Pressing On: The Roni Stoneman Story

24. On the Road

K N < E K P $ = F L I On the Road Well, what with the popularity of Hee Haw, I had an easy time getting work, and I was out on the road a lot, traveling from show to show, all over the country. That’s a whole new ballgame, being out on the road, and it’s a real big part of any country musician’s life. So here’s a little about what it’s like. At times it can almost be dizzying. Sometimes you’re traveling so much that you would sort of lose track of where you were. I remember one time back when I was with the family and we were playing some grand auditorium. I sang Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and got a standing ovation. I said my standard line, Scott’s line, “Hot dang, I’m good!” Then I went off the stage, and I said, “Daddy, wow, did you see that? I got a standing ovation!” And he said, “Well, you darn well oughta. This is Hank Williams’s birthplace!” Aside from those times when you were totally “out of it,” you really On the Road pressing on / 173 did get an education on the road, learning about people and places. Like when we went west and learned about those California hippies. Another learning experience was when I was booked into a little place in Alaska, in Fairbanks. Now, at the time I gotta admit, this seemed like the gig from hell. It’s only in looking back that I can appreciate it. Anyway, ice all over the roads. Every piece of car that came to town was wrecked, had a hole in the side or the front or the back, or both sides would be crunched in. People would drive ninety miles an hour and slide on that ice, and I don’t know how they kept from killing themselves. It was like the 1800s or something, like a pioneer town. It was winter, January. And what did I know about the weather in Alaska? So I’m in little cotton dresses, because Nashville is not really that cold. And when you’re on stage, it’s a lot of hot lights up there, so you wear cotton clothes, something maybe with rhinestones in it, something pretty, but as far as wearing warm clothing, you don’t want to do that. The thing was I had bought that house, that beautiful house made of Tennessee sandstone with all them bedrooms and that swimming pool shaped like a big kidney where we floated those candles. So when I got the chance to go to Alaska, I thought, Good, the money will buy all the extra things that I need to go into the house. When I first got to Fairbanks, I went out to the place I would be playing in, to see it and hear the band I would be performing with. And there was Merle Travis doing his last night. He did his last show and fell off the barstool from drinking. And I don’t blame him at all. Because the place . . . it was just one room, an old square, with a little bar. Merle’s drinking put him there. I mean, this guy was so far above me or anyone else, and his drinking got him down to a point that he actually had to play in a place like that. Anyway, I helped him up off the floor. And I played there the next night, and the next night, and the next night. I played three sets a night, three sets with a band that couldn’t hardly boom chuck chuck chucka chuck. Oh sweet Jesus! But anyway, the second night the guy that owned the club took a liking to me because I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke. I just got up there and I did my show the best I could. And the guy decided he was going to find me a good husband. I said, “No, I’m married! I don’t want a man, no, no, no!” He wasn’t 174 / pressing on listening. “Oh, you gotta have a good man to take home with you to Tennessee. Or you could move up here.” The next night this Eskimo who won the dog-sled contest across Alaska came in. He had teeth that were worn down from chewing blubber ! And the club owner said, “Now he’s a little dude but, Roni, he is just the one you need.” This Eskimo didn’t seem all that small, but then he peeled his muckaloks and his parka off, and he melted. You get real skinny when you shed all them clothes. He wanted me to come out to his igloo! And I said, “No, no, no!” Then he suggested a dog-sled ride. I could just see it, me out there freezing my butt off in a little cotton dress on the back of a dog sled, going all through the cold flat land of Alaska! The pipeliners were there, though, and I got to learn about pipelining . On the airplane going over, I ran across a lady whose husband was a pipeliner. She and her husband were kind, picked me up early, it was still dark, and drove me out to the pipelines. They showed me the steel drillings and how the pipes went across the ice. Well, I learned a lot, but I kissed the ground when I got back to Nashville . On the subject of kissing, one of the things every woman musician on the road gets is a crash course in dealing with men. Of course, dealing with male musicians can be tricky anywhere. But it’s even trickier when you’re traveling. I was one of the boys. Purposefully. I never messed with any pickers. I got a key bit of advice about that from Mother Maybelle Carter herself. I was sitting on her bus one day, just talking with her. She was a quiet woman, but she liked humor. She had a round face and big eyes, and she wore long dresses, like prairie dresses, with lots of lace. “I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I’m separated from Gene, and I want to start to date, but I’ve got the kids and, well, you gotta be careful when you date with children.” And that’s true. You have to be extra careful because you want your children to have a safe atmosphere. Mother Maybelle pondered a minute and then said, “Well, just don’t date no musicians . Don’t do anything naughty with the pickers. ’Cause they tell.” I came off the bus, and I thought, Well she’s got a point. They’re always telling war stories of being on the road.And then I started laughing. Because it was as if she was saying, “Don’t worry about your reputation with God or anything, just watch that the boys don’t hear.” pressing on / 175 But there would of course be propositions, and you had to learn how to handle them. One of the ways that worked well was to joke about them. For instance, there was the time I was doing an Opry package show with Jeannie Shepard’s band and some other folks. Huge auditorium. And there was this nice-looking young man and we were just talking in the afternoon while everybody was checking out the hall and the sound system. “You know, Roni,” he said. “Music today is changing.” “Yeah, it is kinda different. Yeah, I’d have to say it is.” “I think it’s really getting bad.” “Yeah, it’s getting pretty bad, but some of them pickers sound good, and they got some awful cute little gals out there that are singing real good.” So we’re having this philosophical discussion about the state of music . And I thought this is nice, the guys are talking to me like I’m one of them, a professional and all. And then, out of a clear blue sky, he said, “Roni, what would it take to get in your britches?” I just looked at him. Then I stood up and walked away. But I got to thinking, Well, I can’t let this get the best of me. I’m gonna have to come up with something. So later when I got up on stage to perform, I was wearing some pantaloons I had made to go under my full dress. They came down to just above the knee, with a little ruffle and lace. I’m on stage, and Jeannie Shepard’s band is backing me up. That guy was sitting there in the front row of the band, a piano player. The audience is listening hard, and I say, “You know, gang . . .” And then I stop. “No, I can’t tell you that.” Now, you start off like that and what’s an audience going to do? They’re gonna holler, “Yes, yes, we want to hear! Tell us, tell us!” And I said, “Well . . . I don’t want to offend anyone.” So then of course everybody yelled, “We want to hear! Tell it!” “It’s something one of the boys up here in the band said to me.” Then all the band is saying, “Who is it?” “What was it, Roni?” And the audience all started applauding. The piano player was shrinking a little bit. I said, “Well, I was talking to . . . You really want to hear this now?” “Yeah! Yeah!” “Well, okay. It was him, the piano player. You know what 176 / pressing on he said to me?” And the audience said, all at one time, “WHAT?” I said, “Well, I was sitting there talking to him before the show.” Now he was really sinking down. Spotlight came right on him. “And,” I went on, “he was talking real nice to me, but then suddenly he said to me, ‘Roni, what would it take to get in your britches?’” I looked at the audience for a moment, to let it sink in. And then I pulled my dress up to show the pantaloons. I faced toward the piano player, and I said, “Honey, I don’t think you want to get in these old britches!” Here I am, Roni Stoneman, measurements 9–10–11, and wearing a training bra, and those pantaloons . Well, Jeannie and the band were in hysterics. There was fifteen minutes of applause. I guess Maybelle Carter was right and the boys do tell because I was never asked that again. Speaking of “romance,” one of the more, well let’s say interesting, characters you run across on the road is the “snuff queen” or “diesel sniffer.” I did a whole tour with my friend from Hee Haw, Junior Samples. This was another time when I kissed the ground when I got home. We were going to play Coffeyville, Kansas, and we stopped in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The boys said they wanted to go to a certain club. I didn’t want to, but Junior said, “Roooni, you gotta go with me.” He had that drawl. Bless his little heart. Well, he wasn’t little, but bless his heart. So I agreed to go. We get to the club. Junior’s sitting there with me at a table and we were listening to the band, and people were saying that the steel guitar player was the ex of Sammi Smith, the “Help Me Make It through the Night” girl, a friend of mine. Before Sammi made “Help Me Make It through the Night,” which was written by Kris Kristofferson and which got her and him Grammys, I used to help her—not through the night but to move her stuff from one friend’s house to the next because she’d have to be living with different people. She came from a . . . I guess you’d say it was a deprived background. Her mother was married eleven times, and Sammi grew up in a flophouse. Anyway I loved to go out to hear her play her songs. Daggone they were good. Back to Junior. We’re in this club in Arkansas, and all these girls started gathering around Junior. They were kissing him on the neck. pressing on / 177 And I’m sitting there beside him, thinking, This is awful. But it was new and wonderful to Junior. He was a country comedian, overweight, in his bibbed overalls. He hadn’t had someone to constantly tell him he was handsome. He had a beautiful wife, I thought, was named Gracie, a sweet lady. But he hadn’t been out on the road before and he wasn’t used to this kind of thing. It certainly was different from life back in the swamps of south Georgia where he came from. When he was a kid, Junior told me, his father was making moonshine and they caught him and put him in jail. The family lived in a little shack out in the middle of nowhere, had holes in the floor, big cracks in the walls, and mosquitoes. They didn’t have any water in the house and the mosquito eggs were on top of the bucket of water in the yard, and you’d have to scoop off the mosquito eggs with your hand in order to drink the water. You do that and of course you’re inviting malaria. Well, the authorities came down to look, to see how the family was doing, because they were worried there might be no food in the house because they had his father in jail. What they saw was all the rest of the family laying on the floor, unconscious, from malaria. “We almost died, Roni,” Junior said. The family lived in a tenant house. And when Junior got Hee Haw, he built a large new house. He had silver dollars writing “HEE HAW” in the driveway, with polyurethane poured right over them. “Junior, that’s beautiful,” I said. He built the house right in the middle of all them tenant houses. In Cummings, Georgia. They were nice enough little houses, and they were clean because the people were hard-time workers. But you know you don’t get your money back from your house when you build it in the middle of that. But he wasn’t going to move. Those were his friends, and Junior never let his friends down. Okay, we’re back at the nightclub. And all these girls were slobbering all over Junior. I went, Oh my gosh, I want out of here. The place was so bad it brought back memories of those bars in Washington, D.C. So I got Sammi’s ex to take me to the hotel. He was a nice enough guy, but steel players will be steel players and he wanted to play a little bit, but I wasn’t interested in singing his song. He was a gentleman about it. The next morning, about 9:30, I go down in the coffee shop in the hotel, and Junior’s down there and this girl’s sort of latched onto him. 178 / pressing on Junior said, “Roni, she really loves me!” Well daggone if she wasn’t a diesel sniffer! Now I’ve got to explain this. The men singers often had female fans, and we called them different things. The “gherms” are female fans that go “I love you, I really love you!” in a high squeaky voice. “Diesel sniffers” (sometimes called “snuff queens”) are the women who follow the buses of the entertainers from state to state. Most of them take their vacations at the time their favorite star is going on tour. They go to the shows, and then they go to the hotel rooms and party. We had been through four states, and this diesel sniffer and some of her friends were following us. So there we were eating breakfast, and this girl’s trying to cuddle up with Junior! And people kept coming over and asking Junior for his autograph. He sold his picture and autograph for two dollars. He’d just put “Jr.” Or “Junior.” Later somebody taught him to write “Samples.” That evening, before the show, we’re back in the tune-up room, and Junior said “Ronnnni, I went shopping.” Everybody in the world had been used to Junior Samples in his bibbed overalls. Well, he had gone out and got a new shirt, a pair of Levis, and a plastic vest. He was like a little boy at Christmas with his first cowboy vest—“Ronnnni, how do I look?” He also had a belt with a big buckle and a pair of cowboy boots! I just stared at him. The vest was brown, made out of Naugahyde. And he had that big belly. How he looked was like a barrel. He said, “Ronnnni, I respect you. Your family’s been in the music business for years, and I respect what you say. Tell me, does this look all right for me to perform in tonight?” “Well, Junior,” I said, “you look mighty handsome , you look very very handsome. But you gotta think of that audience .” And I paused, “Now you can put this on after the show. But my opinion? You should wear your bibbed overalls, ’cause that’s what you get paid for, honey. The audience wants you in bibbed overalls.” Coffeyville, Kansas, was where those old cowboys did a big robbery. Not the James gang. The Dalton Boys—last raid of the Dalton Boys. Historical town. Well, I wanted to see everything that the cowboys was into, so I wanted to stay overnight and go to the museum the next day. All right, after the performance we pull up at the hotel. And a lady says, “Mr. Samples, Mrs. Samples is here.” Junior says “Oh, God! Lord have mercy! Lord gosh!” He thought Gracie had come. Fortunately, he come to find out that the diesel sniffer had introduced herself as Mrs. Samples. pressing on / 179 To know Junior was to love him and understand. I was lucky. My mom and dad had stepped out into the world, so they taught us a whole lot. But with people like little old Junior, you didn’t have those parents who stepped out into the sunshine, so how were they going to teach their children any better? He was a good sort. That was a good family. But they were just backwoods. I understood him. I understood everything he was going through and what he was saying in his heart. Those long long drives are a big part of the musicians’ road experience . Now, I really in my heart believe that the bus or van drivers had to take something to stay awake because they were driving so much. It’s well known that they took pills. That was the time in the sixties and seventies when Dr. Snap in Nashville was giving them out. I think he was a good man who loved musicians and he saved a lot of lives. Because , well, this is how it worked. You had to do a certain amount of Saturday nights at the Opry in order to keep staying on the Opry. But it didn’t pay well, I think it was sixty-five dollars a night, so you had to book dates for the rest of the weekend. And as soon as you’d finished your Opry appearance, you had to run and get on the bus, and the driver, who was often a sideman, would take off, and he would drive all night long through snow, sleet, hail. It was like the mailman—the band must go through. So the bus driver took a pill or two to keep going. And then he would start talking, and he could talk you to death. We called it a talkathon. The drivers wouldn’t use coffee because then they’d have to make a lot of pit stops. So it’d be an “old yeller,” or a “blackie,” or an old “benny.” They’d say, “I think I’ll let old Benny drive awhile.” Well, one time we Stonemans were on a tour with Kitty Wells, her husband Johnnie Wright, and her daughter Ruby, Jim Ed Brown, George Hamilton IV, and the Stonemans. We were going through Iowa in the wintertime. I remember it was winter because the wind came whipping around those corners in Des Moines. We were on an Abe Hamza tour, and if you were on his tour you were number one. So we were proud of that. We were going to be on this radio program, Mike Hoyer’s. It was about 2:00 in the morning and Mike stayed on all night. The program was a musician’s dream because Mike was a fun guy to communicate with and the station was like WSM, but it seemed like it was even larger, seemed 180 / pressing on like it broadcast all over the United States. So a lot of entertainers would go through there from the Opry, and Mike would interview them live. We got to the studio for the radio show, and we were talking to Mike while he took a break during the weather report. All the boys were discussing what they were on, the pills they’d been taking to keep them driving all night: “Boy, I can drive all the way to Canada on this!” “Just give me a West Coast Turnaround!” That was the “blackie,” and the whole idea was you could take one and drive to the West Coast and back on it. A lot of the pickers were talking about Dexedrines. Dexedrines were very popular, and a few of the musicians had taken them. One guy’s eyes was staring like he was on them right then. Anyway, after the weather, Mike was introducing Kitty Wells, and he said, “Miss Kitty, and what are you on?” She looked at him and said in this incredibly sweet voice, “De . . . De . . . Decca.” And the whole room busted out laughing. That was Miss Kitty Wells. She is truly the best lady. I remember we were playing a fair with her in Springfield, Illinois. The people from Illinois never let us down. They came there in droves. We Stonemans performed first, playing so hard and jumping around. We were all over that stage. And then after we got off, they said, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, the Queen of Country Music, Miss Kitty Wells!!!!” She walks out on the stage, just walking, taking her time, such a lady. The people roared. And she said, in this tiny little voice, “Thaaaannk you.” Roar, roar, roar. “Thaaank you. Thaaaannnk you.” I stood and I watched her. And I thought, God, ain’t she fantastic! I thought, I’m doing this all wrong. I’m up there jumping around doing crazy things, and she just says “Thank you,” and the audience goes wild. But of course even at that time I realized that you have to do what you do best, act like people expect you to act. Kitty Wells was my hero. Without her songs I would never have been able to feed my children. Because that’s what I used to sing back at the Famous Bar and Grill in Washington. I learned to sing just like her because the people always wanted Kitty Wells songs: As I sit here tonight / The jukebox playing . . . Recently I was able to sing at her combined anniversary and birthday party. She and Johnnie have been married some sixty years. Johnnie was from the team Johnnie and Jack—Goodnight, goodnight, sweetheart / Well it’s time to go. But after Patsy Cline got killed pressing on / 181 in that air crash, Jack Anglin got killed in a car accident on the way to her funeral. Johnnie’s still a class act, and Kitty can still outshine any newer girl. Well at that party I got to sing one of Kitty’s religious songs. They picked it out for me to do and I didn’t know all the words to it, but I faked it because I wasn’t about to lose my part in the celebration. Once I did the Ralph Emery show, Nashville Now, and Kitty Wells was on the show. I’m sitting there beside her, and she looked at me and said, “That’s where I got my name.” I said, “Where?” She said, “Your father’s song. I was named after ‘Kitty Wells,’ your father’s cylinder record.” My eyes got real big, and I said, “Ralph, did you hear that?!!!” Here’s another story about one of those long drives. Now if you go out on the road with Faron Young and the Deputies—and I did—you got yourself a heap of trouble. Faron was really funny. As I said, he called me Olive Oyl because I was so skinny. Faron would say, “Olive Oyl, c’mere, Olive Oyl.”And there I’d be so skinny and with my crooked eye, onstage with Faron, so handsome. Gee, was he handsome! And so full of impish goings-on. True, he would talk tacky. There wasn’t a sailor from the furthest of seas could talk rougher than him. But if he really liked you a whole lot, he’d kind of cool it, the real nasty stuff. Now, Faron always treated me with respect. Though he would joke with me. One time I wore a short dress, and he went, “Olive Oyl, stay the hell out of Clarksville with them bird legs.” That’s because Clarksville had a lot of blackbirds, and they had to have this campaign to kill them because they were causing lung diseases from the droppings. In other words, somebody was going to shoot me, mistaking me for a bird. And I laughed. Faron had a way of loving you at the same time saying something that would kill anybody’s feelings. He was adorable. I traveled a lot with Faron because he liked the way my banjo playing would give the show a slightly different flavor, different from just steel guitars and drums. This was when I had just started doing Hee Haw, during the seventies. Faron was called the Little Sheriff because he was once a sheriff. So he called his band The Deputies. Faron was tough. Especially when he’d get to drinking and . . . All right, I was in the bus. I forget where we were exactly, but we were riding along. The boys had been playing cards and drinking beer, and then they all went in the back to sleep it off. And the driver was driving, just driving along. 182 / pressing on Most often someone would be riding shotgun. That means you would sit up by the driver, in this sort of well at the front of the bus, down where the steps to go in and out of the bus are. There’s a little seat that pulls out. And you’d do that either because you wanted to get away from the rest of the band or because you wanted to make sure that the driver stayed awake. You’d talk to him—or you’d be listening as he was going through the talkathon. Okay, on this particular night since the boys had been up drinking for hours before they went to sleep, the trash bin was full of beer cans and there were others stacked up waist high against the wall near it. Now, Faron wanted his bus kept clean because he did have a nice bus. But the band’s thinking, Oh hell, we’ll just get rid of this stuff next stop. So everybody was asleep. And I thought, Well, I’ll get up and ride shotgun with the driver. We’re riding along, just talking quietly, and then we heard Faron stir out of his room. Had a little star on his door. That was usual. Sometimes the musicians will put the star on for the bandleader and sometimes he’ll do it himself. It’s sort of a joke because although the bandleader would have the only private room, it wasn’t luxurious or anything. It was cut real short into the wall. The rest of us had bunks. Okay, so we heard Faron get up and open the door and he starts yelling to the driver (I was invisible down in the well, so he didn’t know I was there): “Hot damn, ****###&&#**&&&&. What’ve they been doin’ in here?! Them son of a bitches! Look at this trash! Look at ’em cans! Son of a bitch! Well, I’ll fix em! I’m gonna put this shit . . .” And he picked up this big trash can and threw it right down into the well where I was sitting. He dumped all this stuff on me. Beer came running down over me. And the food they hadn’t eaten, sandwiches and stuff. And cigarette butts. I had worked hard on my hair, trying to make it look nice for the next show coming up, fixing myself up real good. I just sat there. And then I slowly raised up. And I kept raising up, and I said, “Faron, why’d you . . . ?” “What the hell!!!!! I didn’t know you were down there!!” He started laughing, and he got all the boys up to come look at me. “Look at ’er. Look at Olive Oyl,” he said, “Look at old bird legs herself!! Hot damn. I just . . . I’m sorry.” That’s the first time ever I heard Faron say he was sorry about anything! pressing on / 183 Now, Faron was a great performer. When he walked out on stage and started It’s four in the morning, well, the girls would go “Ahhhhhhhh .” I could see why. He always looked so nice, and he had a whole lot of energy on stage. Offstage he was also always doing something, and it usually pertained to girls. Later when he did get married, he really adored his wife and his daughter. One of his wives was called Hilda. He would call her Brunhilda, I guess because she was pretty tough on him in the divorce. Everybody in Nashville knew that Faron was the cat’s pajamas. If he liked you, he was always on your side.And if I’m gonna give you the full picture of Faron, I gotta go back to Nashville for a second. One time we were down at Channel Five filming Hee Haw, and this man was there to watch. He was kind of cocky. And someone said, “Faron Young’s going to come in today and do a guest spot.” So this guy started talking about Faron. He said, “I heard he was such and such,” badmouthing him. I said, “Let me tell you about Faron. He is such a giving soul. You can go to Faron and say, ‘Faron, I need eight hundred dollars.’ He wouldn’t ask you why. He would just give it to you.” “That’s hard to believe,” said the know-it-all guy. “You don’t believe me? Okay I’ll prove it.” Faron came in the back door and went into the studio area and started taping his part. I said to the guy, “Make sure you’re standing right here when he gets through. He’ll come out this way and say hello to everybody.” The guy stood there and soon Faron came along. “Faron,” I said, “I gotta have one thousand dollars. I just gotta have it.” “Okay, one second,” he says, and pushed around in his pocket, about to get it out. “No, Faron, it was just to prove a point.” And the guy was amazed. “That’s the kind of man Faron is,” I said. Believe it or not, the arrival at a venue after a long trip could have its own set of problems. Back when I was playing with the family, I often traveled separately from them, if it was more convenient. In the late sixties we were performing with Eddy Arnold. He was known as one of the 184 / pressing on greatest singers of our time—any time, as far as I’m concerned. He could sing, oh brother, and he was such a gentleman and so sweet and calm. It was particularly amazing to me because I was so hyper. We’d open the shows, “the singin’, swingin’, stompin’, sensational Stonemans,” and then later on, calm, gentle EddyArnold would come out. He’d croon “I’ll Hold You in My Heart (Til I Can Hold You in My Arms)” and “Make the World Go Away.” Again, like when we opened for Kitty Wells, a terrific contrast. Well, one time we were playing in some big auditorium in North Carolina. I got there before the family because I rode with some friends. And I had always been told, if you’re part of the band, don’t get there ahead of the rest of them because everybody’ll be asking you all kinds of questions in a worried voice: “Where they at?” “Why aren’t they here?” Even though they’re not late. So I thought, What am I gonna do? Maybe if I get into the dressing room, I can hide from the promoters. Now we used to kid among ourselves about Eddy Arnold’s manner. It was very formal. He’d put his hands together, grasping them, like holding hands with himself. And he’d say, veeery sloooowly, “How are you, Mr. Stoooonnneman? And how are yooou, little Donnna?” And each time he’d say a name, he would change his hands. He was really funny with that. Okay, so there I am in this dressing room, really a locker room, but I’m still worried that someone will come in asking about the family. So I shut myself up in a locker. But then the tin bottom of the floor bent to where I couldn’t open the door! I started banging, “Help! Get me out of here! Help! Help!” So someone walks inside the locker room, and he hears me bang, bang, bang, and he manages to open up the door. I stare out. It’s Eddy Arnold, looking me right in the face. And instead of saying “What the hell are you doing in there?!!”, he grasps his hands and he says, very calmmmmly, “Hellooooo, Ronnnni. How are youuuu? And where is the rest of the familllly?” It was real tempting to say “In the other lockers!” I didn’t. I guess one of the best things about traveling was just being with the other musicians, performing with them and getting to know them, and watch them in, well, different-from-the-usual circumstances. So now some stories about them. pressing on / 185 Patsy Cline I first met Patsy Cline when we were part of a show with her. I was about ten years old. We were on WARL in Arlington, Virginia, performing outside on a flat-bed truck. The audience was huge. Patsy was young, had a cowgirl suit on, a long-sleeved western shirt, and a navy blue skirt with a fringe that touched the top of her boots. The boots were white and on the front of them was a gold eagle. Connie B. Gay said, “And ladies and gentlemen, the young lady coming out here now, she just got out of the apple orchard. She’s been picking apples all day, and she’s gonna get up here and sing, and her name’s Patsy Cline!” We knew to respect her because we’d heard her sing before. I thought, Well, she don’t need an old stupid banjo in her band, so I started backing off. And she said, “You get right back up here, and you pick as hard as you want to!” She sang real loud, in this clear voice, and I’m staring at her face, trying to chop rhythm on the banjo. And about that time there’s this “whheeeeeeeeee,” a loud siren, over on the Lee Highway. It was a police car. She stopped right in the middle of her song. “Sic ’em, boys!” she said. “Sic ’em!” And I thought, God, she’s so great! I wasn’t paying much attention to the songs she sang. I was mainly just watching her. I thought, One of these days I’m gonna get me a pair of boots just like hers. And I did. I have some pictures of me wearing them, with the gold eagle on the front. My legs look like sticks. I look like Minnie Mouse on a bad day. But I had those white boots all polished up. By that time Patsy Cline was getting pretty well known. She hadn’t come to Nashville yet, but she was working a lot in Virginia. Because her voice . . . it’s as if as soon as she started singing, she was famous. There’s some people can do that. They are immediately famous by the way they play or sing. I never became close friends with her because, well, my sister Donna would say about a number of singers, “Now, Roni, don’t spend a lot of time with them. They’re kind of rough.” Patsy Cline knew how to party hearty. Just like the girls of today will go out and have a drink with the boys. She was ahead of her time, that’s all. Because young girls in our world didn’t partake of alcohol, as I said. Whenever we’d see a woman 186 / pressing on drink, we felt that she was rough, she’s been there, she’s done everything that boys do, and that wasn’t good. I now think it was the double standard and it was unfair. After all, what’s going to happen when you die? God will say, “Oh, you’re a boy, well you’re going to heaven. You’re a girl. Even though you did the same thing, you gotta go to hell.” In my opinion, God don’t see it that way. Loretta Lynn Well, while we’re on the subject of boots, as I guess it’s clear, I love them—and so does my friend Loretta Lynn. And one time we were doing a show together in Toronto, Canada. Loretta had a pair of boots she had bought in London that I wanted so bad. So this must have been back in the late sixties because that’s when the boots were in, the mod boots. Donna and I wore white boots on our television show, white boots and cotton dresses. It was a sort of go-go-dancing-with-country-music-andfolk -music look. Loretta’s boots were a light blue-gray, real pretty, with a charcoal band at the top. No zipper—they were a soft glove leather. And I said, “Oh, I really like your boots, ’Retta.” She said, “Ya dew?” in her southern drawl. And I said, “Yeah.” And I thought, How in the heck am I gonna get them boots from her? Because I kept watching those boots everywhere she went. Now Loretta is slightly bowlegged. She couldn’t catch a greased pig if she tried. That’s why she wears those long dresses. I said, “’Retta, you know, you’re an awful pretty woman.” Of course that’s true. She’s a gorgeous woman. “Oh, thank you, Roni.” “But your legs . . .” “I know, these old legs . . .” “I’m gonna tell you something,” I said, “you’re like a sister to me . . .” “I know, we’re two of a kind.”And that was true too. She had a bunch of kids like me, and a sorry situation. So I said, “You know, if you didn’t wear them boots . . . Well, they got a different kind of heel than you need, Loretta. They make you look bowlegged.” pressing on / 187 “They dew?” “Yeah, you oughta get a different kind of boot.” Actually, that was also the truth. “Wall, I’ll tell you what,” Loretta said. “If you go shopping with me today, I’ll get some new boots, and then I’ll let you have these.” So we went downtown. She had a mink car coat on, and she had her hair up in brush rollers. You women out there, do you remember those old rollers with the brushes in the middle of them? I still have a can of them lying around somewhere. They were great because they worked good for the hair, but boy did they hurt! Loretta would always wear them. She had no choice when she was on the road. She’d get on the bus, and she’d have to fix her hair. So in the back room of her bus, where she always had flowers, she also had all kinds of rollers, and her Adorn hairspray. Without them brush rollers and Adorn hairspray, Loretta Lynn couldn’t have sung her songs. I don’t think she could have gotten through I was born a coal miner’s daughter. We were supposed to do a show that night, so she had her hair up in those rollers. And all she had to go over them was one of those net-looking things that were like stiff chiffon scarves. It was pink and you could see the curlers through it because it was sheer. God, it was the ugliest dang thing. She had those boots on, a pair of jeans, the fur coat, her hair in curlers under that pink net, and no makeup. So off we went to a department store that’s by the town building that’s shaped like two U’s together. The City Hall, I think it is. I remember learning that the man that made it died before he saw it finished. A salesman came over to us. “Can I help you ladies?” he asks, in this real “propa” voice. “Oh, I wanna git some boots,” says ’Retta. “Well, come right this way.” And we followed him to the bargain basement. ‘Retta gazed at the displays. “Oh, no, I don’t want them boots. I want some pretty good boots,” she said. So he took us to the second floor, which was the second grade. “Wall,” she said, looking around, “I don’t want them things either. They’re fine, but they’re not good for what I want.” 188 / pressing on The guy was getting irritated. Then we went up on the third floor—it was a real expensive area. “I suppose these are the boots you had in mind!” he said. Me and Loretta walked in there, and she didn’t have any idea, and neither did I at the time (I figured it out later) that he was being sarcastic because of the way she looked. I’m sure he thought the coat was fake. Anyway, she picked out lots of boots, and she tried them all on, one after another. The salesman’s getting more and more impatient. Then she said, “I want that one, and this one, and that one, and this one.” Twelve pairs. His mouth was hanging open. “Do you know how much they cost?” “I know. I want ’em.” She paid him cash. We left him with his mouth still hanging open. Then we went downstairs, to go out the store. “Look, a miniskirt. I like that miniskirt,” I said, pointing to one. “You’d wyar a miniskirt? You mean to tell me you’d wyar something that short?” “Yeah.” “Well, I’ll tell you what, Roni. You try on that skirt, and I’ll buy it for you, if you wyar it.” She’s always been real generous, Loretta. So I tried it on, and she bought it and I wore it. And then I stepped into her lovely blue-gray boots. Feeling a little guilty—but not much. She really did look better in the other boots, and she had the money. Away we went back to the hotel. And there’s Daddy, Donna, Jimmy, and Van, eating at the café. I walked in with them boots, and that short miniskirt. I had attractive legs, even if, as Faron joked, they were thin. Loretta was giggling. She’d go “Hee, hee, hee, hee.” She was always cute that way—she’d get embarrassed easy. So we went in there and we sat down. “We got her a miniskirt,” Loretta said, and she giggled. “I see you did,” says Daddy. “Oh, Roni, it’s so short!” said Donna. And Jimmy, well, if my brother Scott told a risqué joke on the stage, Jimmy would leave the stage and stand in the kitchen part of the honkytonks . That was just his way. So Jimmy got a napkin and he put it on my pressing on / 189 legs, covering them up. And I sat there, real thin, with that skirt on, and the napkin, and Loretta giggling. I kept the boots and I wore them all the time. I was ever so proud of them. As I said, Loretta was in a sorry situation. She had a tough life. I’ll never forget one time in Vegas. I was down there because Buck Trent was getting married for the second time, and a lot of the Hee Haw crew was there. Loretta was playing one of the casinos, and she called me to come over. She had just came in from Hawaii on a tour. Now before she went to Hawaii, she had had an emotional breakdown. But they treated her with no mercy, her husband Mooney and her other managers. Right after she got out of the hospital, they sent her to Hawaii, and then out to Vegas. Though she’s normally sharp as a tack onstage, at this time she was a wreck. She kept repeating things. She needed three doctors working on her to keep her going. I went to her dressing room. She lay down on her bed and started crying. “Oh, Roni, my fifteen-year-old, one of the twins, got married,” she said. “Oh, Loretta.” “I didn’t want her to be like me. And she married a boy I didn’t want her to marry. Mooney called me and he was drunk, and was cussing me every kind of name.” “Oh, my God, Loretta! I know how you feel.” And I got down by the bed, and I was crying with her. “Roni, how do you get through it?” “When it gets so bad, Loretta, all you can do is open the door and step across and keep going.” It was so sad. Tanya Tucker I really admired Tanya Tucker. Maybe Tanya’s almost as famous for her relationship with Glen Campbell as she is for her singing. Now Tanya loved Glen very much and he loved Tanya I’m sure, but when I was out 190 / pressing on on the road with them, they fought constantly. About everything. I think they’d have fought over a French fry. One time we were playing somewhere , in Boston or someplace, some fancy city that we were proud to be in. I always liked to play for the city folks. They’d sit there and kind of not know what to expect. And then you thought, Okay, give them a little extra. C’mon, I’ll drag you into our culture, and I’m going to make you like it. That was the exciting part of music to me, interacting with the people. So, we were playing this fancy city, and we were eating dinner in a fancy restaurant. I was sitting right near to Tanya and Glen. Afight broke out and she punched him. Oh God, I don’t know where that girl learned it, but she could fight. She didn’t pull hair and scratch. She’d take a fist and haul off and punch. She socked him again, and they went down on the floor, and I mean it was just a scrapple there. My opinion: they were both talented people (she had her hit “Delta Dawn” when she was thirteen !), both taking things they shouldn’t have been, and that made them touchy. Eventually, of course, they broke up and she went into rehab. But there was another side to Tanya. One time we played a show together in California, and on the plane going back there were two little girls that were really raggedy looking. Tanya kept watching them. When we got off the plane in Nashville, she just took her hand and touched the little girls’ faces. And then she gave their parents some money. She was really concerned about those two little girls. She said, “You know I wanted to adopt those children. I’m going to adopt me some children.” Tanya later had her own child, Presley, and then another, and she’s a great mother. : Sometimes it was not the particular famous people in unexpected circumstances but just the unexpected circumstances themselves that made being on the road interesting. You’d be stuck in situations where you’d have to improvise. Those times really called out the creativity in you. Now improvisation can have its downside. I mentioned Johnny Cash and how kind he and June were to me, offering to help pay for my teeth. Johnny once said, “Roni Stoneman is great! She really missed her calling. She was another Judy Canova.” John talked nothing but pressing on / 191 good things about me. No wonder. He hit me in the shin, and it liked to have killed me. This was in Beaumont, Texas. He was singing John Henry was a steeldriving man . . . And he was supposed to bang two steel things together and make it sound like steel driving. But he didn’t have the proper things, so he improvised. What he came up with was a Coke bottle and an iron railroad lantern cover. He sang John Henry was a steel . . . and he went CRASH, and the bottle broke and it shattered all over the floor. So he just took that iron lantern cover and threw it in the wings—like somebody’s gonna catch it?—and it hit my shin. Blood ran chu, chu, chu, chu, all down my leg. I went “Ohhhhhh!!” And I was rolling around on the floor. He came dashing off the stage. “Did I hurt you? Did I hurt you?” “I’m okay. Go back out there, hon.” He went running out from the wings, and, well, he slid on his knees right in that glass. And the blood was flying all over the stage. A disaster! Mostly, though, the improvisation led to more positive experiences. I remember the Stonemans one time getting to a place where we were to play that night, but the stage was real tiny. Daddy went out and got some lumber and built a larger one that very afternoon. Playing on that new stage really made us feel great. And then another time . . . umm . . . well, did you ever iron a dress with a light bulb? Okay, once when I was on the road, I was in this awful rundown hotel room, and I was trying to get the wrinkles from my clothes. They didn’t have an iron, so I got to looking around. And I said, Wait a minute, there’s a big light over there. I can take that lampshade off and spread a little bit of water on the clothes and then hold them over the light bulb. Steam them. And that’s what I did. Worked pretty good. I heartily recommend it to all you friends and neighbors out there, in case of an emergency. Now, when you figure out something like that, you don’t get the best ironed clothes (take it from the Ironing Board Lady!), but it does give you a sense of power, gives you a real high. The main high came of course from performances that turned out to be special. Often these were in hospitals and clinics. I got a lot of those jobs through Nat Winston, my dear friend, the psychiatrist. He treated a lot of country stars and was the one that helped Johnny Cash get off pills. He later ran for governor of Tennessee. 192 / pressing on One time I did a show up in Murfreesboro, at a veterans’ hospital. Now this hospital also had an alcoholics ward. So a lady came up and said the alcoholics would like to come too, was that okay? And I said, “Sure.” So in walk a bunch of people and I look up, and one of them is my brother Jack! In the audience also of course are all these veterans in wheelchairs, poor guys, hurt and with nobody to feed their brain and not much entertainment. I’m thinking, I’m going to give them every bit of any talent I have. They had been watching Hee Haw every week, so I had worn one of my Hee Haw dresses, the red checkered gingham. I started playing, and someone said, “Your brother wants to play with you.” Now Jack was a brother who wasn’t so nice to me when I was growing up, but I said, “Yeah, fine.” And Jack found a bass. So we played Don’t make me go to bed an’ I’ll be good / No, Papa, an’ I’ll be good / No, Papa, an’ I’ll be good. I had him play that because he shined on the bass in that. And that let him show off to his friends. So I was finishing up the show, and I’m up there singing and without thinking much, I said, “Now let’s all sing a song called ‘Mountain Dew.’” And then I thought, Oh my God, there are all these alcoholics in here, and I’m gonna sing “Mountain Dew”? I’m as bad as Van in the unwed mother’s home, hoping to see those pregnant girls again next year. I quickly said, “This is one of Grandpa Jones’s songs. And I want everyone in here that can clap or wants to sing to go ahead, and we’ll have the best time because that’s why Grandpa Jones recorded it, as a fun thing.” I was covering with everything I could think of to say! So I started singing Oh they call it that good old mountain dew, dew dew. And I took the mike around and held it to different people to sing. I didn’t pay too much attention to the alcoholics because they were really getting into it on their own, waving their arms around and such! I was focusing on the men that were in the wheelchairs. And they were that way because of fighting for our country to be free and for me to be safe enough to go out there and play my music. I’m thanking them for it by taking the mike around. Then this one old guy got out of his wheelchair, stood straight up and sang a whole verse. The psychiatrists, there were about six of them lined up against the wall, gaped, and a couple of the nurses started to lean forward. The guy was singing and I was singing with him, and then he sat down. The doctors came up to me later and pressing on / 193 said, “He’s been here fourteen years and he’s never stood up from that wheelchair. We try to get him to use his legs, but he doesn’t.” It was a magical moment for me. And that’s life on the road. There are some boring and exhausting times, but you end up with unforgettable experiences! ...