I Love You a Thousand Ways · If You’ve Got The Money I’ve Got The Time

Lefty Frizzell’s singles career began with a demo. Early in 1950, while he was singing at a Big Spring, Texas, honky-tonk, he went to Jim Beck’s studio in Dallas, where Beck recorded his half-finished song “If You’ve Got the Money I’ve Got the Time” and took it to Columbia’s Don Law. Law was more interested in the singer than the song. Frizzell signed with Columbia in June 1950. His first session, at Beck’s studio on 25 July with Art Satherley and Law producing, produced that song and “I Love You a Thousand Ways,” which he had written to his wife during six months in a New Mexico county jail. Issued together on Columbia 20739 late that summer, both sides reached number one.

Beck’s studio remained his base until the end of 1955. Jimmy Rollins played lead guitar on most of the Dallas dates, with Curly Chalker on steel in 1951. The session of 24 May 1951 produced “Always Late (With Your Kisses)” and “Mom and Dad’s Waltz,” and an overnight session on 1–2 June was given to songs of Jimmie Rodgers, whose yodel had made Frizzell want to sing, among them “Brakeman’s Blues” and “Travellin’ Blues.” “Always Late” spent twelve weeks at number one, and in October 1951 it was one of four Frizzell songs in the Billboard Top Ten at once. His run of thirteen Top Ten hits was over by 1953, and from early 1955 to late 1958 he did not reach the chart at all.

By then the family had moved to Southern California. He recorded in Hollywood at Radio Recorders in 1957 and 1958, but from May 1956 most of his sessions were in Nashville, with Don Law’s studio players: Grady Martin, Hank Garland, Harold Bradley, Buddy Harman and Floyd Cramer among them. At Bradley’s studio on 3 March 1959, with Don Helms on steel and Marijohn Wilkin on piano, he made the first recording of “The Long Black Veil,” which Wilkin had written with Danny Dill. Coupled with “Knock Again, True Love” (Columbia 4-41384), it followed “Cigarettes and Coffee Blues” back onto the chart.

The Frizzells moved to Nashville in 1962. “Saginaw, Michigan,” recorded on 21 October 1963 at Columbia’s 16th Avenue South studio with the Anita Kerr Singers, topped the chart early in 1964, his last number one. A session on 10 February 1965, with Pete Drake on steel, produced “She’s Gone, Gone, Gone” and “Confused” (Columbia 4-43256). Don Law retired from Columbia in 1967, and the label dropped Frizzell in 1972. ABC signed him, and from December 1972 to October 1974 he recorded at Woodland Sound Studio in Nashville. His two ABC albums included songs he wrote with Whitey Shafer, among them “That’s the Way Love Goes” and “I Never Go Around Mirrors.” He died after a stroke on 19 July 1975, at forty-seven.

Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.