and summer nights cool enough you could sleep outside. Willie’s cowboy movie heroes Gene and Roy were in Southern California—Gene Autry was one of the biggest developers of land between Los Angeles and San Diego.
Westward movement had grown in number and desperation during the Dust Bowl drought that decimated much of North Texas and the Great Plains during the 1930s, and a quest for prosperity following World War II prompted the next great migration wave, which Willie joined. San Diego sounded good to him. He felt confident he could get work playing music and possibly score a disc jockey job; Charlie Williams, the DJ he replaced at KCNC in Fort Worth, found work on a country radio station in Los Angeles, just up the road from San Diego.
Willie hit walls from the moment he arrived. The most imposing barrier was the Musicians Union. You couldn’t play music in California without joining the Musicians Union, and you couldn’t join the union without paying for your membership. Without gigs, he didn’t have the means to scrape together the fee, and no radio station was looking for new talent.
Broke, busted, and running out of options, he finally accepted his mother’s invitation to come stay with her in Portland, Oregon. She had moved there and was tending bar at a local tavern in nearby St. Helen’s. The idea of a roof over his head felt pretty good. Even better, his mother knew the lay of the local country music scene and all the good dance bands in the area. Willie hustled a job as a plumber’s helper to bring home a paycheck and started looking for real work.
If there was a stereotypical character of the Northwest, it was the lumberjack, the big tough physical man of the woodlands, trained to fell as many tall trees as he could to render into timber. Many of the people who worked in the woods came from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and across the South.
But though the Pacific Northwest was about as far removed as it could be from where country music was manufactured and marketed and still be in the United States, its clubs and dance halls were jammed and jumping with customers with money to burn from the logging, railroad, shipbuilding, and shipping industries, abundant fruit orchards and grain farms, several large military bases, and general construction.
The stars performing in the dance halls and clubs were touring artists and regional talent, including T. Texas Tyler from the Lone Star state, Rusty Draper, Bud Isaacs, Rose Maddox, and a popular Pullayup, Washington, disc jockey named Buck Owens. Records were being made and played in the Northwest too. One local hero from Spokane named Charlie Ryan had scored a monster hit with his Timberline Riders two years before Willie arrived, a bopped-up cover version of Arkie Shibley’s “Hot Rod Race” song about car racing, retitled “Hot Rod Lincoln.”
Portland was the largest city in the northwest, with a population of 412,100 in 1957 and almost a million souls living in the metropolitan area. Hundreds of taverns in and beyond the city functioned as community hangouts, many featuring country music. The lush scenery, the volcanic soil that produced bountiful crops, and the bright lights of the big city had spoken to the roaming gal from Arkansas and Texas with a wild streak a mile long. Now they were speaking to her son. “Well, it rained a lot, but I didn’t really mind that,” he said. “I enjoyed the greenery and the fruit. It was apple country and fruit country.”
Martha got waitress work at Fran’s Café in Portland, and Myrle tipped Willie to a job at a radio station in Vancouver, Washington, fifteen miles from downtown Portland. Vancouver was a good town for a country music radio station. It was Portland’s smaller, more rural sibling, much like Fort Worth was to Dallas, less than one-fourth the size of Oregon’s largest city, although locals liked to point out that Fort Vancouver, from which Vancouver had sprung, was the oldest European
Westward movement had grown in number and desperation during the Dust Bowl drought that decimated much of North Texas and the Great Plains during the 1930s, and a quest for prosperity following World War II prompted the next great migration wave, which Willie joined. San Diego sounded good to him. He felt confident he could get work playing music and possibly score a disc jockey job; Charlie Williams, the DJ he replaced at KCNC in Fort Worth, found work on a country radio station in Los Angeles, just up the road from San Diego.
Willie hit walls from the moment he arrived. The most imposing barrier was the Musicians Union. You couldn’t play music in California without joining the Musicians Union, and you couldn’t join the union without paying for your membership. Without gigs, he didn’t have the means to scrape together the fee, and no radio station was looking for new talent.
Broke, busted, and running out of options, he finally accepted his mother’s invitation to come stay with her in Portland, Oregon. She had moved there and was tending bar at a local tavern in nearby St. Helen’s. The idea of a roof over his head felt pretty good. Even better, his mother knew the lay of the local country music scene and all the good dance bands in the area. Willie hustled a job as a plumber’s helper to bring home a paycheck and started looking for real work.
If there was a stereotypical character of the Northwest, it was the lumberjack, the big tough physical man of the woodlands, trained to fell as many tall trees as he could to render into timber. Many of the people who worked in the woods came from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and across the South.
But though the Pacific Northwest was about as far removed as it could be from where country music was manufactured and marketed and still be in the United States, its clubs and dance halls were jammed and jumping with customers with money to burn from the logging, railroad, shipbuilding, and shipping industries, abundant fruit orchards and grain farms, several large military bases, and general construction.
The stars performing in the dance halls and clubs were touring artists and regional talent, including T. Texas Tyler from the Lone Star state, Rusty Draper, Bud Isaacs, Rose Maddox, and a popular Pullayup, Washington, disc jockey named Buck Owens. Records were being made and played in the Northwest too. One local hero from Spokane named Charlie Ryan had scored a monster hit with his Timberline Riders two years before Willie arrived, a bopped-up cover version of Arkie Shibley’s “Hot Rod Race” song about car racing, retitled “Hot Rod Lincoln.”
Portland was the largest city in the northwest, with a population of 412,100 in 1957 and almost a million souls living in the metropolitan area. Hundreds of taverns in and beyond the city functioned as community hangouts, many featuring country music. The lush scenery, the volcanic soil that produced bountiful crops, and the bright lights of the big city had spoken to the roaming gal from Arkansas and Texas with a wild streak a mile long. Now they were speaking to her son. “Well, it rained a lot, but I didn’t really mind that,” he said. “I enjoyed the greenery and the fruit. It was apple country and fruit country.”
Martha got waitress work at Fran’s Café in Portland, and Myrle tipped Willie to a job at a radio station in Vancouver, Washington, fifteen miles from downtown Portland. Vancouver was a good town for a country music radio station. It was Portland’s smaller, more rural sibling, much like Fort Worth was to Dallas, less than one-fourth the size of Oregon’s largest city, although locals liked to point out that Fort Vancouver, from which Vancouver had sprung, was the oldest European
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