Live Fast, Love Hard: The Faron Young Story

12. Making Music in the 1960s

12 Making Music in the 1960s Faron’s first Mercury release, “The Yellow Bandana” in early 1963, went to number one on Cash Box charts and number four on Billboard’s. Shelby Singleton, Mercury’s A&R director and also a Shreveport native, signed Faron to the label and produced his first few albums. The initial one, This Is Faron, opened with “The Yellow Bandana,” and side two contained new arrangements of previous Capitol hits. Two of the Deputies, Ben Keith and Odell Martin, played on the session, the Jordanaires, and Singleton’s wife, Margie, singing backup.1 Faron’s second album, Faron Young Aims at the West, showcased a dozen western songs. Merle Kilgore, another Shreveport native, said he and Faron wrote the album cut “A Dead Man Ago,” however, co-writer credit went to live fast, love hard  Margie Singleton instead of Faron. While recording the album Faron called Kilgore to say he needed another song. “They want a New Mexico song. Billy the Kid was from New Mexico; we ain’t writin’ about no Billy the Kid, though.” “Man, this is gonna take a lot of research,” Kilgore protested. “No, it ain’t. Go to the damn library and look up western songs. Most of them are PD [in the public domain] anyway.” Kilgore went to the library in downtown Nashville and found a song, author unknown, about New Mexico. He gave the librarian $5 to type the lyrics and then rushed to the studio. “Great,” Faron said. “I wonder how it goes.” “Hey, I did my part,” Kilgore told him. “You do your part.” Faron pulled a melody out of his head and sang “New Mexico.” Kilgore, who thought the song turned out well, chuckles at the memory. “We didn’t write it,” he says. “We manufactured that baby.”2 Faron also called Johnny Western to report, “Guess what I did! I recorded your song” (“The Ballad of Paladin”). Western was “thrilled to death.” Guitars and fuzz tone duplicated the opening sound of the French horns on Western’s recording. “I was honored that he would do my song on one of his albums,” Western observes. “He was singing great, and it’s something I’m very proud of.”3 Faron and the Deputies left Nashville on July 31, 1963, for a sixteenday personal appearance tour of U.S. Army camps in Germany. Hilda and their two sons were already there, visiting her parents.4 The men squeezed themselves and their equipment into a little Volkswagen bus every morning , did a show at a different base each day, and returned to their Frankfurt hotel in the evening. One day their military escort took them to the Soviet border, and they watched through binoculars to see the changing of the Soviet guard. Soon after the return from Germany, the Deputy foursome of Gino King, Ben Keith, Jerry Wayne “Cootie” Hunley, and Odell Martin broke up. King was arrested in the middle of a tour, for not paying child support. “They left me in jail and they went back to Nashville,” he says. “I don’t know how many more dates there was after that. I was sitting in a six-bysix cell, very unhappy.” King has fond memories of Faron. “If anything ever happened that we needed help, he was there,” he says. Later, when King ran short of money, he would occasionally ask Faron for a loan, “and he always, always, would give me twenty or fifty bucks. I’d try to pay him back and he wouldn’t take it. He took care of his pickers. If you’d catch him  when he was drinking, that’s a different story. Then, he’d embarrass the hell out of you. I always seemed to catch him when he was straight.”5 Darrell McCall returned to the Country Deputies in his old role as frontman and bass player. Hunley quit the band in October to be home for the birth of his son; he purchased and ran a convenience store.6 Replacing him as drummer was Glen Davis, who left George Jones to do so. “Faron was one of my favorite guys to work with,” he observes. “I really thought the world of him. He was fantastic.”7 When Martin took a job with another entertainer, Leon Sutton replaced him as lead guitar player. “Hey, Wahoo,” Ferlin Husky said to him one day while on tour, and...