Ernest Tubb and His Texas Troubadours

Tubb had been singing on radio in Texas as the Gold Chain Troubadour, for a flour company sponsor, when the Nashville manager J. L. Frank brought him to the Opry in January 1943. He joined the regular cast that February and, at Frank’s urging, hired his first band, which took the name the Texas Troubadours. The band made its first recordings without him: four sides in Hollywood for Decca in January 1944, none of them issued, and a single for the Nashville label Bullet in 1946, “That’s All She Wrote” with “Why Should I Cry Over You.” In 1950 the band was Tommy “Butterball” Paige, Jack Drake, Hal Smith and Bill Drake. Jack Drake played bass on Tubb’s Nashville sessions from 1947 into the late 1960s, and Billy Byrd played guitar on them through most of the 1950s.

From the late 1950s the Troubadours were heard more often on Tubb’s own records, which Owen Bradley produced. Buddy Emmons played steel guitar on Tubb’s sessions from 1958, Leon Rhodes joined on guitar in 1960, and from 1961 the sessions were billed as Ernest Tubb and the Texas Troubadours. Buddy Charleton took over the steel guitar in the spring of 1962 and stayed until the fall of 1973. Jack Greene joined as drummer in 1962, and Cal Smith, hired in 1961, played guitar on most of Tubb’s 1960s records. “Thanks a Lot” was cut at Columbia’s Nashville studio on 10 July 1963 with Rhodes and Smith on guitars, Charleton on steel, Drake on bass, Greene on drums, the session guitarist Harold Bradley and Hargus Robbins on piano, and “Waltz Across Texas” at RCA Victor’s Nashville studio on 19 April 1965 with Rhodes, Smith and Jerry Shook on guitars, Charleton, Drake, Greene and Jerry Smith on piano. In the early 1960s Tubb also turned the Troubadours into a dance band and began playing the nightclub circuit, working 150 to 200 shows a year from then until 1982.

Decca issued four albums by the band alone, mostly instrumentals with vocals by its members: Ernest Tubb Presents the Texas Troubadours (1964), with “Panhandle Rag,” “Rhodes-Bud Boogie” and “Six Days on the Road”; Country Dance Time (1965), with “Leon’s Guitar Boogie” and “Almost to Tulsa”; Ernest Tubb’s Fabulous Texas Troubadours (1966); and The Terrific Texas Troubadours (1968). Greene sang “The Last Letter” on the first of them, and Decca put it out as a single in 1964. Smith, Rhodes and the guitarist John Wiggins also sang on the band’s sessions. The band’s singles on Decca ran from 1964 to 1969.

Greene left with Tubb’s encouragement to go solo, and in 1966 recorded “There Goes My Everything,” which was number one on the country chart for seven weeks and won him the Country Music Association’s Male Vocalist of the Year award in 1967. Smith left for good in 1969, had his first country number one with Bill Anderson’s “The Lord Knows I’m Drinking” in 1973, and in 1974 recorded “Country Bumpkin,” which won Song of the Year from both the Country Music Association and the Academy of Country Music. Rhodes later played in the band on the television show Hee Haw. Tubb was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1965. A later Troubadours lineup, with Pete Mitchell on guitar and vocals and Lynn Owsley on steel, made an album for First Generation in 1981, on which Tubb sang as a guest; he stopped touring the next year and died in September 1984.