdubbing into another microphone. The engineer would mix the overdub with the original (itself no mean feat), then cut the results onto another acetate. If the singer flubbed just one note or the engineer messed up the balance they'd have to start over"(from Road Kill on the Three Chord Highway Colin Escott).

Described by James Miller, in his book Almost Grown, as "a tricked up, technologically evolved sort of pseudo folk song", Page's version was a phenomona selling in excess of six million copies. The song had transcended its roots, it was no longer simply a country song, indeed for the twenty six weeks Page's version spent on the charts, it became the country's song. In other words simply a great American song.

Everybody from Jo Stafford to James Brown has recorded The Tennessee Waltz.

On February 17th 1965 it was adopted as the official song of the state of Tennessee.

Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart were elected to the Songwriters Hall Of Fame in 1970 and Johhny Cash was on hand to present the award when King was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1974.

King died of a heart attack aged 86 on March 6th 2000.