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It's pleasure to meet you Craig. I believe that
you have been involved in differing styles of music and you
were involved with the New York musical production of The
Littlest Whorehouse In Texas. Tell me a little about your
career.
"Well how I got into the music business? I went
crazy! That is of course is a pre-requisite. If you want to
get into the music business, you oughta just flip-out.
No! I started playing the guitar as a youngster.
I was cowboying in South Texas and some of the older guys
had an old guitar, and we were singing lots of the old traditional
cowboy songs. I thought I oughta to do that. I can sing a
little bit."
When you sat that you were cowboying, was that
working on a ranch or rodeoing?
"I worked on ranches all of my young life; worked
for horse trainers...you know, broke young horses...rodeoed
since I was a teenager and I actually rodeoed for about six
years and worked on ranches all over South Texas and Southern
Oklahoma and parts of Louisiana. But going to the dances with
some of the older guys I got to hear of different bands at
the country dances and ranch dances, and heard western swing
played live. Of course I'd heard Bob Wills, Spade Cooley records:
Leon McAuliffe, along with the Gene Autry and Tex Ritter music
when I was a kid at home. My parents had played the old 78s
along with Big Band music. They'd listened to everybody from
Duke Ellington to Bing Crosby, Count Bassey and Benny Goodman.
I had a real good really wide exposure to a lot of different
American music when I was a youngster and of course Hank Williams,
Roy Acuff and the roots of country music. And I'm just grateful
for that diverse early background! My wife is just about to
have a baby and I'm going to make sure that my kid gets to
hear a lot of different kind of music growing up, because
it's been a real treasure to me.
The first music I heard live, really was western
swing dance music. I was fascinated by it and when I had an
opportunity to play it professionally, I jumped at it. I was
trying to be a guitar player, but there was a shortage of
bass players in Huston, Texas at the time that could sing.
So I went out and bought an electric bass and went out with
some of the guys in western swing bands around Houston. These
fellers were veterans of the Bob Wills, Hank Thompson and
Leon McAuliffe bands, and at that time there was a tremendous
overlap of big band players playing western swing. This was
in the 1960s and there was a big difference between western
bands and country bands. The country bands played the George
Jones and Lefty Frizzell tunes and that style of country music,
whereas the western swing bands really played swing music.
The Bob Wills tunes, of course all the pop standards, the
Goodman, the Dorsey and the Ellington books and that was fascinating
to me. You could play that kind of music on fiddles and steel
guitars and have a horn in the band. I loved it and that was
how I got into the music and was also what made me into a
bass player.
I don't play bass now, unless somebody calls
me. I get to play acoustic rhythm guitar and I used to get
to do that when I was a youngster with the big bands and love
that style of rhythm guitar playing."
How did your involvement with the musical Little
Whorehouse Of Texas come about?
"That's an interesting story! I was a studio
musician in Nashville and with some of my friends we were
somewhat bored with what we had to play for a living. We all
liked western swing and so we put a western swing band together
and stated rehearsing in my living room at home and pretty
soon one of the studios where I worked gave us some studio
time, to come in an record some songs. Rounder Records out
of Boston picked it up, heard the three songs we had done
and said they would like us to make an L.P. The group was
called The Real Grand Band and we made a record for Rounder
called Playing For The Door.
It was just about to be released when Tommy
Allsup called me and said; - there are some people from Universal
Pictures coming down to talk to me about doing the music for
a musical play in New York, about the closing of a whorehouse
in Texas and I don't want to leave hear. - Tommy was one of
the top studio musicians at the time and was making a good
living producing some acts and had a very successful career
going in Nashville. He said - I'm not going to go to New York
and take a chance on this deal, so I've told them about your
group and they're going to come to hear you.
We happened to be playing at a room in Nashville
that week called the Pickin' Parlour...just an acoustic listening
room. Those folks came to hear us...the author of the story,
the director, the producer and the choreographer of what turned
out to be The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas. They asked
us to come and rehearse with them and would open this show
off Broadway and would run for one week. If the reviews were
good they would move it up-town as they say...to Broadway
and then eventually to film. Well we rehearsed for six weeks
and opened the show off Broadway and the reviews were mediocre.
They weren't real good, but the house was sold out. It was
sold out like way in advance, so they went ahead and moved
it to Broadway and the show ran for almost five years. It
was terrific and wonderful to have a hand in those arrangements
and to be able to lend the authentic western swing sound to
Carol Hall's wonderful songs. Carol is a Texan and most of
us in the band knew this music intimately and was a great
mix of our western swing background and her songs. A terrific
play and terrific people to work with."
So the film with Dolly Parton came from this
musical
"Yes! The film was produced after the stage
play had been a success for several years around the late
70s, early 80s."
It was fantastic hearing how the whole thing
started Craig. Thanks for your time, it was wonderful
talking to you.
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