Yes, I was and will be a Porter Wagoner fan until the day I die. When I was a small child, his voice was one of the last things I heard before I went to sleep at night; my dad would put his records on our old mono player.

A native of West Plains, MO, Porter's first recording was 1952's "Settin' the Woods on Fire," a cover of a Hank Williams Sr. song. Porter, along with Ray Price, Hank Snow, Faron Young, Webb Pierce, Carl Smith, and George Jones, began to hit the Top Ten regularly after Ol' Hank's death, beginning with "Company's Comin'" and "A Satisfied Mind" in l954. By 1960, he had his own TV show, which lasted nineteen years and 686 episodes. By far the most successful of those years were the period 1967-1974, when he teamed up with a "girl singer" who turned out to be the phenomenal Dolly Parton. Though they had their differences over the years, especially after Dolly left his show to go out on her own, she has consistently thanked him for giving her her first shot at the big time; at one point when he was in financial difficulties, it's said she bought up the rights to all the songs he penned himself and then returned those rights to him.

Porter probably was in large part responsible for the caricature of the honky-tonk singer, with that blond pompadour and the elaborate rhinestone suits, all of which were made by the legendary Nudie Cohen.
He also had a reputation as a player--a predilection for women led his wife to shoot him (allegedly over his original girl singer, Norma Jean Beasler, who said in her autobiography she aborted his child sometime in the early 1960s). He alone of the great honkytonk singers of that era never gave up the suits, and probably chasing women either; it was one of those silent facts of life in Nashville and among his fans, like George Jones's alcoholism. It never affected his music.

Market pressures did though. In the late 1970s Porter made the mistake of trying to keep up with the times by branching out into some of the sorriest country-pop tunes I ever heard. In the 1980s, he used the gimmick of an all-girl band for awhile. Yet he continually toured, and on the Opry, of which he was a member for fifty years, fans went wild when he sang his old songs.

If I had to pick my favorites of his output, one would be the loud honkin' "In the Shadows of the Wine" which I discussed in a previous blog about drinking songs. The other would be a cover of what I think was originally a Red Foley hit called "Midnight," a down and dirty blues with a stunning guitar solo by his friend and producer Chet Atkins.

Not overly coherent today, guys. I'm in mourning. Thank you for fifty plus years of great music and beautiful Nudie suits, Porter. In heaven they're gonna be wearing shades cause the sequins will burn your eyes.

When my mother was growing up there was a house not far up from where she lived that had a reputation of being haunted.
It was built in the mid 1800’s by this man who supposedly a) had money and b) was a woodcarver of some renown. He lived in the house with his wife, their son and his wife. The man had built this magnificent bed that stood in the front bedroom where he and his wife slept. One day his wife was found dead. No reason could be found by anyone why she should die that way. So they buried her and the man continued to live in that house but slept in the third bedroom. He couldn’t sleep in the front anymore.
One day the son’s wife was found dead and the next the son was dead. There was fight marks but nobody seemed to know anything. However anyone passing the door to that front bedroom would hear cries of pain and yelling. The old man stayed in the house but not that room until his death.
It was sold at auction with all the furniture in it to a young family. They loved that bedroom and it’s bed until the noises started and the husband woke up one night with his hands around his young wife’s throat.
They quickly decided to move out and find another place. The left the beautiful bed because they couldn’t get it apart to move.
The next several families all heard the noises and had problems sleeping in that room. At least one woman awoke to strangling only to discover no one there with her. Finally in the early 1970’s a family moved into the house. But this family was a little different. They knew about haunted houses and ghosts. When they started experiencing what was going on they knew that something bad had happened there. Something bad had happened in the front room on that bed. They worked at actively trying to remove the ghost. It didn’t leave. Finally they took an ax to the bed itself. They broke it into a hundred little pieces and burned them knowing fire will purify.
Just before they burned the wood the wife suddenly understood why the bed was the center of the phenomenon—the man had killed his wife there, as had the son. The bed had gathered this hatred and kept it going.
Things seemed to settle down in that house so the worst was over but there was still something that remained and seemed to cling to the very woodwork. In the 1990’s the house was sold again to a young family from another state. They lived in a rental house as they tried to repair the damages of time. No power was running to the house during the summer of that year. No hobos hid there. But in the middle of the night on midsummer’s eve a fire sprang up in the front bedroom of the house. By the time the rural fire department knew about it and arrived the house was a smoldering ash heap. The young couple cleaned out the remains and built a new house there. A new house with no spirit dwellers.
Until Next time, Willard.

Back in the old days there were fine fiddle players around, and in Weakley County, Tennessee, way in the northwest corner of the state, the finest of all was Ples Haslock. Self-taught, Ples could mimic birds and bees and cows to the pasture and horses to the plow. And when he settled down to serious fiddlin’, he could make women sigh, grown men weep, rowdy boys sit still and crying babies hush. It was just like an angel bowing the strings; simple and sweet and oh, so beautiful.

They used to have fiddle contests around. There was no money for prizes; first place always won a demijohn of the finest whiskey, the so-called fiddler’s dram. Ples Haslock won so many fiddler’s drams that , just to keep other fiddlers entering the contests, a second dram was offered as a consolation prize to the second place finisher.

And so things might have gone on for many years if a wall of the jailhouse at Dukedom hadn’t collapsed. Now the county was broke, an all too common thing in the rural South. But somebody had the bright idea of holding a fiddle contest to raise the money. They’d charge a small admission, and sell pie, and they’d have the money to fix the jailhouse wall in no time flat. And the winner would get the coveted fiddler’s dram.

"Somebody needs to go tell Ples Haslock," said the county clerk.

Coot Kersee, a fiddler who’d lost to Ples Haslock many times, said, "He might not be able to come. Hear he’s down with the heart dropsy."

"Don’t you wish?" some wag snorted.

Nowadays we call heart dropsy pulmonary edema, an accumulation of fluid in the lungs and around the heart that can lead to cardiac arrest. If it kills you fast, you just drown one day; if it kills you slow, you get weaker and weaker and feel an oppression on you chest till your heart simply stops. Dropsy ran in Ples Haslock’s family.

When the county clerk rode out into the country to tell Ples about the contest, Ples was indeed on his sickbed. "But I’m feelin’ some better than I did," he said. "Tell the folks I’ll be there. I’m gonna win that fiddler’s dram."

On the night of the contest, Ples didn’t show up. People were disappointed, but they were treated to a fine faceoff between Coot Kersee and another great local fiddle player named Rob Reddin. They both were master showmen. Coot, up first, played an old tune called "Leather Britches" that brought down the house. As for Rob Reddin, he not only played hell out of "Hell Broke Loose in Georgia"; he got such an ovation that it was some time before the crowd even noticed that a sickly-pale Ples Haslock was onstage, playing a beautiful eerie old camp meetin’ tune called "Poor Wayfaring Stranger." They abruptly settled down to listen.

They say Ples played for an hour or more, a succession of old tunes brought from countries over the sea; and when he was done, the crowd roared its approval as the judge awarded Ples the fiddler’s dram.

Ples pulled the corncob stopper out of the demijohn with his teeth and took a long drink from his prize, then crashed over backwards. They called for a doctor, but Ples Haslock was dead. As they waited for the doctor, they noticed that his clothes were muddy, like he’d walked through a swamp on his way to the contest..

When the doctor arrived, he examined Ples’s body and pronounced him dead. Then he asked, "How did this man get here?"

The judge said, "He walked in. Must have crossed a swamp, by the mud there. He fiddled awhile, then fell over dead."

"Not hardly," the doctor said shortly. "This man’s been dead at least two days. And by the look of his clothes, I’d say buried too."

This story, actually a reanimated corpse tale, was collected in Weakley County circa 1938 by James R. Aswell of the Tennessee Writers’ Project, under the aegis of the New Deal-era Works Progress Administration, and first printed in GOD BLESS THE DEVIL! LIARS’ BENCH TALES in 1940. More recently it has been retold by professional storyteller S. E. Schlosser in SPOOKY SOUTH (2004). Occasionally it is conflated with a story from Johnson County, in upper East Tennessee, about a fiddler called Martin who charmed timber rattlesnakes, as in Randy Russell and Janet Barnett’s THE GRANNY CURSE (1999), but originally the two stories were separate.

C’mon, guys, you KNEW my favorite ghost story would be about a musician, didn’t you?

And until next time, fair thee well.

Willard again with one of her hometown haunts. A True story of events that happened close by.

The first is about a haunting that started sixty odd years ago. The girl was a friend of my mother’s so I know this is true. This girl who had the prettiest head of golden colored hair got involved with this man that her parents didn’t particularly like but she convinced them to let her marry him. He was big and had a temper that anything could set off. They married and moved into a little house several cotton fields away from her parents. Every day neighbors would say they heard her arguing with him and every day she would go across the fields to her parents and he would follow and forcibly take her back to their little shack.

One day this girl never showed up on her parents doorstep. Two days then three went by and still she didn’t come. Her mother was worried. She grew even more worried when she saw her son-in-law passing by with an ax.
"Jim, how’s my girl doing? I haven’t seen her for a few days."
"I thought she done come home to you. She said she was shut of me." He said taking off in a huff.
That wasn’t like the girl at all. A week went by before the woman and her husband saw the sheriff and asked him to check in to her disappearance.
Our sheriff had this huge dog that he took everywhere with him. As they walked across the field toward the little shack, the dog went crazy. It started running around in circles and baying like a mad animal. It found one certain spot in the field (that was dark and bare) and howled. Over and over it howled before it started moving away with it’s nose down against the dry soil.
It started racing toward Jim’s shack. As the sheriff and his dog got closer they saw Jim come out with the ax and a small canvas sack. Dog raced straight at the big man with froth dripping down his jaws. Jim fought the dog and tried to run away from our big sheriff. They wrestled a while before finally Jim was subdued. Inside the sack was the girls right hand. The sheriff’s car was back at Jim’s in-laws house so they started walking back that direction. Again that huge dog started going crazy as it got close to the barren spot in the field. Jim tried to pick that moment to escape but the sheriff and some field hands who spotted the two men subdued him. The men held Jim while the sheriff followed his dog and found more body parts—more parts that is, excluding her head.
Jim was tried and found guilty of murder. He killed his wife the last night he removed her from her parents home. The ax had blood on it and the dark spot in the field did too. The one thing they never found was her head—The head with the beautiful golden hair.
The story doesn’t end with the murder. Jim went to jail and served his time before returning back to the community where he killed his wife. Somehow he bought the property and built a large house on the spot where the shack stood. He died less than twenty years after he murdered his wife. But neighbors have said that on nights when no one is home at that house, loud voices are heard arguing. A woman is heard screaming both at the house and further into the field. There is one barren spot in that field that has not grown anything since the year the sheriff and his big dog found bits and pieces of a girl who would have done better to stay at home a while longer with her parents.

Hi Guys Willard here.

There are places in the world where the wall between the past and present is thin enough that time can bring a person to both places at once. Where you can know your past and still exist in your present. I know of just sort a place not too far from my happy hunting grounds.

Fairweather and I have been up there and both felt extreme emotions. But there is one place that took me from emotion to an entirely different level.

It started at this beautiful old barn that is unique in many ways (At least it was before the tourists started writing graffiti all over it but that’s my soap box). The minute I got close to it an eerie feeling of deja vu started settling over my mind. I could lead you anywhere on that property. I could tell you about the people. I was crying for a young boy who died after falling from the barn loft, breaking his leg, and gangrene setting in. He had been my best friend. Yet in this time I had never lived here.

Fairweather says I really scared her at the moment when I "got that look on my face". I guess when you are in two places at once you look odd.

The house across the road brought tears to my eye. I saw the furniture that should be there and wasn’t, the people that were supposed to be there and I saw the reality of now. That beautiful home was empty and again the graffiti covered walls and ceilings. The image of a woman who in the past I knew as Mother swam before my eyes. I knew this kind woman would have been upset because of this trash on her clean walls.

This is not a true ghost story in terms as we are used to. It’s about the ghosts of the past, of memories that travel through time to land on those sensitive enough to feel and respect them.

Tears still come to my eyes when I think of the girl trying to keep her playmate company after the fall when the pain wouldn’t leave and he grew weaker. I wonder what became of them both. And where he is now.

Until next time.