Country Music

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Country Music

HE HAD NO. 1 HITS, NUDIE SUITS, SILVER-DOLLAR CARS — AND A $30,000 GUITAR-SHAPED POOL THAT MADE HIS OWN NEIGHBORS TAKE HIM TO COURT. By the mid-1950s, Webb Pierce was one of the biggest country singers alive. Hank Williams was gone. The Grand Ole Opry had a hole to fill. Webb came in loud, sharp, and dressed for attention. “There Stands the Glass” went No. 1. “Slowly” went No. 1. “In the Jailhouse Now” sat at the top for months. For a few years, nearly everything he released found the upper end of the country chart. Then the success started spilling out into the yard. Pierce had Nudie Cohen line convertibles with silver dollars. He wore suits made to be seen from the back row. At his Nashville home, he built a $30,000 swimming pool shaped like a guitar. The place became a tourist stop. People came by the thousands to look at the pool, the cars, and the kind of country-star excess most fans had only heard about on records. The neighbors got tired of it. Ray Stevens lived nearby and helped lead the push against the tours. The dispute went to court. The neighbors won. Webb Pierce had to stop turning his own house into an attraction. By then, country music had started changing around him. The hits slowed. The younger names came in. The man who once helped define honky-tonk became almost as famous for the house behind the songs as for the songs themselves. Webb Pierce had built a pool shaped like a guitar. But the sound that made him rich enough to build it was already starting to belong to another generation.

Country Music

URBAN COWBOY TURNED GILLEY’S INTO A NATIONAL LEGEND. NINE YEARS LATER, A COURT RECEIVER SHUT THE DOORS. ONE YEAR AFTER THAT, FIRE TOOK THE BUILDING. Mickey Gilley was already working the clubs around Pasadena, Texas, when Sherwood Cryer brought him into the room that would take both men farther than either one expected. The place was on Spencer Highway. It had bars, dance floors, pool tables, a rodeo arena, and a mechanical bull that could turn a refinery worker into the center of the room for a few seconds. Gilley played there for years. The sign outside carried his name. The crowds came. Then Urban Cowboy came in 1980 and turned Gilley’s from a Texas honky-tonk into a national picture of country nightlife. For a while, everything got bigger. Tourists came to Pasadena. The club sold beer, shirts, stickers, jeans, glasses, and almost anything that could carry the Gilley’s name. Mickey’s own career jumped with it. “Stand by Me” became one of his biggest records. Johnny Lee came out of that same room with “Lookin’ for Love.” The mechanical bull became almost as famous as some of the singers who played there. Then the partnership broke. By the late 1980s, Gilley and Cryer were fighting in court. Gilley said Cryer had cheated him and let the club fall apart. In 1988, Gilley won a $17 million judgment. The court eventually ordered the club closed in 1989 because it was still losing money. A sign went on the door. The building that had once stayed open seven nights a week was locked up. In July 1990, the main club burned to the ground. Investigators ruled it arson, but nobody was ever convicted. What was left of the honky-tonk that made Urban Cowboy famous became an empty lot in Pasadena. Mickey Gilley got his name back. The room that made it famous was gone.

Country Music

THE CANCER TOOK LEVON HELM’S SINGING VOICE. SO HE OPENED HIS WOODSTOCK BARN, SAT BEHIND THE DRUMS, AND LET THE MUSIC FIND ITS WAY BACK TO HIM. By the late 1990s, Levon Helm had already lived through the kind of losses that could empty out a musician for good. The Arkansas-born drummer and voice of The Band had watched Richard Manuel die, lost his Woodstock home and studio in a fire, and spent years fighting money trouble. Then came throat cancer. The treatment saved his life, but radiation damaged the voice that had carried “The Weight,” “Up on Cripple Creek,” and so much of The Band’s worn-in American sound. At first, Helm could barely sing. The man whose voice sounded like gravel roads, cotton fields, and old Southern kitchens had to stand back while other people took the microphone. But he still had the barn. At his rebuilt home in Woodstock, New York, Helm began hosting what he called the Midnight Rambles — loose, late-night gatherings shaped by the old traveling medicine shows he remembered from Arkansas. Musicians came through the door. His daughter Amy was there. Larry Campbell was there. Friends, singers, strangers, and people who had grown up with The Band’s records crowded into a room built by a drummer for musicians. At first, Levon mostly played drums. Then, on January 10, 2004, he sang again. It was not a grand comeback staged in an arena. It was a man in his own barn, after cancer had nearly taken the one thing people knew him for, finding enough of his voice to return to the song. The Midnight Rambles helped pay medical bills, helped save the house from foreclosure, and eventually led to Dirt Farmer, Electric Dirt, and Ramble at the Ryman — all Grammy-winning records. Levon Helm did not rebuild his life by chasing the old spotlight. He rebuilt it in a wooden room in Woodstock, with a drum kit behind him, his daughter nearby, and a voice that came back one rough note at a time.

Country Music

JOHNNY HORTON MARRIED HANK WILLIAMS’S WIDOW — THEN DIED AFTER PLAYING THE SAME AUSTIN CLUB WHERE HANK HAD GIVEN HIS FINAL SHOW. Johnny Horton was not supposed to be the second country legend in Billie Jean’s life. When he married her in September 1953, Hank Williams had been dead less than a year. Horton was still fighting for his own place — part Louisiana Hayride singer, part fisherman, part honky-tonk man trying to get Columbia and Nashville to hear something bigger in him. Billie Jean had already lived through headlines, estate fights, and the kind of grief that comes when the world thinks it owns your husband’s death. Then Horton’s records finally caught. “When It’s Springtime in Alaska” went No. 1 in 1959. “The Battle of New Orleans” became a national hit and won a Grammy. “Sink the Bismarck” followed. “North to Alaska” was tied to a John Wayne movie. For a short stretch, Johnny Horton was not just another Louisiana Hayride name. He was one of the biggest country singers in America. On November 4, 1960, Horton played the Skyline Club in Austin, Texas. Hank Williams had played his last show at the same place before dying on New Year’s Day 1953. Horton was driving back toward Shreveport with manager Tillman Franks and guitarist Tommy Tomlinson when his car collided with a truck near Milano, Texas. Horton died on the way to the hospital. Franks survived with serious injuries. Tomlinson survived too, but later lost a leg. Billie Jean was a widow again. This time there was no mystery in the back seat of a Cadillac, no legend slowly growing around a dead man’s final ride. Just another road out of Austin, another country singer who did not get home, and the same woman left to hear the news twice.