Ernest Tubb

Ernest Dale Tubb was born on 9 February 1914 on a cotton farm near Crisp, in Ellis County, Texas, about thirty-five miles southeast of Dallas, the youngest of five children in a sharecropper’s family, and spent his youth farming in different parts of the state. He first heard Jimmie Rodgers’s records in 1928 and taught himself to sing, yodel and play the guitar in Rodgers’s manner. Shortly after Rodgers died in 1933 the nineteen-year-old Tubb began singing on radio in San Antonio, on KONO, while digging ditches for the Works Progress Administration and later clerking in a drugstore.

In 1936 he telephoned Rodgers’s widow, Carrie Rodgers, to ask for an autographed photograph, and the two became friends. She helped him with clothes and songs, got him a contract with her husband’s label, RCA, which was then issuing country records on Bluebird, and took him on a regional tour of movie theaters. On 27 October 1936, alone with his guitar at the Texas Hotel in San Antonio, he recorded six sides, among them “The Passing of Jimmie Rodgers” and “The Last Thoughts of Jimmie Rodgers,” and he was back there on 2 March 1937, with Mervin Buffington on second guitar, for “The T.B. Is Whipping Me.” Neither the records nor the tour succeeded. For the next three years he worked for radio stations and at day jobs in Midland, San Angelo and Corpus Christi. A tonsillectomy in San Angelo in 1939 lowered his voice and ended the Rodgers yodel, and he turned to writing more of his own songs.

Dave Kapp of Decca recorded him at the Rice Hotel in Houston on 4 April 1940, with Jimmie Short on second guitar, and “Blue Eyed Elaine,” with “I’ll Get Along Somehow” on the other side, became his first success; Gene Autry covered it. On 26 April 1941, at Sound Recording Studios in Dallas, with Smitty Smith on guitar, he cut his own “Walking the Floor Over You.” His sixth Decca release, it was the biggest hit of his career and reached the pop chart. It led to two Columbia westerns made in 1942, Fighting Buckaroo and Riding West, and to package shows with Bob Wills and Roy Acuff in cities such as Shreveport, Little Rock and Memphis.

The Nashville manager J. L. Frank saw him in Birmingham, Alabama, in December 1942 and arranged Opry appearances for the following month. Tubb joined the Opry’s regular cast in February 1943 and remained one of its stars for thirty-nine years. At Frank’s suggestion he sold songbooks over WSM, hired his first band, the Texas Troubadours, and kept making films, among them Jamboree for Republic in 1944 and Hollywood Barn Dance in 1947. In January 1944 he recorded in Decca’s Hollywood studio with Jimmie and Leon Short on guitars, Butterball Paige on bass and Johnny Sapp on fiddle, and in September 1946, at the Pythian Temple in New York, with Jerry Byrd on steel guitar, he cut “Filipino Baby,” “Drivin’ Nails in My Coffin” and “Rainbow at Midnight.” “Soldier’s Last Letter” (1944) and “Rainbow at Midnight” (1946) both reached number one on the country chart, and “Tomorrow Never Comes,” written with Johnny Bond, and “It’s Been So Long Darling” were hits in 1945.

In May 1947 he opened the Ernest Tubb Record Shop at 720 Commerce Street in downtown Nashville, the first major record store devoted to country music. The Midnite Jamboree grew out of it, broadcast from the shop before a live audience straight after the Opry and given over mostly to young performers and their new records. That August his sessions moved to Nashville, to Castle Studio in the Tulane Hotel, with Paul Cohen producing, and in September he headlined the first Grand Ole Opry show at Carnegie Hall in New York. Decca paired him with other acts: the Andrews Sisters in 1949, on “Don’t Rob Another Man’s Castle,” and Red Foley from 1949 to 1953, on records such as “Tennessee Border No. 2” and “Goodnight Irene,” cut on 30 June 1950, which was a country number one. His own “Blue Christmas,” recorded on 26 August 1949, also topped the country chart. Billy Byrd was his guitarist on record from late 1949 through the 1950s, Jack Drake his bassist, and Owen Bradley often played piano; “Two Glasses, Joe” came from a session of 22 June 1954.

From 1961 his records were billed as Ernest Tubb and the Texas Troubadours, with Owen Bradley producing. “Thanks a Lot,” cut at Columbia’s Nashville studio on 10 July 1963, reached number three on the country chart, and “Waltz Across Texas,” written by his nephew Quanah Talmadge Tubb, known as Billy Talmadge, and recorded at RCA Victor’s Nashville studio on 19 April 1965, became one of his most requested songs. With Loretta Lynn he recorded duets from 1964 to 1969, including “Mr. and Mrs. Used to Be” (1964) and “Sweet Thang” (1967). In 1965 “Walking the Floor Over You” earned a gold record, for sales of more than half a million, and he was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame; from that year until 1968 he hosted a syndicated television show from Nashville, with Willie Nelson his co-star in the early episodes. In the early 1960s he had turned the Troubadours into a dance band and taken it onto the nightclub circuit, and from then until 1982 he played 150 to 200 shows a year. Over the years he helped other performers by taking them on tour, recommending them to the Opry and to producers and featuring them on the Midnite Jamboree; Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Hank Snow, Loretta Lynn, Jack Greene, Cal Smith and Hank Williams were among those who owed him thanks.

His last Decca sessions, at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, ran to June 1975. From 1977 Pete Drake produced him at his Pete’s Place studio in Nashville for the First Generation label: Living Legend (1977) and The Legend and the Legacy (1979), for which Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Charlie Rich, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Ferlin Husky, Loretta Lynn and others added duet parts to his recordings. In 1980 he played himself in Coal Miner’s Daughter, the film of Loretta Lynn’s life. He stopped touring in 1982 and made his last Opry appearance on 15 August that year. Ernest Tubb died in Nashville on 6 September 1984, aged seventy. His fan club had a single president, Norma Winton Barthel, from 1944 until it closed in the early 1990s, and the Midnite Jamboree went on until the record shop closed in May 2022.

• 1965: Country Music Hall of Fame
• 1970: Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame
• 1999: Texas Country Music Hall of Fame