The Strange Tale of Jody Reynold's 'Endless Sleep' and other Death Discs.

To mark the passing of Jody Reynolds earlier this month I've decided to dedicate this post to death discs.

Introduction

Although murder, misfortune and mortality have always been popular themes in music, Reynolds 1958 hit Endless Sleep ushered in a golden era of largely teenage variations on the subject of death.

The craze reached its zenith in the 1960 when Ray Peterson's Tell Laura I Love Her (which prompted Marilyn Michaels to answer Tell Tommy I Miss Him), and Mark Dinning's Teen Angel both charted despite featuring fatalities.

In August that year Bob Luman's pleaded Let's Think About Living but it fell on deaf ears and the trend continued on into the sixties.

In the UK, Johnny Leyton, whose cover of Tell Laura I Love Her had lost out to Richie Valance's version the previous year, hit with Johnny Remember Me in 1961. Although it didn't explicitly say that the girl he'd 'lost'was dead the echoey chorus left little doubt that the gal was in the ground.

Produced by Joe Meek and written by Geoff Godard the track had apparently been blessed, from beyond by the grave, by Buddy Holly. The pair contacted the bespectacled plane crash victim via weegee board and on hearing their plans for Johnny Remember Me apparently commented "See you in the charts". (See Death Discs by Alan Clayson).

Jan and Dean, who "made surf, cars and simply being between the ages of thirteen and eighteen seem like a mid sixties version of God's grace" (The Dustbin Of History Greil Marcus ), hit in 1964 with Dead Mans Curve which dealt with a drag race fatality on a stretch of Sunset Boulevard in LA.

Also that year Twinkle had a UK hit with Terry the tragic tale of her biker boyfriends untimely demise.

The following year another biker bit the dust in The Shangri La's delirious teen melodrama The Leader Of The Pack, which, with its kitchen sink and all production, surely represented the genres artistic high water mark.

What follows is a random, and by no means definitive, list of some of my favourite Death Discs:

Endless Sleep: Jody Reynolds

Growing up in Oklahoma Jody Reynolds first love was Western Swing.

As he told John Stafford:"I sure did listen to the radio. I loved western swing. Bob Wills, Hank Thompson, Eddy Arnold - I loved stuff like that."

Moving to Arizona in the early fifties Reynolds tastes changed when he heard Elvis Presley on the radio.

Although Reynolds didn't record Endless Sleep until 1958 he told the Phoenix New Times in 2001 that he wrote it in 1956, right after listening to Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel five times in a row on a jukebox.

In doomy echoey style the song told the tale of a boys desperate search for his girl, who he fears has drowned herself after they had had a fight. It was issued by Demon Records in March 1958.

"Demon was in Los Angeles. Herb Montei, who later became my manager had a publishing company in Hollywood. I'd been playing rockabilly or rock 'n' roll or whatever you want to call it for about three years, and I was playing a date in San Diego and a guy at this club said to me, "If you want to record, you should send some stuff to Herb Montei." I didn't have many songs, but I sent him a couple of things and he turned them down. Then I made a demo of Endless Sleep and he liked it a lot, so he found the guys at Demon Records for me."

Apparently the record executives in LA were unconvinced that suicide would sell and persuaded Reynolds to end the song with the boy running into the ocean and rescuing his girl. Ironic that a record that could claim to be the first of the teenage death disc's nobody actually died after all, though the gloomy mood of the record swamps its nominal happy ending.

The people at Demon also felt that although Reynolds was a more than capable guitarist the record people decided to draft in Al Casey:

"I played my own guitar all my life but on that session, for some reason, the record people just wanted me to stand there and sing and not play"

"The guitar riff came from my childhood memories of hearing the funeral bell in Oklahoma" Reynolds remembered. (quoted in Mojo April 2009)

Endless Sleep reached number 5 on Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart. In the UK it provided Marty Wilde with his first hit entering the UK charts in June 1958 it reached number 4 and stayed in the charts for fourteen weeks.

Reynolds continued to record through out the fifties and early sixties. In 1963 Reynolds recorded Stormy written and produced by Lee Hazlewood.

The following year Bobbie Gentry would make her debut recordings duetting with Reynolds on Stranger in The Mirror/ Requiem for Love.

Reynolds would never again repeat the sucess of his first recording and eventually quit the music business to work in real estate in Palm Springs.

He died on the 7th November this year aged 75.

Further reading here and here

Ode To Billie Joe: Bobbie Gentry

Musical prodigy, Gentry was born Roberta Lee Streeter and her early life was spent in rural hardship in Chicksaw County, Mississippi.

Gentry's grandmother traded a cow to provide the piano on which Gentry wrote her first song, My Dog Seargent is a Good Dog when she was just seven years old.

In 1955 14 year old black teenager Emmet Till was brutally beaten and then shot, a 75-pound cotton gin fan was tied to his neck with barbed wire to weigh down the body, which was then dropped into the Tallahatchie River ,where it was subsequently found by fishermen. Those responsible were acquitted and later admited to the killing. At the insistence of Mamie Till, Emmet's mother, photographs of the boys beaten and disfigured body appeared in the press. This horrible event caused widespread outrage at the treatment of African Americans.
Bob Dylan articulated this disgust in the song The Death Of Emmet Till in 1962.

One wonders what impact it had on young Bobbie Gentry. Is it, perhaps,in some slight ghostly way, on Mama's mind in Ode To Billy Joe when she comments: "Seems like nothin' ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge"?

In 1957, when she was thirteen, Gentry moved to California to be with her mother , graduating from Palm Valley School in 1960 Gentry funded attendance UCLA (studying philosophy) and the Los Angeles Conservatory by working as a nightclub singer, under the name Bobby Gentry, and as a secretary.

As already mentioned she made her recorded debut in 1964 with Jody Reynolds.

Subsequentlty Gentry continued to perform and in early 1967 Capitol Records producer Kelly Gordon heard a demo and signed her to Capitol.

Released later that year her debut single for Capitol was Mississippi Delta/Ode To Billy Joe. Despite the A Side being a scorching swampfunk classic it was the sparse, sineous, southern gothic of the B Side that the DJ's warmed to and which climbed to the top of the pop charts.

In the wake of Ode To Billy Joe' s success I believe all subsequent Gentry singles had the intended playside on the B- side.

In many respects Ode To Billy Joe is not typical of the death disc genre, in contrast to the teen histrionics of, say, Leader Of The Pack, Ode to Billy Joe deals with death, a suicide at that, with almost callous offhandness. The demise of Billy Joe MacCallister in the Tallahachie River treated as just another piece of county gossip. The family patriach best sums up the mood when he says: "Well, Billy Joe never had a lick of sense, pass the biscuits, please"

Ode To Billy Joe won Gentry three Grammys (Best New Artist, Best Vocal Performance Female, Best Contemporary Female Solo Vocal Performance) whilst the song itself won a further Grammy for arranger Jimmie Haskell.

The other big Grammy winner of 1967 was fellow Capitol records signing, Glen Campbell ,who picked up awards for both Gentle On My Mind and By The Time I Get To Phoenix.

Capitol paired Gentry and Campbell the following year. The sleeve notes of the resultant album gushed:

"They have the affinity, one for the other, that's unusually rare - striking to hear because of it's rightness and it's absolute simplicity.....singly they seem like the first of a new breed, these two, whose every effort runs true - writing, playing, singing - performing what they feel as they feel it, so that what emerges rings true. these talents stay with the taem too,losing nothing and gaining a new dimension."

In 1970 Gentry scored a hit with Fancy which tells the story of a young impoverished womans journey from poverty to wealth by being "nice to the gentlemen."

Recorded at Rick Hall's Fame studio's it featured Travis Wammack on guitar: " I played her little guitar on that. Rick asked her, he said 'Bobbie would you mind if Travis played your little bitty Martin? I'd like to try and duplicate the Ode To Billie Joe sound. She said 'sure'. it took me a while because it was a little bitty small scale double eighteen Martin guitar." (from Country Got Soul 2 sleevenotes)

The album brought Gentry another Grammy nomination.

Fancy was a hit again in 1991 when it was covered by Reba McEntire, but by that time Gentry had been in self imposed exile from show business for 13 years. Her last public appearance was as Johnny Carsons guest on the Tonight Show Christmas 1978, since then little has been heard from the Garbo of Chicksaw County.

Back on The Road: Nancy Sinatra And Lee Hazlewood

The B side of Nancy and Lee's 1971 Reprise release Did You Ever? Back on The Road is a from- beyond- the- grave- twist- in - the- tale record.

It details, in the first person narrative, the life of two tramps who, in the final verse, wake up in a town were their feet and backs hurt no longer . Although it's never made explicit it becomes clear, to the listener but not the songs protagonists, that the town is heaven and our two hero's are dead!

I've written at lenght about Nancy and Lee elsewhere in this blog.

Seasons in The Sun: Terry Jacks

When Jacques Brel originally wrote Le Moribund it was as an acerbic tragi -comedy in which a dying man lets his wife and friends know that he has always known of her multiple infidelities. Brel claimed to have written it in a Tangiers whore house.

It first became Seasons In The Sun when it fell into the hands of Rod McKuen .

Before becoming the "most popular poet in the world" Rod McKuen had apparently worked in psychological warfare during the Korean War. He moved to San Franscisco in the sixties and began churning out poems and albums.

"My first experience with Brel", Mc Kuen recalled in the sleeve notes to Rod McKuen Sings Jacques Brel "consisted of doing an unauthorized adaptation of Le Moribund, which I called Seasons In The Sun."

In McKuen's adaptation the dying man apparently forgives his wifes infidelity though her lover was his friend , though a few lines later he does threaten to haunt his faithless spouse!

"I (McKuen) subsequently learned that Brel had received a my recording ..after returning from a long and tiring tour of France. he remarked that he had been so pleased by someone doing something for him without requesting or expecting anything that he immediately returned the compliment by adapting (McKuen's song) The Lovers into French." (quoted in the sleeve notes to Rod McKuen Sings Jacques Brel)

It marked the beginning of a professional relationship between the two men that was to last some ten years.

The Kingston Trio released the Brel/McKuen version in 1964, and one of those that heard it was Canadian Terry Jacks:

"I heard their version and I didn't like the translation. But there was still something about that song" he told DJ Barry Scott.

Jacks had first come to prominence as part of The Poppy Family who enjoyed a number two hit in 1970 with Which Way You Goin', Billy, originally intended as the B- Side to The Poppy Family's cover of Reynolds aforementioned Endless Sleep.

In 1972, in the wake of Brian Wilson's mental collapse, Jacks was approached to produce the Beach Boys. Jack's recalled Seasons In The Sun :

"With lines like 'But the stars we could reach were just starfish on the beach,' I thought , here's a great song to produce for the Beach Boys. I had this idea for the song and I went down there and I worked really hard on it. we cut all the tracks, got the voices on and we were getting ready to do some sweetening, but it was too much for brian to have somebody from outside come in and produce. We never finished it. It was too bad. I came home , almost having a nervous breakdown." (from We Had Joy We had Fun by Barry Scott).

Shortly after returning to Canada Jacks learnt a friend of his was dying:

"I said it must be terrible to have to tell your best friend and your father - and he had a little girl - that you are going to die. It must be a terrible feeling. So I rewrote the words to Seasons In The Sun about a young person dying. They were telling their best friend,their father and their little girl that they're going to die."

Jacks recorded it with Link Wray and issued it in late 1973 on his own Goldfish label in Canada, where Jack's had recently enjoyed number 1 success with Concrete Sea.

It was an instant hit. Signed to Bell for US and European distribution Seasons In The Sun went to number 1 in America for three weeks and in the UK for four weeks. It was the first record a young Kurt Cobain purchased.

Despite changing the lyrics and sugaring the tune to within an inch of its life the writing credits featured only Brel and McKuen's names "It was an inventive treatment," the latter grudgingly admitted, "so I was glad he'd taken a song of mine, that hadn't been a hit, and made something of it" (from Jacques Brel The Biography by Alan Clayson)

Jacks returned to the Brel/Mckuen songbook for his follow up, that old chestnut If You Go Away, which failed to sell as well as Seasons In The Sun peaking at number 68 in the US in 1974.

Its follow up fared even worse and Jacks retired from the music business on the proceeds of his smash hit version of Seasons In The Sun.

Stan : Eminen

Hip Hop probably has the largest body count of any musical genre with murder a lyrical staple, Eminen, however, channelled the spirit of The Shangra La's in this masterstroke of storytelling.

Born in Kansas City Marshall Mathers aka Eminen aka Slim Shady moved to a predominantly black neighbourhood in East Detroit when he was eleven years old.

"When I came to Detroit hip hop was huge...Everybody loved rap and from there i just grew up on it. I think I was fourteen when I wrote my first rhyme and it was just like LL Cool J. as I started getting older I started learning how to put words together, I started to get good at it." (from The Hip Hop Years A History of Rap by Alex Ogg with David Upshal)

Eminen gained a reputation for his freestyle skills at local throwdowns.

Unlike some other white rappers like say, Vanilla Ice, hip hop was as natural to Eminen as the blues were to Elvis Presley or Jimmy Rodgers. Like these two before him he had absorbed a style more usually associated with another race and used it to tell his own story. As he says in his forthcoming book The Way I Am :" In real life rap is all that I really know how to do well."

Still when his first album, Infinite, emerged in 1996 Eminen found himself castigated for his colour:

"The album got stepped on and I got a lot of criticismfrom it: 'Your trying to sound like Nas! You're trying to sound like AZ! You're white, you shouldn't rap, you should go into rock 'n' roll'. Just a lot of criticism, just a lot of bullshit that I was hearing." (from The Hip Hop Years A History of Rap by Alex Ogg with David Upshal)

In 1997 Eminen was second placed in the Rap Olympics:

" I took second place to a hometown favourite or something. It was bullshit. Everybody knew I got robbed there." (from The Hip Hop Years A History of Rap by Alex Ogg with David Upshal).

The Rap Olympics did serve to bring Eminen to the attention of Dr Dre which resulted in 1999's The Slim Shady LP which entered the US album charts at number two and brought the rapper to mainstream attention whilst his work on Rawkus maintained his credibility in the underground.

" An underground following has to be there, you've got to start off there or you don't have nothing to fall back on" said Eminen (from The Hip Hop Years A History of Rap by Alex Ogg with David Upshal).

Stan was issued in 2000. Over a 45 King backing track it tells of fandom gone horribly wrong. In its first three verses Eminen reads the letters of a fan. Over a rhythm is provided by what sounds like a felt tip pen scribbling away on paper it becomes increasingly clear that this fan is one sick puppy:

"Sometimes I even cut myself to see how much it bleeds

It's like adrenaline, the pain is such a sudden rush for me"

Increasingly irate that his idol won't reply to his letters the troubled Stan prepares one final letter to tell his idol that he is driving off a bridge with his pregnant girlfriend in the boot:

"Well, gotta go, I'm almost at the bridge now

Oh shit, I forgot, how'm I supposed to send this shit out?"
says Stan admist the sound of car tyres squealing, crashing and splashing in a production that the sacred Shangra La's themselves would have been proud of.

In the songs final verse Eminen plays himself sitting down to reply to his disciple during the course of this verse Eminen assures Stan that he is valued as a fan and that maybe he should get some counselling: "I just don't want you to do some crazy shit".

Eminen then begins to describe a story he'd read of a man who drove his car off a bridge with his girlfriend in the boot..

"and in the car they found a tape, but they didn't say who it was to

Come to think about, his name was.. it was you

Damn!" ...concludes the song.

Stan was the third single taken from The Marshall Mathers LP . Two further albums followed before Eminen disappeared from public view in 2005.

In 2006 Eminens best friend DeShaun Holton from D12, a rap act that rode the coat tales of Eminens patronage to chart success of their own, was murdered.

"I have never felt so much pain in my life...It was a year before I could really do anything normally. I had days when I couldn't even walk, let alone write a rhyme."(from The Way I Am by Eminen)

Despite a hiatus of some three years Eminen was voted The Best Rapper Alive by readers of Vibe magazine this year.

It seems likely that a new Eminen album will be with us in the first partof 2009.

The picture accompanying this post is from Ingmar Bergmans The Seventh Seal.

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.