“Flesh Made Music” book excerpt: Leroy Van Dyke

Leroy Van Dyke: Walk On By, by chance                                                                                                           

When worlds collide…

In the Summer of 2004, I traveled across Iowa with a team of ballot petitioners for an independent presidential candidate. 

My last week of duty was spent in the Eastern part of the state. Under a blazing Davenport sun, I talked each day (all day) to thousands outside the annual Missouri Valley Fair and got such signatures as I was able.

One afternoon, I chose to take my lunch break inside the Fair. (Rules kept petitioners outside the entrance.)

I was contemplating a hot dog vendor’s wares when a familiar, affable singing voice cut through the milling crowd’s hubbub:

“If I see you, tomorrow, on some street in town / 

Pardon me, if I don’t say hello…”

Well, perhaps that wasn’t the exact passage I heard. But it was definitely “Walk On By,” the Leroy Van Dyke classic I’d first heard covered by Robert Gordon on his 1978 “Rock Billy Boogie” LP.

I entered a nearby large tent filled with rows of folding chairs and saw the legendary Van Dyke, himself. A consummate performer in fighting trim, he looked and sounded as comfortable onstage as if he were in his own living room. A broad smile creased his tanned face as he moved confidently about the stage. His band was steady and unerringly professional.

A chance brush with greatness at a fair in Iowa. What were the odds?

Never mind that the tent was only about half-filled, or that the evening’s headline-ballyhooed, cavernous hall performance by an unspectacular, flavor-of-the-week Nashville pop-country act would probably draw many times the bodies. The trendy fools had no idea what they were missing.

Here was Leroy Van Dyke. The one and only. A living connection to ’60s country.

In his music, traditional backwoods airs were filtered through modern and cosmopolitan sensibilities, ones that on record incorporated lush strings and sweet background choruses with steel guitar swipes and drawling fiddles.

Lyrics dealt in themes common to 1960s country music: Straying spouses (“Walk On By,” “If A Woman Answers”), cuckolded husbands (“Anne Of A Thousand Days,” “The Swing Of Things”), hard times faced by the working man (“Black Cloud”).

“Touch Of The Master’s Hand” offered a spoken, faith-based narrative similar to those sometimes indulged by Porter Wagoner on his television show of the same era. And, “Who’s Gonna Run The Truck Stop In Tuba City” took a satirical look at marital friction.

“City-style country music,” was how the man typically described it to interviewers. And that summed it up pretty well. His original glory days fell between the late-1950s smoothed-out pop balladry that had followed raw rockin’ and the mid-1960s British Invasion.

Leroy, not only a singer but a credentialed auctioneer, first saw chart success in 1956 with (aptly) “Auctioneer.” (In later years, “World’s Most Famous Auctioneer” would become his title.)

That auspicious entry brought additional reward. He was invited to become a regular on Red Foley’s ABC show, “Ozark Jubilee.” 

He again scaled the charts with 1961’s “Walk On By.” And, together with “Auctioneer,” it is today probably the song with which he is most identified. It was his most commercially successful, too. It spent 19 weeks at number one. Billboard in 1994 credited “Walk On By” as the biggest country single of all time.

Such was the regard with which he was hailed by fellow musicians that he was slated to host the 1965 Country Music Association Awards Show. Ernest Tubb was that year inducted into the Association’s Hall Of Fame.

After first stumbling onto Leroy’s 2004 fairground performance, I made a point of taking subsequent breaks inside, to watch him perform. 

He was a master, in the middle of Nowhere. But his presence made Nowhere a special place. And plainly, he was in his element before that appreciative crowd. 

Oh, and we got that candidate onto Iowa’s ballot.