Date News Posted: July 26, 2003

Well we got a little behind, in fact we got a lot behind but that’s what happens when you are doing 40 things at the same time, putting together three CDs, building a pool house, getting a package put together for Freddie Hart and all of a sudden a ton of mail and email coming in from all over which is the fun part, and finishing up the Western Poetry album with Charley Aldridge.

I need a little help with something, a few years ago there was a series of LPs called the History Of Country Music with a guy by the name of Lee Cash doing the MC’ing, I thought they were out standing he told a little story and most times a little interview with the artist before he played the song.

The albums had no markings on them what so ever except to say “Lee Cash Presents The History Of Country Music” no record label name, no record number, no anything except what’s above. (Well they did have a drawn picture on the front and back of a guy holding a guitar) but that’s it

What we want to know is, who is/was Lee Cash, and where is he now? There was 12 or so of these albums released, if there was more we didn’t see them, we have volume 4 here on the desk beside us and on it are 15 great classic country songs including the version that Jerry Lee Lewis did on the Eddie Dean Hal Blair song of “One Has My Name, The Other Has My Heart” along with songs by Faron Young, Leroy VanDyke, Ferlin Husky, Good ole George, Sonny James, Tom T. Hall and a few others but all of them just great classics.

Anyway we sure would like to find and talk with Lee if he is still around.

Speaking of Jerry Lee as we did above, we told this before but what the heck, Eddie and Jerry lee was sitting in the backroom of the Pal in north Hollywood and Eddie said to Jerry, why don’t you record One Has My Name, Jerry said why? Eddie being honest said, I could use the money, Jerry did record it and according to the most honest man I ever met, Eddie said the first royalty check paid for his and Dearest house out there by the lake.

Jerry’s version of the song was just great and even though you don’t really think of him (Jerry Lee) doing a slow ballad like this song, he just flat tore it up>and like we also said above it is featured on one of these Lee Cash albums.

We want to see how much of the information that we have and can find on Glen Sherley before we start doing another story on him, we get more mail on Glen then just about anyone and I really don’t know why, oh we liked his music fine but there wasn’t much of it due to the fact he cut it all short by taking his own life.

The guy that as far as I know that knew him better then anyone other then kin folk is Harlan Sanders, he sent me a little story some time ago about Glen but Harlan now is to sick for me to call and keep him on the phone long enough for me to get more of a story then what he has already told me.

Glen, Harlan and Spade Cooley were all in prison together, At Vacaville, California Department of Corrections, Glen was in several different prisons over the years San Quentin, Chino, Soledad and Folsom, robbery mostly we would say because if he would have plugged someone he would more then likely still be there and it would have been doubtful they would have given him permission to record an album in prison, as a matter of fact you can count on one hand, maybe less fingers then that, that the prison system has given anyone permission to record an album for sale while behind bars, no doubt about it the honest words to the prison officials by Johnny Cash that he would sponsor Glenn if they would let him do the recording, and later they did let him out of prison under Johnny’s watchful eye as they later did Harlan Sanders.

There have probably been others but the only other inmate in a prison that we can remember doing a full fledge recording session while still in prison was Johnny Paycheck with the help of Billy Don Burns and Merle Haggard up in Ohio.

As you probably remember the day Spade Cooley was getting out he did a show for the sheriffs department, suffered a heart attack and drop dead on or beside of the stage.

We will see what else we can find in the files on Glen and get back in a little while.

Meanwhile back at the ranch we received a great album from Lawton Williams, there is no way you could forget the smash hit Lawton wrote and Bobby Helms recorded in 1957 called “Fraulein” the song stayed at number one for 4 straight weeks and 52 weeks on the national charts and few songs ever stay that long on any charts any where.

Another smash Lawton wrote and another of country’s best recorded it, Hank Locklin, the song? “Geisha Girl” and this one stayed in the national charts for 39 weeks that was also in 1957

Lawton was born in Troy, Tennessee on July the 29^th, the year don’t matter he is still a gettin’ and a gotten and that’s all that matters.

In the 40s Lawton worked as a DJ in Detroit and also in Dearborn and then a few years later had his own TV series in Ft Worth, Texas.

Lawton found time in 1961 to chart a song for himself called “Anywhere There’s People” on Mercury then hit the charts again in 1964 with “Everything’s O.K. On The LBJ” that one was on RCA.

Over the years Lawton has recorded for Decca, Groove, Mercury, Plantation, and RCA Victor. Today Lawton Williams is recording for “Tima Records” in Dallas, which very well could be his own label.

The new album is called “Mending Fences” and has a dozen songs on it fit for a nice listen down any old highway, my favorite place to listen to music, no noise no nothing, well maybe a few ole truckers on the air horn saying get your hind end outa’ the way but just back off and let um go, and listen to the music.

Better throw this in, Freddie Hart, (I know we don’t have to say Hart, you know who we mean but if a kid picks this up and reads it he may think we are talking about Freddy Kruger).

Anyway Freddie tries to walk every morning all around a big old park over there by his house, he is solid as a rock as is but he wants to stay that way, so he walks. About a month ago he was doing just that when he stepped on a section of loose stone and zap, out from under him went his feet and he hit the ground face first, his face looked like he had been worked over in a boxing ring and he broke his nose, a couple weeks later his face was fine, back to normal, but they set his nose wrong and this week he has to go back in and get that taken care of. So the way it looks in another week or so he will look brand new again.

It is doubtful though that any one in the ring or otherwise would ever work Freddie over too bad since he has a Black belt in Karate.

We really had a nice time this past week talking with Cindy Walker, she is really a fun lady, the reason I love her is she thinks I’m funny and we love to listen to her songs, not that we haven’t been listing to them for many, many years (just dig out some of your old country albums and look on the back at who wrote what and you’ll see how long she has been a writing’ them hits) but she is still at it, this past week on the phone she played me her newly demoed song she wrote for the theme song for the “Texas Hall Of Fame”.

If anyone is interested a DJ up in Fresno collected what he thought was most all her songs by the artist that recorded them and made them famous and put them all in a box set, but no box set will ever hold all of Cindy Walker’s song ‘till she is up there shaking’ hands with St. Peter because she is not even close to putting that pen down.

What we started to say was, if you are interested in buying a box of them let us know and we’ll tell you where to get um. They are on cassette albums so they shouldn’t cost too much, it’s a great collection.

We mentioned Bozo Darnell a few weeks ago and a song he had released called “I’ll Be Your Steppin’ Stone”, and this week we heard from Bozo’s wife, what a great pleasure that was, we have said a bunch of times the best part about doing this is hearing from family.

Mrs. Darnell would really like to have copies of any of Bozo’s records that anyone wouldn’t mind giving up, she would like to leave them to members of her family one of these days, right now she would like to have them to enjoy for herself.

We know some of you good ole country folk have got billions and billions of old 45s stacked in a corner someplace and you are just like me, you don’t throw away nothin’, so how about grabbing a big stack of them and sit down on the floor and go through them and see if hid away in them piles is some of Bozo’s records, they would mean a lot to Marilyn, (Bozo’s wife).

Bozo passed away in September of 1997 from cancer, and when he was recording back in those great ole country days he probably never thought about the worth of those records someday to his family and as far as that goes to the history of “Country Music”.

Even though Bozo was not what you would say was a super star don’t ever underestimate how many people might have heard his music, I have ask several people this past week if they ever heard of Bozo Darnell and every one of them said quick as a flash, Oh Yea, I sure remember “Steppin Stone” and some of those I ask the whole world of Classic Country music knows, so if you are a real collector of Classic Country then you to remember Bozo Darnell so please take a look in your stacks of old 45s, it would make a nice lady smile to know that you care and remembered her husband, Thanks a lot.

You probably say to yourself if you have been reading what we write over the years “Self” why does he put the word “Classic” every time he mentions “Country Music” well what they play today on most stations is not country, hell, I don’t even know what they are saying in half the songs, of course we don’t listen much now days anyway, we really don’t have to with thousands of albums out there in the studio, we set out there some times late at night putting songs from those great old albums on tape then a month later we forgot what we put on them and do they ever sound great going down the highway in the middle of the night.

The other day we were flippin’ around the channels on the TV and came across a station that was running to days country videos and a guy was singing what we guess was a love song laying in a corn field, another one the guy was under the hood of his car with grease on his ears, and another one the gal was running all over that stage like she had ants in her drawers. Now let me see by the show of hands, how many of you ever felt like making whoopee, alone in a cornfield, smelling grease from the engine of an old pickup truck or with ants in your drawers. Did we miss something somewhere down the line?

Which brings us to another point, the way some of these new kids look, we don’t need to see boobs to enjoy a song, we don’t need to hear anyone putting our leaders or country down, we personally don’t give a hoot if George Bush never found as much as a pea shooter in Iraq just stopping another Adolph Hitler from killing people that had done nothing to anyone is enough to blow that sucker out of the pond and just the pictures on TV of some of those poor people kissing the hands of some of our service men who risk their life so they could live was enough to put a tear in my eye, but then I guess all those kind of stories we should leave to Rush Limbaugh.

Any Classic Country artist that has got a new, or old CD that he would like played here is a great station to send it to K.G.Y Am-Fm Radio >Dennis Brown>P.O.Box 1249>Olympia, WA. 98507.

Dennis is working on a Saturday show that he can play the record and call you for an on the air interview if you are up to it.

We are going to have to find the call letters, the M.D’s name and the address of another station that shoots the same program out of three different stations in three different states, actually it is a talk radio station and they can only play about a minutes worth of each song but they do all that while they are talking to you on the air. They told us when they called wanting Freddie that they could only play a short amount of music because they were not licensed as a music station but as a talk radio station, but what the heck, if they are talking to you about your music and where you are going to be, and where you been, what more could you ask.

We lost June Carter Cash and Minnie Snow (Hank’s wife) and cowboy poet Larry McWhorter passed away March the 19^th.

Larry worked some shows with Red Steagall, and speaking of Red Steagall, if you want 45 minutes of some really fine viewing then Red’s video called Sourdough, Beefsteak & Beans should be sitting next to your video player, I don’t know how many times we have played it but a bunch and it always seems brand new, it is great. Let us give you Red’s address so if you want to order one you can, direct from ole Red, there is no phone number on the box or email address but he has both we are sure but not on this box, anyway spend 37cents on a stamp and send it to this address and they will send you their whole catalog, it is Red Steagall> P.O.Box 136639> Ft. Worth, Texas 76136.

We ran across an email the other day from a guy that had read one of our news letters where we had said Les Carrot Top Anderson was alive and well in Canada, when we wrote that, he was just that and I think we put it into a news letter after that, that he had since passed away. We were watching one of the “Town Hall Party” shows from Compton, Ca the other night, well we were watching a tape of the show in the other room and you don’t even want to know how many of those great artist are no longer with us. Les owned part of that show so he said, and he was there long enough so I guess he did. We did hear that Tom Tall who was pretty young at the time of T.H. lived up in Washington State and so did Gary Williams, Larry an Laurie Collins as far as we know are still at it, Billy Mize lives in Bakersfield, Cliff Crofford in Ontario, Ca. and we think Joanie Hall lives up in Canyon Country, Gene Ridgway who worked with Hal Southern and goodness knows how many others in those great old days sent us an email the other day, he’s doing fine but he wrote to let us know that Allen Johnston had passed away, Allen was a pretty darn good song writer but never got the break he needed for the big one, Doye O’Dell recorded a couple of his songs and they did good for Doye but that was about it.

Sometimes don’t you just wish you could be in the mountains in a cabin by a running stream, no TV, no newspaper, no phone no noise but the little birds, no woman or no man to tell you to take out the trash? The news seems to be the exact same every day, the only thing that changes are the names of those that were gunned down in a drive by, another artist that has died, or somebody left their children or a pet in a car with the windows rolled up.

 We know for a fact that there are some artists out there that read these things we write that back in the good old days were somebody’s favorite singer, and we also know that there is probably a million of your good ole fans out there that wonder what ever happened to you, if you are the son or daughter or wife or husband or kin of any kind to one of our heroes, please write us and let us know how she or he is doing and anything else you would like to say, we would really appreciate it and so would someone who sat home last night playing their old 45 record and wondering what ever happened to them.

God Bless America

We’ll see you next time but just in case we don’t, take care of yourself