Overstreet, in the early 1970s, would become an international country hitmaker with big-voice ballad singing on numbers such as “Gwen, Congratulations” and “Heaven Is My Woman’s Love”. He’d later record a disc’s worth of Austin songs, and is capable to this day of a spot-on Austin imitation.
Austin’s influence in rockabilly inevitably reached its King — arguably the all-time king of southern pop as well — as Colonel Tom Parker regaled Elvis Presley with tales of life on the road with Gene Austin, then introduced the two legends. They got along very well. Elvis found this man who’d gone back to hotel rooms and found four women waiting under his bed, 30 years earlier, easy enough to relate to, according to both Overstreet and Tillman Franks.
Along the way, the somewhat incongruous, obscure 1920s number among Presley’s hits, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”, got there, the Colonel always said, because, in just that one case, he asked Elvis to do it. Parker’s wife Marie had loved the way Austin did it in clubs.
Austin’s own beloved fourth wife of seventeen years through the ’50s and ’60s, LouCeil, told Parker chronicler Alanna Nash that during the filming of Viva Las Vegas in 1963, the Colonel brought Austin onto the set, — supposedly to offer pointers to Elvis on singing. Using the situation to embarrass his one and only client, he then took the insults further. LouCeil has Parker saying, right in front of them all, “Now, Elvis, I don’t like about eight bars of that. Call David Houston and sing it to him; he’ll give you the Gene Austin licks for those bars.”
Houston, singer of the classic country near-cheatin’ song “Almost Persuaded” and the first duet partner of Tammy Wynette, had toured with Elvis and Hank Snow in the ’50s. And it was via Houston that Gene Austin had one more key bit of influence in country music, in the ’60s era of the pop-leaning Nashville Sound.
A last close encounter
Gene Austin’s best boyhood friend in Louisiana, oddly enough, had been a boy named Gene Houston; they’d sit on the curb smoking cigarettes together at the age of 10. As adults, they’d own an auto dealership together, and Austin would be godfather to Houston’s son, David. Gene first began showing David how to become a showman when he was just 4 years old.
Tillman Franks, for many years David’s manager, bass player and songwriter, knew the Houstons well — and the musical impact of David’s lifelong relationship with Austin.
“David’s daddy wasn’t a musician, so Gene Austin taught David how to play the piano, his style, how to hit the licks on his voice, and to hit those high notes,” Franks explains. “David’s voice was a lot like Gene’s anyhow, and Gene really worked with him and taught him.
“How David had learned to play the piano like Gene when he was very little used to bug me, in fact, because he would play behind the beat sometimes, a pop beat, and did that even when he was playing guitar in a country band. He would drag the song down!”
Houston’s string of ’60s-’70s hits often show the Austin vocal training, among them “Have A Little Faith” and “A Loser’s Cathedral”. And his song themes were often right out of the Austin playbook; “You Mean The World To Me”, co-written (as were the aforementioned two) by his producer Billy Sherrill and Glenn Sutton, references bluebirds singing in the yard and heaven at home in a house.
By the late ’60s, Austin was in a down cycle again. His marriage to LouCeil was over, and drinking problems were reappearing; after an unsuccessful run for governor of Nevada, he was living, for the first time, in Nashville, Tennessee, in a small place with rented furniture and a piano. He was married to his fifth wife, Maxine, known as “Gigi.” He hadn’t had a record released since cutting some sides for Dot in 1960.
David Houston took the idea of recording with his godfather to Epic/Columbia Records Vice President Larry Cohn, in New York, who knew American music history well and excitedly approved the idea. Sherrill would produce the session, which, as records at Sony/Epic in Nashville show, took place on the morning of May 20, 1969. Sherrill has no special recollections of the occasion now, other than that it was set up by David.
Houston and Austin recorded a song Gene had written. Unusually for him, it had an outright religious message, “His Arms Around You”. It seems fitting that Houston sings in a straightforwardly Austin-like crooning style, and Austin seems, at times, to add just a bit of country twang to his delivery. A pop chorus swells behind them, in keeping with the more-pop-than-ever Nashville Sound. Austin also recorded two unreleased solos that morning — “I Cried For You” and “If I Had My Way”, opposite sides of one 78 from 1936.
The “His Arms Around You” duet was eventually released on Houston’s Epic LP A Man Needs Love. And so it was that the very last released record of Gene Austin, like his very first one, 45 years before, would be marketed as “country music.” Austin died, after battling lung cancer, on January 24, 1972.
In 2004, the audience for country is less and less rural-based and poor, increasingly middle-class and suburban (or even hipster urban), to the point that Johnny Cash pondered aloud in his 1997 autobiography whether the future of rural-derived sounds and songs might be in doubt.
For more than a decade, much radio-played, pop-like country music has focused on the relentlessly upbeat, on songs fixated on affirmations of family happiness and the life experiences and point of view of the suburban sun belt — and sounds that amount to the further reaches of southern pop. At this writing, the former Nashville FM radio outlet of Grand Ole Opry broadcaster WSM has just introduced a format mixing contemporary pop-toned country sounds not with early country music, but with undisguised earlier pop said to appeal to the same audience.
This may be crass, brilliant, brilliantly crass, or turn out to be a bad business decision. But the only reason to call such music “country” (and they do) is marketing. It is in fact a different form of music, one that has been handily rolling along nearby right from country’s birth, an established, uncredited tradition of southern-born pop that often appeals to the same audiences — and sometimes even changes country sounds.
Gene Austin was its father.
ND senior editor Barry Mazor’s previous exercise in music history re-examination, concerning Little Miss Cornshucks (ND #45), is featured in the new volume Da Capo Best Music Writing 2004.
