Detroit Country Music: Mountaineers, Cowboys, and Rockabillies

Chapter 14. What Makes The Jukebox Play: Jimmy Work

197 Chapter 14 What Makes the Jukebox Play JimmyWork Detroit, Michigan, was a good place, a good country music town. They helped me a lot with my music. That’s where it all got started. —­Jimmy Work1 Looking through a country music fan’s music collection, one song that’s sure to be there, by one artist or another, is Jimmy Work’s“Making Believe.” Trained as a millwright in Detroit during World War II, Work wrote songs and sang them on radio as a hobby. In 1948 Work recorded his “Tennessee Border” for a Detroit jukebox label. The resulting C&W hit distinguished itself by breaking from the double-­entendre novelty songs that local jukebox companies preferred to carry during the 1940s. In 1955, he recorded“Making Believe” and“That’s What Makes The Jukebox Play,” which grew so successful he left his skilled trade for several years to make music. Work could have cut his next sessions with the best musicians at any studio in the country, but he returned to Detroit time and again to record with Casey Clark’s Lazy Ranch Boys, until he moved to California in early 1957. Work’s life began in Akron, Ohio, on March 29, 1924. Some forty miles south of Cleveland,Akron was a boomtown during the 1920s, with four major tire and rubber manufacturers based in the city. As happened in Detroit, most of Akron’s new residents arrived from Eastern Europe and the South- 198 / Detroit Country Music ern United States. Work’s parents had moved from Kentucky. Around 1926, they settled on a farm near Dukedom, Kentucky, straddling the Kentucky-­ Tennessee border. Work listened to records by the Carter Family, Roy Acuff, and Gene Autry played on his grandmother’s Victrola. He enjoyed hearing country music on late-­ night radio broadcasts pulled in from distant stations. “Years ago, [when] I was going to school, . . . my dad gave me about eight-­ tenths of an acre. I had to grow tobacco,” said Work. He saved his earnings to purchase a battery-­ powered radio and marveled at midnight western swing broadcasts from Texas. After discovering he could coax music from an old banjo,Work’s parents bought him a Gene Autry guitar from a Sears-­ Roebuck mail-­ order catalog. He didn’t take music lessons regularly, but sitting in with neighbors inspired him to keep picking.“In this part of the country, they had a lot of good musicians ,” he said. “I had a schoolteacher by the name of Miss Katy Barnes, and she was real good on the piano. I would chord and follow her, while she played.” Work began writing songs when he reached his teen-­ age years. “I like to write. It’s like inventing something,” he said. You’re Gone, I Won’t Forget Around 1940 the young man left Kentucky and moved to Detroit, when Southeast Michigan retooled in support of the nation’s preparations for war. “Back years ago, everybody around here [Dukedom], they went north,” said Work.“They either went to Akron, or they went to Detroit . . . for a job. “The first job I received in Detroit, I worked at the Willow Run Bomber Plant . . . as a millwright. I served an apprenticeship [there],” he said. Shortly after his arrival,Work met theYork Brothers,George and Leslie, at a tavern on Harper, near the Kentucky Pool Hall at Harper and Helen, where many Southerners gathered on weekends.“The York Brothers would have me to sing a song or two wherever they were playing. We were good friends,” he said. What Makes the Jukebox Play: Jimmy Work / 199 Eventually he auditioned at WCAR Pontiac, and he performed a radio show every week.“I have a book of songs that M. M. Cole [Publishing Company] published back when I was going to high school, [of] the songs I wrote,” said Work. He sold copies of the book during his program. “My hobby was, . . . I’d work up there and make a little money, . . . get some musicians together, and we’d make [recordings],”he said.Around 1945 Work cut four songs from his book for theTrophy label,based in the Penobscot Building, downtown. Work led the session at United Sound Systems on Second Avenue in Detroit. Guitarist Dorris Woodruff, also from Dukedom , imitated Jimmy Short of Ernest Tubb’s band, while Work strummed rhythm guitar, yodeled, and sang“Those Kentucky Bluegrass Hills,”“You’re Gone I Won’t...