The Colonel Page 13

  Parker’s frequent trips to Nashville reminded him just how much he missed the traveling and the exhilarating cadence of the wheels rolling beneath him. For that reason—and to study the mind-set of the typical country musician, whose generally honest and unfettered psyche he had yet to fully grasp—Parker signed on as Pee Wee King’s road manager for the bulk of the 1943 season. Then, as King remembers, Parker was always eager to play cards and shoot dice with the band to kill the long hours on the drives between dates, keeping a $100 bill in his wallet for gambling emergencies.

  When the tour ended, he returned to Florida and booked personal appearances for newcomer Ernest Tubb. Parker was one of the best promoters there was, in Tubb’s estimation, but he told his son, Justin, that he’d never use him on a long-term basis because “he’d constantly try to put one over on you—that was the life he’d led as a carny.”

  Parker saw the extreme advantage to staying on good terms with a rising star like Tubb. Soon Parker surprised Justin, then almost nine, and his younger sister, Elaine, with the magnanimous gift of two ponies: a black-and-white paint named Honey for Justin, and a smaller Shetland and buckboard for his sister.

  The Tubb children, not knowing that Parker needed to unload the last vestiges of his kiddie ride concessions, were thrilled at such benevolence, even if Elaine’s pony, Trigger, was, in fact, both old and blind. But their father suspected that Parker seldom did a favor without expecting one in return, and that while he gave the children the ponies because he hoped they would enjoy years of pleasure with them, he also planned to use the gifts as leverage. Indeed, Parker had plans for expanding his relationship with the lanky Opry star.

  Since 1941, the WSM Artist Service Bureau had been commissioning a series of summer tent shows that took the Opry from its base in middle Tennessee and out into the rural South. Parker had tossed his hat in the ring as the booker and advance man, or “general agent,” for the Jamup and Honey tent show of 1944, which would go out that April, taking country music to audiences that couldn’t travel due to wartime restrictions on tires and gasoline.

  The Jamup and Honey show, he told Harry Stone, WSM’s general manager, held special interest for him. Aside from the blackface comedy duo, who’d heard about Parker’s prowess as a promoter from Roy Acuff, the show starred old-time banjo player Uncle Dave Macon, Minnie Pearl, and Eddy Arnold, the rising performer who, in his first year on the Opry, was already being considered to host his own segment. With Stone’s and - Acuff’s recommendations, Parker got the job.

  On the day that the Jamup and Honey tent show opened a five-day run in Mobile, Alabama, the rain came down with such velocity that great tongues of water lapped at the slopes of the taut canvas tent, finally seeping through and dripping down below. By the time for the first of two shows that evening, the ground under the tent brimmed like a river, so much so, as Gabe Tucker, then Eddy Arnold’s bass player, remembers, “We performed barefooted, it was so bad. And God, it rained every day.”

  Still, the April showers could not deter the throngs of people who came not just from Mobile, the Azalea City, but from the outlying rural areas, eager to plunk down their hard-won, wartime cash of twenty, thirty, and thirty-five cents a head—even the top ticket price of $1—to hear and see the Grand Ole Opry under canvas. For hours, they stood in a great snake of a line, the men in suits and ties, the women in Sunday dresses and long coats to keep off the spring chill, hoping to be among the lucky 1,500 to crowd into the 80-by-220-foot tent.

  For Tom Parker, who had traveled the back roads of the central South and Midwest as part of the booking agent, bill poster, and advance-man crew, the choice of Mobile was not by happenstance. In selecting the spots where he would recast his life once again, following the WSM radio clear-channel signal, he returned to the city where he most likely came ashore in 1929 and reshaped himself into an entirely new entity.

  Now, as the tent show got under way for the second week, Parker doubled back to Mobile to see if he had delivered what he’d promised both WSM’s general manager, Harry Stone, and Lee Davis “Honey” Wilds, the owner of the show, whose daily operating expenses reached nearly $600 (“Everybody said we were crazy,” admitted Wilds), and who paid the radio station a weekly commission for using its call letters and the name Grand Ole Opry. Almost always along the route of one-night locales like Caruthersville, Missouri; Harrison, Arkansas; and Meridian, Mississippi—the idea was to pick little towns that didn’t have auditoriums—Parker would discover with great satisfaction that the shows sold out, often with monstrous crowds still waiting at the door. Sometimes nearly the whole town showed up: in one Oklahoma berg of 1,500, 1,100 people turned out to sit shoulder to shoulder, ten to a row, in sections marked by lines of slender poles. Word quickly filtered back to Nashville.

  “Even with the tent shows,” says Pee Wee King, “Tom seemed to know how to put them in the right place at the right time. Some of us would go out on the road in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama and have rain. And Tom would be in Illinois and Indiana and Iowa, maybe also having rain, but still drawing crowds.”

  As the poster of the 21-by-28-inch signs (HEARD THEM ON THE AIR! STARS IN PERSON! MAMMOTH TENT THEATRE!) that brought folks flocking to a tent illuminated by dangling lightbulbs and thrown up in the middle of a farmer’s pasture, Parker traversed the country in a well-worn International panel truck, painted a somewhat sickening shade of yellow and festooned with bright red letters boasting WSM, GRAND OLE OPRY, ADVERTISING.

  “They furnished him that ol’ truck and gave him Green Stamps for gasoline,” says Gabe Tucker, who first met Parker on the show, having admired his promotional skills since the Gene Austin days in the late ’30s. “He slapped them big posters, the three [30-by-60 pictorial] sheets, up on the sides of barns with flour and water, and oh God, that truck smelled awful, just sour as hell. And he slept in it every once in a while out there on the road. I felt sorry for him, dressed like a tramp in them awkward-lookin’ shoes with his britches halfway down ’em. Marie was in Tampa, and he was so damn lonesome. It was pretty rough living.”

  But being attached to the show brought Parker in close proximity to Eddy Arnold. The singer’s management contract with Dean Upson wasn’t due to expire until October 1945, yet Parker wanted to lay the groundwork now. Both Tucker and Little Roy Wiggins, the eighteen-year-old who played steel guitar in Eddy’s band, remember seeing him standing in the shadows, watching, only the red glow of his cigar giving him away.

  The tent show was a perfect vantage point from which Parker could talk to Arnold, persuade him, and learn more about him. To achieve that, he needed to be around the singer often enough that Arnold would feel comfortable with him and seek his advice. Even though Parker felt superior to most of the troupe, particularly with his shrewdness about money, he also wanted to make a favorable impression on the people around him, both by his actions and results as an advance man, and by the sheer force of his personality. Since he was not just establishing himself, but still recreating himself as a country promoter, he hoped to bolster his own reputation and to further his education in the hillbilly ways. He knew the way to win their confidence was to gain popularity.

  And so at least once a month, or every ten days if he could manage it, Parker made a point of circling back to the show on the pretense of working out a problem or to pick up his pay.

  “He was trying to make friends with everybody that was there, because he didn’t know who was heavy [with power] and who wasn’t,” says Gabe Tucker. Since Parker envied Tucker’s proximity to the star, “we got along just fine. But back then, he could get along with anybody. He was the nicest guy in the world when he needed you.”

  Before long, Parker was traveling in the car with the eccentric, whiskey-nipping Uncle Dave Macon—who in 1926 became a cornerstone of the Opry as the first individual featured performer—and his handsome son Dorris, who accompanied his father on guitar.

  A plus for Parker when he accompanied the troupe was that although they t
raveled at night, while it was cool, and arrived in the wee hours of the morning, he got to sample the downy comfort of a real bed, rather than sleep in the truck, even if the accommodations were, as Honey Wilds remembered, “little wasp-nest hotels.”

  Although Jamup and Honey wrote and performed comedic songs, their primary act was a lively amalgamation of Southern humor, drawn from the nineteenth-century minstrel tradition and mugged in blackface as tribute to the Negro culture.

  With his sulfurous sense of humor and appetite for the practical joke, Parker was more naturally drawn to comedy than he was to the homemade music of the rural Southeast, with its reliance on story songs chock full of drunks, disappointed love, and deferred dreams. And perhaps because a joke about a bumpkin farmer from small-town Tennessee was not so different from a joke about a farmer from a small village in Holland, Parker reveled in the stories about rube hillbillies, ethnic immigrants, and the hayseed who got the best of the city slicker that made up the country comic’s stock-in-trade.

  Whether he realized it, Parker’s six-month excursion in the company of country comedians had a profound effect on his thinking and entrepreneurial style. In years to come, he would often book a comic on his shows, whether the headliner was Hank Snow or Elvis Presley, and even when such opening acts were no longer fashionable or appropriate.

  Out on the road, Parker spent long hours with the troupe, sharing meals, leisurely telling stories, strolling around the town with them before packing up the cars and heading out to the tent grounds for the performance. Yet when Minnie Pearl, who had known him from his earlier days in Tampa, tried to engage him in intimate conversation about his youth and growing-up years, the usually gregarious promoter turned silent. As she said years later, “I was with him for months at a stretch, and he never even slipped and mentioned anything about his background.”

  Pearl was mystified, since “Southern people talk about their grandmother, their great-grandmother, what their daddy did, what their grandfather did. They’re involved in background and family.” The rumor, which she believed, was that “the enigma,” as she called him, was born down around Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. But no matter how hard she tried to confirm it, Parker refused to divulge a single detail.

  However, he seemed to enjoy a more relaxed rapport with Honey Wilds. While Parker naturally would have tried to cultivate the show’s owner—the man who hired him “right out of that dog pound,” as Honey remembered—the towering Wilds was not the easiest man to know. Like many comedians, the off-stage Wilds was frequently difficult and unpleasant, with a streak that ran close to morose. He also gave off an air of danger. Wilds routinely carried a pocket knife, which he always prided as the sharpest in the room and, on the lot, a ten-inch crescent wrench, which he brandished like a weapon. For the countless miles of travel, he armed himself with a pistol, sometimes shooting it within ten feet of someone just to get their attention.

  The basis of his bond with Parker, concludes David Wilds, Honey’s son, “was that what each did appealed to the other. My father was a total creative rebel. He was a lot like Tom in that he was a very intelligent guy who worked really hard to either dominate a situation through any means necessary, or pretend that he wasn’t as shrewd as he was. Tom’s thought process was just constantly evolving, and Daddy had a tremendous appreciation for his ability to get things done.”

  As the nights turned nippy and the tent show ended its season that fall of ’44, Parker threw a big dinner for the troupe in Tampa. In retrospect, say members of Arnold’s band, such uncharacteristic generosity came more from Parker’s hope to impress Eddy than anything else, since Eddy still hadn’t made up his mind about this uneducated hustler with the faulty English.

  Parker was already full of plans on how to make Eddy a major name, even outside the confines of the Opry. But until he was able to snag the singer’s management contract, Parker hired on with J. L. Frank as a stump man, a combination of promoter, road manager, and advance agent, keeping Frank’s acts working in the South and Midwest.

  At a time when most country acts booked dates and tours from their home telephone, and the switchboard operator at the Grand Ole Opry acted as an answering service for the few personal managers working out of Nashville, Parker ran his business out of the lobby of Nashville’s Andrew Jackson Hotel, making use of its free wall phones and letter desks.

  “He used to tell people in New York, ‘Call me in my office at two o’clock,’ ” remembered Parker’s carnival friend Jack Kaplan. “He’d sit there and wait on it, just so everybody would think he had a big office in Nashville.”

  Primarily, Parker handled a tour of several hundred dates for Ernest Tubb. With a huge hit like “Soldier’s Last Letter” and a pair of quickie movies, Tubb was now a big enough star to headline a package of Opry newcomers, including comic Rod Brasfield and, as an extra added attraction, the Poe Sisters, real-life siblings just barely into their twenties who used the stage names Ruth and Nelle.

  As usual, Parker traveled two weeks ahead of the dates, booking auditoriums and theaters, billing posters, arranging for newspaper ads and hotel accommodations, and in keeping with Joe Frank’s brand of broadcast promotion, setting up fifteen-minute early-morning radio programs for the troupe to come in to advertise the show.

  Somewhere along the route, Tubb would get a telegram from Joe Frank telling him where Parker would catch up with him, usually in one of Tom’s favorite diners. There, Parker would fill him in on what he’d lined up, writing it all down in his meticulous, methodical handwriting and passing the schedule sheet across a table ladened with double orders of chicken-fried steak served on green, sectioned plates, with plenty of sweet tea to wash it down. Afterward, Tubb would silently lay a deck of cards or a pair of dice on the table, and he and Parker would adjourn to get up a friendly game. “He’d take a chance on anything,” says Gabe Tucker.

  In contrast to his shabby, vagabond appearance with the Jamup and Honey tent show, Parker, as an agent for the distinguished Joe Frank, dressed in the kinds of clothes that had once delighted the young Andreas van Kuijk.

  “He would always wear a white shirt with a nice sport jacket and slacks,” recalls Nelle Poe. “He was already heavyset and balding, but he really looked like a gentleman. He traveled so hard and fast promoting us that he would have a whole suitcase of white shirts, but he wouldn’t have time to get them laundered. He’d say, ‘I’m sending them home for my wife to do them. I’ll pick them up on the next trip.’ ”

  Parker was in unusually good spirits on the tour, and soon he grew so bold as to insinuate himself into Tubb’s stage act, impersonating the comedian Smiley Burnette and his character Frog Millhouse, Gene Autry’s faithful sidekick. With his penchant for costumes, Parker had acquired an outfit similar to Burnette’s signature look of checked shirt, loose black kerchief draped at the neck, and a floppy black hat turned sideways.

  Nelle Poe remembers that Parker, who had studied Burnette’s moves and could mug his poses, was able to play the comic with unnerving accuracy. “As soon as Ernest walked out on the stage,” says Poe, “Tom would start down the aisle, brushing people’s shoulders off with a little broom. He would do that on both sides of the audience, and Ernest would just stop and stand there with his guitar and look through the crowd like he didn’t know what was going on. Of course, Ernest couldn’t sing, because people were just howling at this big commotion of Tom’s. He was really hilarious.”

  The heady reception fueled Parker’s honeyed dreams of fame. “He always said to me, ‘I’m going to Hollywood someday,’ ” Poe adds. “He had big ambitions, and he was sure he was destined for great things.”

  Yet Parker surely knew that his best chances of succeeding in Hollywood were not as a performer, but through his management of an alter ego. To that end, he continued to keep a vigilant watch on Eddy Arnold, who had just been tapped to host Ralston Purina’s “Checkerboard Square” segment of the Grand Ole Opry, a plum spot.

  As Eddy began to rouse the at
tention of national advertisers, Parker repositioned himself to strengthen his relationship with the budding star. Working with freelance promoter Jim Bulleit, who had headed the Opry Artist Service Bureau before the war, he booked Eddy for two weeks of theater dates in Florida during the winter of 1944–45. The idea was to show Arnold that he could bring him up a level, to get him away from the little piss-ant county fairs Eddy had played with Pee Wee King, where the people came up to grab a piece of the star or get an autograph. Once he was able to manage a top-notch act like Arnold, Parker vowed, he’d take him only to the bigger rodeos and fairs, and restrict that kind of fan access. To get the crowds lathered up, and then declare his star untouchable, was to rend him a god.

  In the fall of 1945, Parker made a handshake deal with Arnold for exclusive representation. It was not the clear, round tones of Eddy’s baritone that called to him, nor the Western bent of the tenor end of Eddy’s register, reaching to surreal high yodel. With the understanding that Parker would take 25 percent of Arnold’s income and Eddy would pay the expenses, Parker was not even overly concerned with the money he hoped to realize in bringing Eddy to prominence, although his funds were so tight that Marie had to temporarily hock her wedding ring to finance his trip to Tennessee. For him, the chance to couple his fate to Eddy’s was a matter of personal power, of showing folks how to play the game.

  As before, in the name of promotion, he was shameless. Joey Hoffman, Peasy’s son, remembers seeing him hand out pictures in front of the grandstand at the Tampa fairgrounds to advertise Eddy’s show, telling passersby, “It’s free today, but the next time you see this face, you’ll be paying for it!”

  Yet Parker saved his boldest move for the day of the show, when he ambled down to the opening of Jack Shepherd’s grocery store on Howard Avenue and approached a hillbilly band playing live on the air. Brashly, he went up to the microphone and asked the lead singer if he knew Eddy - Arnold’s favorite song, “Mommy, Please Stay Home with Me.” The singer sheepishly said he didn’t, so Parker invited the band—and the listening audience—to come out to the fair to hear Eddy sing it himself, thus wangling a free radio advertisement out of the station.