The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience

Chapter 12: Jess Morris: Boiled Shirt and Cowboy Boots

[ 327 ] 12 Jess Morris Boiled Shirt and Cowboy Boots T o open the Jess Morris “corporate subject” file at the Archive of Folk Culture is to release a veritable flood of clippings , letters, and postcards brimming with the Texas fiddler and singer’s picturesque experiences and expansive personality. Other collections harbor the same unsinkable spirit, from the autographed sheet music he sent the Wyoming State Archives to the musical autobiography he provided the Amarillo Sunday News and Globe, from an update he returned to his college alumni office to heated moments he shared with the Texas Folklore Society. In one 1940 letter to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram he acknowledges with mock biblical solemnity that “I have learned, that: ‘He that tooteth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooted.’”1 A year earlier, writing to John A. Lomax, and dismayed over a proposed recording session in which he could not participate because of the distance to Washington, D.C., Jess (1878–1953) ruefully observes, “I guess that they will get some ‘pretty boy’ from Hollywood that don’t know a cow from a giraffe, to sing their cowboy songs.” Lomax responds to this sentiment on the letter’s margin, “This is probably true.”2 Nor has the Folk Archive been able to confine Jess to a single file cabinet . Once, while researching a totally unrelated subject, I happened upon a folder labeled “Johnson, Lyndon.” The future president had forwarded to the [ 328 ] Archive a 1952 letter from “a constituent of mine, Mr. Jess Morris.”3 Duncan Emrich, then head of the Folk Archive, wrote back to Senator Johnson about the forthcoming release of what Jess called a “large record,” a point Emrich explained as “his interpretation of the fact we are issuing his ‘Goodbye, Old Paint’ on a ‘long-playing record’ later this fall.”4 Shortly before this exchange, in another of his typed postcards to Emrich, Jess implored, “I wrote you . . . last . . . Saturday, and told you to use the Ol’ Paint, anyway you saw fit. Mr. Emrich, can’t you get The Hon. Lyndon Johnson and The Hon. Tom Connally, to write the proper Authorities, in Austin, Texas, to let me hang my picture alongside of Jean Autry, in their ‘Hall of Fame’ in the Capitol Building in Austin? I can’t see that ‘JEAN,’ has anything on me, unless it’s his beautiful teeth. Sincerely, Ol’ JESS.”5 Ol’ Jess lived many of the realities that Gene Autry portrayed on the movie screen. Like the wide open spaces Autry traversed by projectionist’s lamp, Jess knew firsthand the unbroken range of the Texas Panhandle, the last of the long-distance cattle drives, and the all-night ranch dances reachable only by horse-drawn wagon. He also embodied a cultural breadth that exceeds cinematic stereotype. On the day Jess died, his hometown Dalhart newspaper observed that “Morris was a genuine son of the Old West. He was as much at home in a tuxedo, boiled shirt and bow tie playing classical music on a violin, as he was in levis, loud shirt, big hat, and cowboy boots playing the lilting tunes of the Old West on his fiddle.”6 Schooled as a sight reader and knowledgeable as an ear player, Jess’s expertise gave him ease, the obituary continued, at both “cowboy dances and high-falutin’ formal balls.” His community remembered him especially for “Goodbye, Old Paint,” a song he learned in childhood. It became his signature number, one that he copyrighted and published. His contribution to the piece mattered to him to the end of his life as he waited anxiously for its release on a Library of Congress album of cattle calls and cowboy songs. Conscious of its place in folk tradition , Jess wrote detailed, even notarized accounts of how he made this song his own. With “Goodbye, Old Paint,” he grappled with questions of culture and ownership, and by extension, of what is ours, individually and collectively. Fully able to tell a giraffe from a cow, Jess’s penetrating combination of horse sense and refinement not only fit his own past, it underlies his gift to America. “Each generation,” Vera Skelton Morris writes in her 1983 genealogy centered on Jess’s parents, his brothers and sisters, and their families, “seems chapter 12 [ 329 ] to be confronted with their own ‘Red Sea—you can’t go over it or under it or...