Detroit Country Music: Mountaineers, Cowboys, and Rockabillies

Chapter 5. Tenacious Trailblazer: Arizona Weston

51 Chapter 5 Tenacious Trailblazer ArizonaWeston I’ve done everything a guy can do in this business. —­Arizona Weston1 During the first half of the twentieth century, country and western singers often invented alter egos. As cowboys and mountaineers grew popular through radio, stage, and motion pictures, musicians found it necessary to invent new names and appearances.Arizona Weston, a.k.a.William Harvey Breeding,began his career as a country and western singer,with an emphasis on the “western,” and never veered from the course he set early on: to participate in and promote country music. Weston followed the chivalric ideals presented in the books of Zane Grey and movies of Gene Autry through eight decades as a musician, singer, emcee, square dance caller, songwriter, recording artist, storyteller, radio disk jockey, television host, booking agent, friend, husband, father, and grandfather. He was born April 15, 1921, to Frank and Alma Breeding in the small community of Washburn,Tennessee, east of Knoxville. Months after his arrival, Weston’s parents moved to Middlesboro, Kentucky, northwest of the Tennessee and Virginia state lines, between Pine Mountain and the Cumberland Mountains. We lived there five years. . . . Then we moved back to Tennessee. . . . Then we moved to Detroit, Michigan, in 1928. Then we moved to Pontiac on New Year’s 52 / Detroit Country Music Day 1929. The Depression hit us in ’31, and we went back to Tennessee. It was worse down there than it was up here, so we came back [to Pontiac] in ’34. Eventually, Weston found himself the big brother to six boys, but he played music with just one. Seventeen months younger, Grover “Smokey” Breeding was as large as Weston by the time he was five years old.“The two of us grew up together, and everybody thought we was twins,” said Weston. “When we started playing music, we were called . . . the Arizona Twins. I went by the name of Arizona, no last name or anything. . . . Zane Grey’s books, . . . I read all them books and I liked the name Arizona.” Weston’s dad played music, providing entertainment for house parties, churches, and other community functions. Before we came up here, we went to a singing school in Tennessee. . . . I’d have been about eleven, twelve years old. We went to a singing school at the church, and they taught us how to read shape notes. . . . We wound up [with] my dad singing bass, my mother singing alto, and I was singing tenor, and my brother was singing the lead. We had a quartet in our family. When we came up here, my dad always had a guitar—­I can’t remember when there wasn’t a guitar at the house—­ and he played banjo and the fiddle. In 1929 and ’30, everybody [made their own] homebrew. The house that we lived in, in Detroit, was a two-­ story family flat. The house next door was raided one time. Police brought out big jugs and dumped it right in the backyard. Broke it all to hell. So everybody had their own homebrew and stuff, and they’d have house parties on weekends,Friday night or Saturday night.[The parties went] on’til three or four o’clock in the morning. The band would get tired, and that’s how me and my brother Smokey, we got to play in the band. We’d get up there and play the guitar because we was sober, and [the band wasn’t]. That’s how we learned to play the guitar. . . . My dad could play fiddle for old-­ time breakdowns and stuff like that, square dances and stuff. . . . Before I was seventeen, I was calling square dances. After the family’s move to Pontiac in 1934, Weston’s father befriended Tenacious Trailblazer: Arizona Weston / 53 Steve “Mack” McDonald, who operated an auto service station. Mack McDonald was an older brother of musician Enos“Skeets” McDonald, and the first of his family to move to Michigan from Arkansas.“The first day Skeets arrived in town, my dad was introduced over at Mack’s garage. My dad invited Skeets to a house party he was playing that night. Skeets showed up, and my dad and him were good friends after that.” Skeets McDonald grew up in rural Arkansas (born in 1915 near Greenway ) and moved to Pontiac around 1935 (his mom, dad, and another brother followed). He found work in a factory and...