At the old Twist and Shout on Pearl Street, they used to
keep the boxed sets behind the counter and off to the left, and it was stuffed
with Bear Family collections – Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Burl Ives, Louis
Jordan, great old artists like that, all in twelve-by-twelve boxes with big,
beautiful photos on the front. Inside each were multiple CDs and thick,
full-color, glossy books about the artists with lots of photos and extensive,
well-researched liner notes. The Johnny Horton one is what drew my attention to
them. I had a friend I used to go garage sale-ing with at the time who’d play a
Horton greatest hits tape in his car as we’d drive from sale to sale and I
really dug his rockin’ hillbilly sound, so I set my sights on those box sets.
Problem was, I was just out of college and poor and those Bear Family
collections were expensive. The pricing formula was $20 per CD, and $20 for the
book. And this was the mid-90s. I was lucky if I could get a temp job paying
six bucks an hour. But I bit the bullet and bought it, for $120, and Horton
quickly became a high-ranking lord in my pop pantheon.
A big part
of it was Horton’s story. He got his start playing on the Louisiana Hayride
when Hank Williams was the star of the show. When Williams introduced Horton to
his wife, Billie Jean, Williams told the young singer that he would one day
marry her, too. A few months later, on New Year’s Day in 1953, Horton was in
Milano, Texas, when he heard that Williams had died of a heart attack after a
show at the Skyline Club in Austin. Within a year, Horton married Williams’s
ex, and was on his way to becoming a rockabilly star. As his career ascended he
would go on spirit journeys through the past and future, sometimes with Johnny
Cash, and he was visited often by spirits who told him he would die at the
hands of a drunkard. These premonitions grew stronger and stronger until he was
filled with fear as he took the stage at the Skyline Club on November 5, 1960,
because he was sure he’d be murdered that night. He made it through the show
though, and as he was about to leave to drive through the night to Shreveport,
Louisiana, he stood in the same spot and kissed Billie Jean on the same cheek
where Hank had kissed her on the last night of his life. Horton thought he was
home free, but he misunderstood the spirits: a drunk driver slammed into his
car head-on as he was crossing a bridge in Milano, same place where he learned
of Williams’s death.
I listened
to the four discs in that set a lot, each of them crammed to the full 70 minutes
with what were to my ears a perfect blend of rock and roll cool and hillbilly
camp. Horton’s guitarist Grady Martin was a master of twang, and the booklet
had a sweet, full-page picture of him wearing a plaid jacket and holding an old
double-neck guitar. Despite the dozens and dozens of songs on the collection my
favorites were his big hits: “Honky Tonk Man,” “One Woman Man,” “Hole in My
Pirough,” “The Battle of New Orleans,” “North to Alaska” and “Old Slew Foot.” I
used to love to play this last one for my country-hating friends because it was
so old-school redneck with its cooking banjo and blazing harmonica. And even
when Horton was rocking out, he had a way of adding a little yodel to the end
of his verses that was too corny to not be cool, especially when I was driving
around Boulder with the windows down and the stereo blasting. It was like, Take that, you new-age yuppie clones!
That box
set was one of the last pieces to fall in the death of my collection in the age
of the MP3. I was low on cash and I sold it on eBay for $50. When I got my
turntable and started buying records again, two of my earliest purchase were a
couple of greatest hits collections that are still easy to get on CD, and
they’re probably enough for me, at least for the time being. Still, I regret
the loss. The booklet that came with the Bear Family set remains one of the
best I’ve ever seen, and it had songs you can’t find anywhere, most notably a
hissy demo recording of a spooky gunslinger ballad called “Streets of Dodge.” I
used to hit repeat on that one over and over again. I regret, too, that I never
bought some of those other Bear Family sets that I wanted so badly, especially
the Louis Jordan one, a nine-disc set that would’ve set me back over $200 at
the time. But that was the better part of a week’s paycheck for me back then.
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