Live Fast, Love Hard: The Faron Young Story

13. Faron and Friends

13 Faron and Friends Stories told by friends about Faron usually cover extremes in his behavior. Connie Smith learned early not to take his teasing seriously. When she came to Nashville in 1964, she and Faron were standing together at a show and listening to George Jones sing. “George Jones is my favorite singer,” Smith says, “and I said something about him, and Faron insinuated that—I didn’t even know George, because I didn’t know anybody at that point—he insinuated that something was going on between me and George, and it made me mad.” A few moments later Smith’s two-year-old son came by and Faron reached down and patted him on the head. “Just don’t touch my kid,” Smith ordered. She wasn’t used to Faron’s kind of talk and didn’t want to hear it personally, nor did she want her children to hear it. She didn’t voluntarily go near him after their first meeting, but work put them in the 10 same environment. “I was forced into a situation where I got to know him,” she says, “and once you know his heart, all the bull didn’t matter. He had a big heart, and I loved him to death.”1 Ralph Emery remembers a package show Faron headlined in Charleston, South Carolina, in the early 1960s. The venue sold beer, and the audience grew drunker as the show rolled on. Grandpa Jones left the stage upset because the rowdy crowd yelled too much to hear the punchlines of his jokes. The teenaged Hank Williams Jr. also had a rough time getting the crowd’s attention. “Faron came on,” Emery recalls, “and he spoke their language. They loved him. A rowdy crowd is hard to entertain. So we sent them a rowdy entertainer, and he got the job done.”2 Faron, Billy Walker observes, “had two personalities. His good side showed up when he wasn’t drinking, and his bad side showed up when he was. He shelled out a lot of money to help people. This is a side of Faron Young nobody talks about much.” One day on Music Row, on the street in front of Faron’s office, Walker saw a man ask Faron for help in finding a job. Faron quizzed him about his wife and children, who were in the car, and the man said they didn’t have much to eat. Where, Faron asked, did they live? The answer was, “In that car.” Faron handed the man several hundred dollars and told him to get a room and something to eat. “If you ever make it back,” he said, “you can pay me back, and if you don’t, don’t worry about it.” Walker maintains that “Faron was a real philanthropist—when he wasn’t drinking. When he was drinking, he was meaner than a little snake.”3 Tommy Cash met Faron soon after moving to Nashville in 1964 to open a music publishing company for his famous brother. “My brother was a legend, of course, almost from the beginning,” Cash says. “Through John I got to meet a lot of people. . . . I not only met Faron, I met all the people that were anybody in the music business.” Never did he dream he’d have a hit record and go on tour with Faron. “Growing up in the cotton fields of Arkansas and going to the Ellis Auditorium in Memphis maybe once every three months to see a show, I idolized people like him and Webb Pierce and the Wilburn Brothers.” As Cash describes a package show schedule, “Tonight we’d play Kansas City, maybe Chicago tomorrow night, the next night Indianapolis, the next night Pittsburgh, the next night no telling where, for about ten days or two weeks.” He was awed by Faron, “one of the most natural entertainers I’ve ever known, [he could] tear an audience to pieces. I learned a lot from him.”4 Faron and Friends live fast, love hard 110 Del Reeves, whose “Girl on the Billboard” hit number one in early 1965, also became friendly with Faron. “He’d cuss around me,” Reeves says, “and call me all kind of names, but he would never say not even hell or damn around my wife.” When Reeves described Faron’s language to his wife, she couldn’t believe he talked the way he...