Whisperin' Bill Anderson

An Unprecedented Life in Country Music

Bill Anderson, Peter Cooper

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780820352916
  9780820349664
• eBook ISBN:
  9780820349657
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

Whisperin' Bill: An Unprecedented Life in Country Music presents a revealing portrait of Bill Anderson, one of the most prolific songwriters in the history of country music. Mega country music hits like "City Lights," (Ray Price), "Tips Of My Fingers," (Roy Clark, Eddy Arnold, Steve Wariner), "Once A Day," (Connie Smith), "Saginaw, Michigan," (Lefty Frizzell), and many more flowed from his pen, making him one of the most decorated songwriters in music history. But the iconic singer, songwriter, performer, and TV host came to a point in his career where he questioned if what he had to say mattered anymore. Music Row had changed, a new generation of artists and songwriters had transformed the genre, and the Country Music Hall of Fame member and fifty-year Grand Ole Opry star was no longer relevant. By 1990, he wasn't writing anymore. Bad investments left him teetering at bankruptcy's edge. His marriage was falling apart. And in Nashville, a music town where youth often carries the day, he was a museum piece—only seen as a nostalgia act, waving from the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. Anderson was only in his fifties when he assumed he had climbed all the mountains he was intended to scale. But in those moments plagued with self-doubt, little did he know, his most rewarding climb lie ahead. A follow-up to his 1989 autobiography, this honest and revealing book tells the story of a man with an unprecedented gift, holding on to it in order to share it.

Known as "Whisperin' Bill" to generations of fans for his soft vocalizations and spoken lyrics, Anderson is the only songwriter in country music history to have a song on the charts in each of the past seven consecutive decades. He has celebrated chart-topping success as a recording artist with eighty charting singles and thirty-seven Top Ten country hits, including "Still," "8 x 10", "I Love You Drops," and "Mama Sang A Song." A six-time Song of the Year Award-winner and BMI Icon Award recipient, Anderson has taken home many CMA and ACM Award trophies and garnered multiple GRAMMY nominations. His knack for the spoken word has also made him a successful television host, having starred on "The Bill Anderson Show," "Opry Backstage," "Country's Family Reunion," and others. Moreover, his multi-faceted success extends far beyond the country format with artists like James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Dean Martin, and Elvis Costello recording his songs. Today, thanks to the support of musical peers and a few famous friends who believed in him, Anderson continues to forge the path of lyrical integrity in music, harnessing his ability to craft a song that tells a familiar story, grabs you by the heart and moves you. Modern day examples include "Whiskey Lullaby" (Brad Paisley and Allison Krauss), "Give It Away" (George Strait), "A Lot of Things Different" (Kenny Chesney), and "Which Bridge to Cross" (Vince Gill).

A product of a long-gone Nashville, Anderson worked to reinvent himself, and this biography documents Anderson's fifty-plus-year career—a career he once thought unattainable. Richly illustrated with black-and-white photos of Anderson interacting with the superstars of American music, including such legends as Patsy Cline, Vince Gill, and Steve Wariner, this book highlights Anderson's trajectory in the business and his influence on the past, present, and future of this dynamic genre.

1

I have loved country music as long as I can remember. My parents tell me I could find the “hillbillies” (as they were called then) on the radio long before I could tie my shoelaces, so maybe it’s a love I was born with. If so, it dates back to my birth, November 1, 1937, in Columbia, South Carolina. My mother said I was just another Bill that came on the first of the month. Actually, that’s not true. My full name is James William Anderson III, and until I was eight years old I wasn’t even a Bill at all. I was known as Billy. One day I decided that Billy didn’t fit me and I refused to answer unless I was addressed as Bill. I’m sure I missed supper a few times when Mom or Dad would call out of habit, “Come to the table, Billy,” but I wouldn’t go until they said it right. Besides, I never thought Billy went with my last name. It always came out Billy Yanderson. Today a lot of people think Bill is my middle name. My first name, they think, is Whisperin’.

My mother and father, Elizabeth (Lib) and James William Anderson Jr. (Jim), had been married a little over four years when I came along. I was their first child. My sister, Mary Elizabeth, wasn’t born until four and a half years later. Although I’ve written and sung many songs about coming from a large family, in reality there were only the four of us.

Daddy was not a farmer, as I sang in my song “Po’ Folks,” but rather an employee of the credit service company Dun and Bradstreet when I was born. He later became, like his father before him, an insurance agent. Mama’s full-time job was taking care of Dad and us.

I don’t know why I’ve always fantasized about coming from a large family and living on a farm. I wrote that not only into “Po’ Folks” (“There was ten of us living in a two-room shack”) but into “Mama Sang a Song” as well (“All daddy ever got was a bad-land farm and seven hungry mouths to feed”). I think that’s why when I finally bought a home in the country in 1979, I looked on it as the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.

My parents were both originally from Georgia, having met as teenagers in the small mill town of Griffin, where my mother’s father, the Reverend Horace Stratton Smith, had been sent to serve as pastor of the First Methodist Church. Mom was the third of four children born to her father and his wife, Mary Jessie Lewis Smith, and I heard her say many times over the years that she often felt like she was the third verse of a four-stanza hymn. “You know how a lot of times the preacher says, ‘We’ll sing the first, second, and last verses?’” she’d ask, smiling. “The third one is the one that always gets left out.”

My mother’s mother died when Mom was only sixteen, so I never knew her. Her father was an interesting man, though. He worked in the newspaper business for a while, was later employed as a school teacher, and might never have gone into the ministry except for a violent thunderstorm that swept across the Gulf of Mexico and onto the coast of Texas late one night. He was young and single at the time, going to school and living alone in a small room on the second floor of an old wood-framed rooming house in Galveston. For most of this particular evening he’d been lying across the bed in his room studying, listening to the wind howl around the corners of the ancient structure while the flashing bolts of lightning lit up the jagged coastline and the raindrops pounded viciously against the tiny window-panes. For some reason, around ten o’clock, he laid down the book he’d been reading, got up from his bed, and walked downstairs to the kitchen for a glass of milk. When he returned to his room moments later, one entire wall of the house had collapsed under the onslaught of the storm and debris was piled more than three feet high across his bed . . . right in the spot where he’d been lying. There was no doubt that if he’d stayed in his room he would have been killed.

He immediately began to ponder why he’d been spared. What made him rise from his bed and go for that drink of milk at precisely the moment he did? Was God trying to tell him something important? Did He have something special in mind for this young teacher to do with his life?

“I spent the rest of that night wrestling with the devil,” he used to say, “and the devil lost.” Grandaddy decided almost immediately to change directions in his life. He returned to Georgia and applied for a license to preach, joined the North Georgia Conference of the Methodist Church, and began his service as an ordained minister. From a fiery young circuit-riding preacher in his early days to a retired district superintendent many years later, he brought the word of God into thousands of lives. On his deathbed in 1965 at the age of eighty-eight, without his even knowing it, he touched thousands more.

“Billy,” he said to me as I leaned over his bed and strained to hear his weakening voice, “I don’t know much about this business you’re in, but I do know one thing: You’re in a position to touch more lives with one song, with one appearance somewhere, than I’ve been able to touch with every sermon I’ve ever preached in my life.” His words stunned me.

I knew what he’d said was true, yet somehow it seemed so unfair. Here he was, a much more eloquent speaker, a much better person spiritually than I’d ever be, I knew, yet my opportunities would be so much greater than his. Several years later when I was given the chance to record an album of all religious music (I Can Do Nothing Alone) I used his last words to me as my inspiration and dedicated the album to his memory.

My dad’s father, James William Anderson Sr., was born and raised on the red clay farm land of middle Georgia, and he worked as a farmer for most of his young life. Things weren’t very easy, though, for people in that part of the country who tried to extract a living from unyielding soil. In 1920, my grandpapa, as I’ve always called him, sold the farm and the little wooden farmhouse in Pike County where my dad was born and moved his wife and their only child seven miles east into Griffin to take up the insurance business. Despite having no experience in the field and only a fifth-grade education, he helped to found Middle Georgia Mutual Insurance Company.

Grandpapa (his wife and friends all called him “Mr. Jim”) was also an old-time fiddle player. He was part of a group that was widely known throughout the central part of the state as simply the Anderson Family Band. They played for every pie supper, cake walk, square dance, worm wrestlin’, and goat ropin’ that was held in those parts. Grandpapa had quit playing very much by the time I was born, but I felt the impact of his music many years later at my great-uncle’s funeral when my dad introduced me to one of the neighbors, an old-timer who lived way back in the woods of that still extremely rural area.

“This is my son, Bill Anderson,” my dad said proudly. “You might have heard of him. He plays up in Nashville, Tennessee, on the Grand Ole Opry.” The old fellow, who had to be over ninety, looked me up and down, never showing any emotion in his craggy face at all. He spit a mouthful of tobacco juice on the ground in my direction and said, “Shoot, I don’t care who he is. He can’t make no music like Mr. Jim!”

My grandmother, Elizabeth Williams Anderson (everybody called her “Miss Lizzy”), was also a musician, a guitar player, although nobody seems to recall her ever performing in public. Like Grandpapa, she didn’t play much in her later years, but I grew up feeling an extreme closeness to both of my Anderson grandparents. I’ve got to believe it was a bond created and strengthened somehow by the love we all felt for music and for singing, for the joy that only music can bring.

I was always particularly close to my grandpapa. He was a big, strapping man who stood well over six feet tall and weighed close to two hundred pounds. He thought his little curly-headed grandson hung the moon. He’d play ball with me in the front yard of his house in Griffin, he’d go to the movies with me and sit through a double-feature of Red Ryder and Little Beaver, and he’d let me help him mow the lawn, pick turnip greens from the garden, even sleep in the same bedroom with him when I’d go to his house for my summer vacation.

In those days there was a train called the Nancy Hanks that ran from Atlanta to Savannah on the old Central of Georgia railroad line, and I’d save my money every year just so I could ride on the Nancy some fifty-five minutes south to Griffin. I thought I was really hot stuff when Grandpapa would be there to meet me at the station in his 1941 green Ford coupe and carry me home to Grandmama’s dinner table where I would invariably stuff my face so full of her good country cooking that I’d get sick. He’d pamper me all night, then take me to his office with him the next morning. He’d set me up in a back room with my own typewriter and a stack of paper, and I’d amuse myself for hours, typing all sorts of things and playing office. At night after we’d gone to bed, he’d lie on the other side of the room and tell me stories and give me advice.

“Billy, don’t you be thinking about getting married now, you hear?” he said to me once when I was about ten or eleven years old and had told him about a pretty girl I liked in my sixth-grade class. And later on he said, “I know how much you like to play ball, Billy, but you be careful now and don’t get athlete’s foot.” I had to laugh even then, but I knew no boy ever had a better friend than my grandpapa was to me.

People ask me all the time where I got my musical abilities and my desire to write songs and entertain. It goes back to my grandparents. When you combine an old-time fiddle player with a circuit-ridin’ preacher who used to write for a newspaper, then throw in a guitar-pickin’ grandma for good measure, you come up with whatever it is that I am.

My mother and dad got married in the parsonage of the First Methodist Church in Decatur, Georgia, where Grandaddy Smith had been transferred, the afternoon of September 27, 1933, then headed south to Savannah Beach for their honeymoon. They had barely gotten inside their hotel room, however, when a bellman knocked on the door and handed Dad a telegram telling him that the company he worked for was transferring him from Atlanta to Meridian, Mississippi, and that they needed him to report immediately.

Jobs weren’t easy to come by in 1933, so, honeymoon or not, my parents-to-be decided they’d best leave Savannah right away. Driving Dad’s little brown-and-tan Chevrolet coupe farther west than either of them had ever been in their lives, they wound their way to Meridian, a sleepy little east Mississippi town that had only recently achieved a certain amount of fame and notoriety as the hometown of country music’s first superstar, Jimmie Rodgers. In later years, actresses Sela Ward and Diane Ladd, honky-tonk wailer Moe Bandy, and folk-rock songsmith Steve Forbert would be born in Meridian. Had my dad’s company not changed its mind again and been so anxious to move him back east to South Carolina in 1936, ole Whisperin’ Bill might have been born there as well.

My earliest childhood memories are set in Columbia, however, and I remember it as a happy place to have lived and begun growing up. It was hot as blazes in the summertime, and the streets were constantly filled during the wartime years with marching soldiers from nearby Fort Jackson. But I learned to play baseball at Shandon Park in Columbia, I saw my first college football game when the University of South Carolina Gamecocks defeated the Presbyterian College Blue Stockings (42-0), and I was valedictorian of my class in kindergarten. That meant I got to stand up in front of the rest of the kids and all the parents at our little graduation exercises and sing “Deep in the Heart of Texas” and recite a poem about how much fun it was to get mud between my toes.

I also got to go inside my very first radio station in Columbia. Our next-door neighbor’s daughter was a receptionist at the biggest station in Columbia at the time, WIS, and she knew that from the time I was three or four years old I had sat faithfully by the radio every morning, noon, and night listening to a group called Byron Parker and the Hillbillies as they played and sang live country music on her station. They had three shows a day, sponsored by Seiberling Tires, Good Enough Flour, and Black Draught Laxative, and I never missed a one. I thought Byron Parker was the greatest man alive. He and General Douglas MacArthur were my first honest-to-goodness heroes.

I couldn’t have been more than five or six the morning she asked me if I’d like to go to the radio station with her and see a live broadcast of my favorite show, but I remember it like it was yesterday. I was overwhelmed by all the microphones and the wires and cables and turntables in the control room, but what really got me excited was finding myself in the presence of the big man that loomed larger than life: Byron Parker, the man who talked to me and sang for me every day in my living room on Dad’s little table-model Philco radio.

“Funny,” I thought when I saw him for the first time, “he doesn’t sound as big and fat on the radio as he looks in person.” In your mind’s eye, your radio heroes could look anyway you wanted them to.

Before he went on the air that morning at eight-thirty, Byron Parker came over to where I was seated in the corner of the studio and talked to me, asked me my name, then introduced me to some of the other musicians in the band. They were names I knew as well as I knew his: Snuffy Jenkins, Pappy Sherrill, and Greasy Medlin. When their show started, Byron Parker, the Old Hired Hand himself, even said my name on the radio so my mother and dad at home could hear that I was there. It was the happiest and most exciting day of my young life.

Byron Parker recorded a few songs for RCA Victor during his career, but he never became a star anywhere outside South Carolina, where his name was legend. I’d have given anything, though, if he could have lived long enough to know all the good things that have happened to me in my career and what a big influence he was on me. He died while performing on stage in the late 1940s, and I never had the chance to see him in person again. Yet there’s another story involving him that gives me goose bumps every time I think about it.

In the early 1960s I was riding to a show date in Maryland with blue-grass greats Don Reno and Red Smiley on their bus. We had worked a show together the night before in North Carolina, and it was the first time Don and Red had ever seen me perform. Somewhere in the wee hours of the morning, Don got up from where he’d been sitting quietly in the front of the rolling bus and walked to the back where Red and I sat talking. He stood there without saying a word for the longest time and finally he looked down and said, “I’ve got it! It’s been about to drive me crazy, but I’ve finally figured it out.”

He was looking directly at me.

“What’s that?” I asked, wondering what I’d done.

“I’ve been sitting up there all night trying to figure out who you remind me of. I saw you working onstage tonight and you reminded me of somebody and I couldn’t think who it was. But now I know.”

“Well, who is it?” I asked.

“Oh, you probably never heard of him,” he answered. “He’s not even alive now. He was just a local singer down in South Carolina that I used to listen to when I lived up around Spartanburg. But, boy, you sound like him and you move like him on the stage, and from what I saw tonight you handle an audience just like he did . . . and he was the best. It won’t mean anything to you, but his name was Byron Parker.”

I didn’t sleep a wink that night.

I started school in Columbia and finished the first, second, and half the third grade at Schneider Elementary. In the 1970s, my mother was rummaging through her basement at home and ran across my last report card from there. In the section on the back where the teacher had space to write her personal comments to the parents, my teacher had prophetically written, “Billy whispers too much.”

I was halfway through my third-grade year when Mom and Dad decided they needed to move back home to Georgia. Dad was becoming a bit restless in his job and wasn’t sure he wanted to spend the rest of his life working for someone else. Too, his being an only child put extra pressure on him to return and live closer to his parents. His folks and Mom’s dad and stepmother were all beginning to get along in years, so even though I didn’t fully understand and begged and pleaded to stay in Columbia, I finally gave in and tried to smile when, in December 1945, we pulled up stakes and moved to Griffin, some forty miles south of Atlanta.

Actually, Griffin was only a pit stop. We lived there in the house with Grandmama and Grandpapa until the following February when the apartment Dad had rented for us in Decatur was ready. By the time my third-grade year was finally over, I had lived in three different towns, attended three different schools, each of which was teaching on a totally different level from the others, and had changed my name from Billy to Bill. I wasn’t really sure at that point just who I was or where I belonged.

Dad had said Decatur would be a great place for us to live. It was only a ninety-minute drive from his parents, even closer to Mom’s family, and “just a few miles outside of Atlanta,” he told us. “It takes only a half hour to get right downtown, and you can ride the streetcar!” he’d say excitedly. “Plus, Decatur is a small town, not a big city like Atlanta. I want you kids to grow up in a small town.” Of course, Decatur stayed a small town for about thirty minutes after we got there, and by the time I left home in 1955, Atlanta had dug up the streetcar tracks, replaced them with electric power lines for trackless trolleys, and swallowed up Decatur and a host of other little towns far beyond.

My childhood was, on the whole, what I’d call average. I wasn’t really very different from most of the kids I grew up around. We didn’t live in a house of our own until I was in the sixth grade, living instead in apartments or duplexes. We didn’t have a lot of material possessions. Dad drove an old two-door black 1941 Chevrolet until I was well into high school, we never owned an air conditioner, we wore a lot of homemade clothes, and I got a lot of fifty-cent haircuts. But I never remember going to bed hungry. I made pretty good grades in school when I tried, but I didn’t always try. I had a dog and a cat, and once I even decided I wanted to raise rabbits. I must have been pretty good at raising them, too, because I raised them faster than Dad could give them away.

I was in the 4-H Club, the Cub Scouts, and I played baseball and football in an honest-to-goodness cow pasture behind Ralph and Jerry Adams’s house. I got interested in girls early on and spent many a Saturday afternoon on the back row of the old Decatur Theater watching cowboy movies, munching popcorn, and holding hands. I carried out groceries in a supermarket, delivered newspapers on my bicycle after school, mowed lawns, took pictures of the neighborhood kids at Christmas (for a small fee, of course), and once even started a neighborhood newspaper. I was always industrious and trying to come up with ways to make some spending money.

Money was something we didn’t have very much of. Dad came home from work one evening not long after our move to Decatur and announced to the family over dinner that he’d quit his job. “What do you plan to do?” Mama asked nervously. “Oh, I don’t know,” Dad replied. “I’ve always kind of wanted to be in business for myself. I think I’ll start my own company.”

And with that, my father went into the insurance agency business in 1946. He called his firm “Jim Anderson and Company . . . All Forms of Insurance.” “We can’t say ‘all kinds of insurance,’” he once told me, “because people will think we sell the good kind and the bad kind.” The “and Company” was, in the beginning, the corner of our dining roo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Chapter Fifteen
• Chapter Sixteen
• Chapter Seventeen
• Chapter Eighteen
• Chapter Nineteen
• Chapter Twenty
• Chapter Twenty-One
• Chapter Twenty-Two
• Chapter Twenty-Three
• Afterword
• Discography
• Index