From: "Doug Bright" <75366.2463@compuserve.com> To: Subject: Article: August, 2005 Date: Tuesday, September 13, 2005 11:33 AM PART ONE: NEW CD BOX HONORS HONKY-TONK HERO FLOYD TILLMAN By Doug Bright Besides being an uncommonly expressive singer, the late Floyd Tillman was arguably one of the greatest songwriters country music has ever produced. His best-known songs, "It Makes No Difference Now", "I Love You So Much It hurts", and "Slipping Around" were huge pop-crossover hits, recorded by everyone from Bing Crosby to Ray Charles to the duo of Jimmy Wakely and Margaret Whiting. Yet despite his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1984, his name is curiously unknown to the general public today, and his classic Decca and Columbia recordings have been hard to find. But now, thanks to a six-disc box set issued last year by the highly respected German label Bear Family, life is getting better for Tillman fanatics like me. The set, which contains a five-decade range of commercial recordings and a few things more, is appropriately entitled I LOVE YOU SO MUCH IT HURTS. Born December 8, 1914 in Ryan, Oklahoma, Floyd Tillman was raised on the Texas plains in the little town of Post, where his family had migrated to work at the local cotton mill. He started work at age twelve, making seven dollars a week at the Western Union depot, and at sixteen he followed his father, uncle, and older brothers into employment at the mill. Nevertheless, the seeds of Tillman's real career were already being planted. Although his biggest childhood interest was electronics, his family was a musical one. There were fiddlers in the area who played for dances, and there was plenty of pop and country music to be heard on radio and records. "I liked all of it," Tillman recalled in a 1985 interview quoted in the notes to the new CD set. "I liked what they called pop music--Gene Austin, and other singers in those days. You could ride your bicycle down the street and hear those five-dollar phonographs playing one of Jimmie Rodgers' hits. But the first record I really heard and loved was one that Vernon Dalhart had out in 1925. It was "The Prisoner's Song" on one side and "The Wreck of The Old 97" on the other. That was my first introduction to country music." With so much great American music surrounding him, Tillman didn't take long to begin playing it himself. After starting out on harmonica and moving on to mandolin, he learned a few guitar chords from his brother Ernest and played his first dance two weeks later behind a local fiddler. "I was about fourteen or fifteen," he recalled in the 1985 interview. "I found that you could make music on Saturday night, make three or four dollars playing these country dances." Tillman's musical development took an unexpected turn when, after gaining early inspiration from the jazz artists he heard on radio and records, he encountered a local trumpet player who was home on vacation from college and sitting in at a country dance. "I picked up a few of his licks and put 'em on guitar," he explained. "To me, and to everyone else I played for, it was unheard of in those days. My brother said, "You ain't supposed to play lead on a guitar. Nobody ever does that." And I said, Well, I like to pick around on it anyway, just for the fun of it." Buying a metal guitar equipped with a resonator to amplify the sound, Tillman practiced obsessively. When he gained enough confidence to ply his unusual skill on the open market, he hopped a freight to Houston, searching the local taverns and dance halls for a band to join. Finding no openings, he returned home to Post, worked in the cotton mill, bought an old Model A Ford at $5 a week, practiced his guitar, and saved up for his next trip out of town to pursue his dream. In 1934, at the age of 19, the young guitarist was ready to make his move. On his first night in San Antonio, where he was staying with one of his sisters, he wandered into a spot called Gus's Palm Garden with his guitar. The trio on the bandstand was led by guitarist Adolph Hofner, another soon-to-be western swing pioneer. Invited to sit in, Tillman wowed both the band and the audience with his then-revolutionary guitar style, and he was invited to join. Each musician was only getting paid a dollar a night and the club-owner refused to go any higher, so each man volunteered a quarter from his own meager take to bring Tillman in. Tillman stayed a couple of months, but when the money got tighter than it already was, he set out for Houston again in search of a better gig. Making the rounds this time, he met fiddler Leon Selph and guitarist Chuck Keeshan. By June 1935, after a few name changes and additions of personnel, they were broadcasting regularly on Houston's KXYZ as the Blue Ridge Playboys. This, in turn, led to a steady gig playing alternating sets with Mack Clark's mainstream pop orchestra at the Aragon Ballroom. After being discovered a year later by Vocalion Records, they recorded their first session in November 1936 at a makeshift studio on the seventh floor of San Antonio's Gunter Hotel, and it is with this session that the magnificent new Tillman CD set begins. Anchored by a solid rhythm section and fronted by Leon Selph's jazzy fiddle and future country star Moon Mullican's hot stride-style piano, the Blue Ridge Playboys' sound reflected the unmistakable influence of Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies, a groundbreaking string band from Fort Worth. Tillman contributed three songs to the band's initial session, including an infectiously swinging motivational song called "Put A Little Rhythm In The Air". It was the first time Floyd Tillman's expressively drawling baritone appeared on record, and given the emphasis he was placing on guitar at the time, it almost didn't happen at all. "I played lead guitar," he explained, "and the only reason I sang was because nobody else knew my songs." Tillman's voice wasn't recorded again until 1939, but he scored one of his biggest hits a year earlier with a fatalistic lost-love lament called "It Makes No Difference Now". His recollection of how he came to write it paints an insightful picture of the way great and prolific songwriters tend to capitalize on ordinary figures of speech. "I went to a beer joint one night to meet a girl," he recalled, "but she didn't show up, so I sat there, drank a bottle of beer, and said, "It makes no difference now." I'd heard the expression somewhere, and I wrote it down. The next day, I picked it up and said, "Let's see--what was that song I was writing last night? Yeah, I remember it." I saw the words and finished the other verse or two." By September 1938 Tillman's song, which he sang regularly with the Blue Ridge Playboys, had become a frequent request at the dances they played. Cliff Bruner's Texas Wanderers, another Houston band, had just signed with Decca Records at the time. Seeing its hit-making potential, Bruner was quick to grab "It Makes No Difference Now" for his first recording session, and he was instantly proven correct. A still bigger hit version was recorded in December by Jimmy Davis, who bought the song's publishing rights from Tillman for $300, and his version led to a string of cover records, including one by Bing Crosby. For Tillman, it was only the first of several country hits that successfully crossed over into the pop sector. The instant success of his song put Tillman in a very good bargaining position when he wrote to Dave Kapp, head of Decca's hillbilly music department, to ask for a record contract. As a result, Tillman began a five-year association with the company in 1939, first as vocalist with the Blue Ridge Playboys and then under his own name. Recorded in March 1939, "A Precious Memory" and "Why Do I Love You" epitomize the jazz-country-pop fusion of western swing in the late 1930's, with the fiddle and steel guitar dominating the instrumental foreground. When Decca recorded Tillman as a solo act five months later, the presence of Moon Mullican on piano and Leo Raley on electric mandolin raised the swing temperature a few degrees, as demonstrated by the smooth fiddle-mandolin duets and hot jazz solos on Tillman's buoyant "Don't Be Blue". At the same time, a more melodic steel guitar intensified the sentimentality of country-flavored laments like "I'm Always Dreaming of You". Tillman, for his part, crooned it all with a lyrical Southwestern twang. Tillman's next solo session took place in Dallas in April 1941, yielding fine performances of new country songs marked by his characteristically eloquent simplicity. "All of my songs that made hits had grade-school words," he once explained. "They had more pushbuttons. People would automatically get the feeling for it." His first personally recorded hit, "They Took The Stars Out of Heaven", continued a string of well-crafted bereavement songs that had begun with "A Precious Memory" from his first Decca session in 1939. Despite the fact that "They Took The Stars Out of Heaven" was recorded in April 1941, it wasn't released until two years later due to a sharp drop in record production brought on by the necessity of rationing materials for the American war effort. Consequently, Decca's recording trips to Texas were completely curtailed. By April 1944 Tillman had a few more songs to shop to the label, so he took advantage of a furlough from Army Air Corps duty to pay a surprise visit to Dave Kapp in New York. "I was eligible to get these round-trip tickets to New York for $37," he recalled. "I just walked into his office unannounced. I didn't call him on the phone or anything." Kapp, knowing that he had nothing left in the vault to release as a follow-up to "They Took The Stars Out of Heaven", quickly availed himself of the unexpected chance to record Tillman and assembled some studio musicians for a session. The result was a timely and topical double-sided hit. "Each Night At Nine" simply but powerfully portrayed the loneliness of the American serviceman away from loved ones back home. The swinging, ironically humorous "G.I. Blues" mirrored the frustration of Tillman's own uneventful tour of duty. "Sit around gettin' fat," his protagonist complained, "how we gonna win a war like that?" "I wanted to be a radio gunner," he explained. "I said, How can I get out of here? I want to go out and help win this war instead of doing nothing." When he was finally discharged in November 1945, Tillman lost no time in assembling a band of longtime musical pals and putting his career back on track. He soon had a regular radio show on Houston's KTHT featuring his wife, Marge, whom he had married in 1939, as alternate vocalist. By February 1946 he was ready to record again, but this time for a new label. Ted Daffan, his old buddy from the early days of the Blue Ridge Playboys, was now a successful songwriter and recording artist. While comparing notes one day, Tillman learned that Daffan had a more lucrative deal with Columbia Records than he himself had with Decca, and Daffan offered to put in a good word. Daffan's recommendation resulted in a two-year contract, an initial session in Hollywood, and another Floyd Tillman hit with performer/songwriter Jerry Irby's potent brew of alcohol and lost love, "Drivin' Nails In My Coffin". The band's front line featured Leo Raley on electric mandolin, his brothers Randall and Darold on twin fiddles, and Ralph "Smitty" Smith on piano. By the time of Tillman's next session in March 1947, however, Randall Raley had left the group, forcing him to compensate by bringing a rhythm guitarist to the Chicago date and playing lead himself. One of the session's finest results, as well as its first release, was a swingingly expressive uptempo blues called "Gotta Have Somethin'", exquisitely showing off both his tastefully jazzy guitar work and the plaintive baritone vocal delivery that was to become a key element of his later style. Despite the fact that most of them weren't released until they emerged on a 1985 Columbia anthology, the session yielded some of Tillman's finest songs. "I'm Checkin' Out On You" couched a cynical generalization about women's infidelity in a bouncy western swing setting, with Leo Raley singing an effective harmony to Tillman's chorus. "You Made Me Live, Love and Die", which became the flip side of Tillman's huge 1949 hit "Slipping Around", amounts to one of the most chillingly evocative suicide notes in recorded country music history. "There's Blood On The Moon Tonight" compellingly followed a common melodramatic theme. In the Floyd Tillman universe, one man's heartbreak is devastating enough to cause cosmic repercussions. Of course, this kind of over-the-top sentimentality has inspired jokes about country music for decades, but as those with the emotional depth to appreciate it readily understand, the unique power of this music lies in its portrayal of deep sadness in eloquently simple terms. Floyd Tillman, in his deliberately down-to-earth way, was a master poet of the genre. (This article will be continued in the next issue of HERITAGE MUSIC REVIEW.) ----------------------------------------