House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) by Roger Wood Andy Bradley Page B

it. We’d start again, and then he’d say. “Ah, that’s not the words.” And I mean, I was up to here with him. Because when I was with [Jerry] Irby [bandleader of the Texas Ranchers], we’d make ’em boom-boom-boom. In one day, we made fi ve 15-minute radio programs [transcriptions]. We might miss a note here or word there—we didn’t care; we’d just keep going. And [on the “Why Baby Why” session] here’s this idiot, man. Toward the end he’d say, “I forgot the words.” We took a break about lunchtime. And [Jones] was going through his fi fth of whiskey. And I told Lew [Frisby, bass player], “Hey, if we can’t whip him, let’s join him.” So we went down to the corner and got us a six-pack of beer.

    I got frustrated with him. I swore that I’d never record with him again—
    and I never have. I told Jones, “Man, don’t ever call me again.” We got paid union wages, but it wasn’t worth it.

    As such testimony makes clear, even in the early days, a Jones recording session could be a challenge for all involved. Steel guitar player Frank Juricek has his own recollections. “I remember a George session that took all night, 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., and we got only two songs done,” he claims.

    Yet, even in the midst of such proceedings, the Gold Star Studios founder Quinn tended to maintain his composure and eventually get the desired results. Consider this anecdote from musician Glenn Barber:
    Bill was a great guy with a good sense of humor. I remember one early session with George Jones that wasn’t going so well because he’d been drinking a bit too much. Bill fi nally came out and had a conference with all of us. He said, “Do you boys think we can do this on the next take?”

    We all said, “Sure, we can do it.”
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    George said, “I can sing it perfect. Let’s do it and get out of here.”

    Bill said, “I don’t want to put any pressure on you, but I only have one acetate dub left.” So we cut it.
    Building on Quinn’s ability to achieve successful resolution of in-studio diffi
    culties, Jones recorded several more tracks at Gold Star even after he had made the jump from Starday to Mercury Records. At least two of those tracks became 1957 hits: “Don’t Stop the Music” (#71029) crested on the Billboard country charts at number ten, and “Too Much Water” (#71096) climbed as high as number thirteen.

    It was not until Daily moved Jones’s sessions to Nashville and made the 1959 Mercury recording of “White Lightning” (#71406), which rose all the way to number one on the charts, that the initial success of “Why Baby Why” and
    “Just One More” was surpassed. Although several takes on “White Lightning”
    (written by J. P. Richardson, better known as the Big Bopper) had previously been recorded at Gold Star, the later hit version was a product of the Nashville studio scene (including the presence of Hargus “Pig” Robbins on piano).
    All in all, Jones released at least twenty-seven songs that were recorded at Gold Star Studios in the mid-1950s. (It is possible that other Jones songs were recorded there but never released, or they may have appeared without session credits on one or more of his early albums.) Though he would eventually become a legendary Nashville fi gure, this country singer from Beaumont launched his bid for stardom close to home in Houston. Accordingly, he—
    like the studio where he made “Why Baby Why”—is a key part of Texas music history.
    rockabilly delivered a powerful jolt to much of the country music recording industry in the mid-1950s. Young white artists such as Bill Haley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis—borrowing heavily from the African American–formed genre of electric blues—were speaking a new kind of musical language, one that drew simultaneously from country and early R&B.
    Across the nation, multitudes of white teens and young adults passionately