Lefty Frizzell

William Orville Frizzell was born in Corsicana, Texas, on 31 March 1928, the first of eight children of an oilfield worker, and he grew up in the oil towns of Arkansas, East Texas and Louisiana. In El Dorado, Arkansas, he sang on the local station KELD while still a boy. Jimmie Rodgers’s yodel made him decide by the age of twelve to become a professional singer, and Ernest Tubb and Ted Daffan also shaped his early style. The name Lefty came from school, where, the story goes, he decked a schoolmate with his left hand.

During the Second World War, living in Greenville, Texas, he sang on KPLT in nearby Paris, and in March 1945 he married Alice Harper. In 1946 the couple moved to Roswell, New Mexico, where he played on KGFL and with the house band at the Cactus Gardens dance hall. In 1947 and 1948 he spent six months in the county jail, and there he wrote songs to his wife, among them “I Love You a Thousand Ways.” After his release he failed an audition for the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport, spent time in El Dorado, and ended up singing at the Ace of Clubs, a honky-tonk in Big Spring, Texas.

Early in 1950 he drove to Dallas to audition at Jim Beck’s recording studio. Beck cared less for the singer than for his half-written song “If You’ve Got the Money I’ve Got the Time,” and took a demo of it to Nashville in the hope that Columbia’s Don Law would give it to Little Jimmy Dickens; Law wanted Frizzell’s voice instead. Frizzell signed with Columbia in June 1950, and on 25 July 1950, at Beck’s studio, he recorded both sides of his first single, produced by Art Satherley and Law. Released near the end of that summer, “If You’ve Got the Money” and “I Love You a Thousand Ways” each reached No. 1.

The hits came fast. At Beck’s studio on 11 January 1951 he recorded “I Want to Be with You Always” and “Give Me More, More, More (Of Your Kisses),” and on 24 May 1951 “Always Late (With Your Kisses)” and “Mom and Dad’s Waltz.” “I Want to Be with You Always” held No. 1 for eleven weeks and “Always Late” for twelve, “Mom and Dad’s Waltz” reached No. 2, and “Give Me More, More, More” topped the chart in 1952. He also recorded songs from Jimmie Rodgers’s repertoire in 1951, and his “Travelin’ Blues” reached No. 6. In April 1951 he toured for a week with Hank Williams, and that July he joined the Grand Ole Opry. His touring band, the Western Cherokees, with the guitarist Blackie Crawford, played on some of his sessions, among them one at Beck’s studio in January 1952. In roughly two years he had thirteen Top Ten hits.

By 1953 that run was over, though he remained popular on the road; in November 1953 he cut duets in Dallas with Wayne Raney, and that year he sang at the first Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Festival in Meridian, Mississippi. A three-month tour in 1954 with musicians from the Louisiana Hayride paid for the family’s move to Southern California, where they settled in Northridge. There he became a regular on the television program Town Hall Party, starred in the first country concert held at the Hollywood Bowl, and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In March 1957 he recorded duets in Hollywood with Johnny Bond, with Joe Maphis on guitar. Even so, from early 1955 to late 1958 he did not have a single chart hit.

In 1959 he began working with Jim Denny’s Cedarwood Publishing in Nashville, and two hits followed back to back, “Cigarettes and Coffee Blues” and “The Long Black Veil,” a ballad by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin that he recorded at Bradley Film and Recording Studio in Nashville on 3 March 1959, with Wilkin on piano and Grady Martin and Harold Bradley on guitars. It reached No. 6, his best-placed single in five years, became a standard in both country and folk music, and was added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry in 2019.

In 1962 the family moved to Nashville, settling north of the city in Hendersonville. At Columbia’s Nashville studio on 21 October 1963 he recorded “Saginaw, Michigan,” which topped the chart early in 1964 and was nominated for a Grammy. It was his last No. 1; “She’s Gone, Gone, Gone” reached No. 12 in 1965. Don Law, his main advocate at Columbia, retired in 1967, and in December that year Frizzell recorded duets with June Stearns that were issued as by Agnes and Orville. Columbia dropped him in 1972, and ABC signed him at once; his first ABC session was held at Woodland Sound Studio in Nashville on 14 December 1972. He was by then writing with Sanger D. “Whitey” Shafer, and their “That’s the Way Love Goes” and “I Never Go Around Mirrors” were on his ABC albums The Legendary Lefty Frizzell (1973) and The Classic Style of Lefty Frizzell (1974), which went largely unnoticed at the time. He died after a stroke on 19 July 1975, at the age of 47.

Frizzell is a member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1982, and his first single, “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time,” entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. Merle Haggard, who as a teenager first played a professional stage on Frizzell’s guitar in Bakersfield, said the impact Lefty had on country music was “not even measurable.” Willie Nelson recorded an album of his songs, To Lefty from Willie (1977), and Roy Orbison chose the name “Lefty Wilbury” in the Traveling Wilburys in 1988 in his honor. In bluegrass, J.D. Crowe and the New South released Lefty’s Old Guitar in 2006, its title song written about his custom Gibson J-200. His younger brother, David Frizzell, also became a country singer.