In 1987 I sought out Frankie McWhorter because I wanted to do a book on his experiences as a cowboy and horse trainer. I spent a good part of that summer visiting with him on the Gray Ranch in Lipscomb County. During the day I helped him with his ranch work, and at night I listened to his stories around the kitchen table.
Although I knew of his reputation as a fiddle player, that part of his life interested me less than his knowledge of cattle, horses, and the cowboy profession.
I remember the night when that began to change. Frankie and I had spent a couple of hours working on the book, when all at once he picked up his fiddle and began to play.
For the next hour and a half, he played one tune after another with hardly a pause between them, and when he did pause, it was to say something like, “Here’s another one Bob showed me.”(Read more)
Frankie wasn’t trying to show off or impress me, but he certainly did. It was a stunning performance, all the more so when one considered that (1) he made his living doing something else, (2) he had almost no formal training as a musician, (3) he couldn’t read music, and (4) he had committed to memory every note of every song and played them exactly the same every time.
It suddenly hit me that to describe him as a “good” fiddle player was an understatement. Even I, who knew almost nothing about the fiddle, could see that this man had a rare and special gift. Not only were his horse breaker’s hands negotiating runs of amazing complexity but he played with so much feeling that he made his music irresistible.
While he played, I took a business card out of my wallet, turned it over, and began jotting down the names of some of the tunes. The ones I chose had one thing in common: Frankie had learned them all from Bob Wills.
At 1:30 in the morning, he finally put his fiddle away, and I said, “Frankie, I think we need to rush you to a sound studio and get those songs recorded.”
The idea caught him by surprise, and he tried to argue against it: He had a thousand yearlings to look after on the ranch and didn’t have time; sound studios made him nervous; and besides, he didn’t play very well.
I got a good laugh out of that one.
“Frankie, this is important. You need to record those songs, just the way you played them tonight.”
He shrugged. “Well, son, whatever you think.”
Maybe he thought I’d forget about it, but the next day I called my friend Alan Munde in Levelland, Texas. I had known Alan for years. He is not only one of the best banjo players in the world, but also holds a position on the faculty of South Plains College, which may be the only college in America that offers a degree program in bluegrass and country music.
I suspected that Alan and Joe Carr, another faculty member, would recognize the historical importance of Frankie’s work, and sure enough, they did. Within days, Alan had reserved time in the school’s twenty-four-track recording studio.
At that point, only two problems remained. The first was that I didn’t have the money to bankroll the deal, and neither did Frankie. At the time, the two of us together would have had trouble bankrolling a chicken-fried steak at the Higgins cafe.
I figured that we could do the whole project, from recording to finished tapes, for fifteen hundred dollars. In the recording industry, that’s coffee money, but to a couple of broke cowboys, it was a significant sum.
So I called up Frankie’s boss, Keith Gray of the Gray Companies in Ardmore, Oklahoma.
I had met Keith several times out at the ranch and I knew that he considered Frankie a dear friend, as well as the best ranch foreman in the country.
I said, “Keith, I’m not interested in making a penny on this tape, but I feel an obligation to history to get it done. Would you consider putting up the money?”
I’ll always admire Keith for having the vision and the trust to say yes to what must have sounded like a harebrained scheme. He didn’t hesitate, and those of us who enjoy this book of fiddle tunes and the tape from which it came can thank Keith Gray for making it possible.
That left only one problem, and it was the most difficult of all-getting Frankie off the ranch and into the studio. Even when the dates were set and the arrangements made, I wasn’t sure he would go through with it.
On October 6 I loaded him up in my car and drove him to Levelland. That afternoon he spoke to one of Joe Carr’s classes at the college, and after supper he went over his songs with Joe and Alan, who would be the backup musicians for the session- Joe on guitar, Alan on guitar and banjo.
They spent about thirty minutes together, and as far as I could tell, that was all the rehearsing they did for a recording session that included fourteen numbers.
Now, I know that they were all professional musicians and that Joe and Alan were familiar with most of the tunes. But I also know that some of those numbers were stamped with Bob Wills’s quirky habit of breaking the meter, which meant that the boys playing backup had to memorize the spots where Wills had hung onto a note or chopped up the time signature to suit his mood of the moment, because right or wrong, Frankie played the tunes exactly as he had heard Wills play them.
As I recall, the session was scheduled for seven o’clock in the evening. One of Joe Carr’s classes came to watch, and I had invited Dr. Charles Townsend of West Texas State University to come. Doc Townsend, probably the world’s leading authority on Bob Wills and Western Swing, had known Frankie for many years and shared our feeling that this was an important event.
I think everyone in the studio enjoyed the session-everyone but Frankie. You must understand that he was accustomed to playing in a kind of raucous barn-dance atmosphere, often among the ranch people with whom he felt most comfortable.
Recording studios, by their very nature, have more in common with hospital operating rooms than with barns and honky-tonks. Even though the SPC folks did everything they could to soften the atmosphere, Frankie looked like a caged coyote-pacing, smoking one cigarette after another, scowling, fretting.
What did he think of the session? “Turrble.” For a long time he could hear only the flaws in the tape, but I think time has finally softened his opinion of it.
The important thing is that we got it done. It’s on tape now and it belongs to the world.
We brought out the tape and sold it through my publishing company, Maverick Books of Perryton-which means that we listed it in a catalog that featured Hank the Cowdog books and hoped that somebody might buy it.
It deserved a much better marketing effort than we could give it, but after all, we weren’t in the music business and we really didn’t know what to do with it.
My hope was that if we got four or five hundred copies into circulation, one day the phone would ring and someone on the other end would say, “You know that Frankie McWhorter tape? That thing is terrific, and I know exactly what to do with it.”
Two years later, the phone did ring, and the fellow on the other end was Lanny Fiel in Lubbock.
The fact that Bob Wills was playing popular dance music diverted attention from his skills as a composer, arranger, conductor, and folklorist, but now we look back at his accomplishments and begin to understand what an incredibly talented man he was.
Frankie McWhorter provides us with a living link between our times and Bob Wills. As far as I can determine, Frankie was the only one of the hundreds of Texas Playboys who took the time to learn these old tunes exactly as Wills played them. As Doc Townsend once commented, “Listening to Frankie, you can close your eyes and almost believe that you’re hearing Bob himself.”
If Frankie is our link with Bob Wills, then Lanny Fiel has become the interpreter of the Wills/McWhorter tradition to an audience of musicians who will approach it from an entirely new direction: printed music.
It has been said of J. Everett Haley’s monumental biography of Charles Goodnight that Goodnight was lucky to have found Haley, and that Haley was lucky to have found Goodnight. I think we can say the same of this collaboration between Frankie and Lanny.
And of course the real beneficiaries will be the young musicians in years to come, for whom Bob Wills is a distant figure and a fading memory. Thanks to Frankie and Lanny, Wills’s enormous contribution to our cultural heritage will not be lost.
John Erickson
