BOBBY WOOD

Sam Phillips put Memphis on the map in the mid-fifties almost single-handedly and even if he hadn’t discovered Elvis Presley, the fact that his Sun Records label was also the first to sign Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins would have done so, but Memphis also had the Hi and Stax/Volt labels, as well as Fernwood, Meteor, Rita  and others all of which were enough to make Memphis a regional recording centre of some importance……and it was in Memphis that Bobby Wood would make his name and lead country superstar Garth Brooks to say, “Bobby Wood may very well be the most successful musician to grace the music business for the last five decades!” 

Bobby Ray Wood was born on January 25th 1941 on the family farm in Mitchell Switch, near New Albany, Mississippi, about a ninety minutes drive south of Memphis. Music had long been an integral part of the Wood family’s life; Bobby‘s grandparents Walter and Kittie were farmers, scratching a living for themselves and their ten children (an eleventh died in infancy), raising cows and pigs and growing vegetables, corn, hay and cotton. Walter was a trained musician and loved nothing more than to spend what spare time he had singing and taught all his children their do-re-mi from an early age. Such was his love of music, he determined to open a singing school and contacted all the local churches he could find, offering to teach the young people of their congregation the joy of music. His school, which proved an instant success, had a hundred and twenty-five students signed up, some paying three dollars for the three week course, others paying with groceries or vegetables and fruit from their gardens. All of Walter and Kittie’s children attended including Leslie Herman Wood, the Wood’s second oldest child, the man who would be Bobby’s father. 

Leslie was born August 8th 1905 and married Eunie Pickens in 1924. They’d met at church and had seven  children, Maxine, Irene, Etoye, Robert, Billy, Bobby and Jamie, but tragedy struck one Sunday when Robert developed colic and died. The child was just eighteen months old. 

Bobby Wood’s parents lived pretty much as their parents had, farming just outside New Albany as a share-cropper, but through hard work and with a little luck Leslie was finally able to buy a one hundred acre farm in the area that came with a two story house, a barn, outbuilding, a smoke house and a lake. It was here where life for the Woods remained simple and frugal that Bobby was born in 1941. 

Many of the things later generations took for granted weren’t part of the Wood’s world; insurance was one such item and when Bobby was just three years old, their family house burnt down. A simple act of forgetfulness had led petrol to be poured onto coals still warm from the morning breakfast. The result was a fire that swept through the house in a matter of minutes. Bobby’s father suffered minor burns and his mother managed to get all the kids out of the house where they watched helplessly as their home was reduced to ashes. 

A new house was built with wood from the farm, but it would be another five years before the house had electricity and a further two before indoor plumbing was installed. Life continued as normal, a daily round of chores for the kids while Leslie farmed and Eunie cooked and kept house followed often by an evening of singing. All the kids learnt to sing in harmony, none of them learned to read music, in fact Bobby Wood has never learned to read music ! 

He did have a few lessons from Lee Roy Abernathy, a gospel musician and songwriter, who sold a music correspondence course, but it didn’t interest Bobby much – he preferred to pick up tunes and rhythms ‘by ear’. Besides, he was also taking the lead voice in the family’s singing sessions and was following his father’s interest in the ‘new’ gospel music of the time, especially The Blackwood Brothers, another family group from Mississippi. 

Bobby’s father’s passion remained music and it was Leslie’s involvement with WELO Radio in Tupelo, thirty miles from New Albany, that led to the Wood children singing the opening song for the station, Turn Your Radio On. Leslie hosted “Pap Wood’s Gospel Radio Hour”, a programme that proved so popular that soon requests were coming in the mail for the Wood family to appear at various conventions across Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, a chance for the kids to appear alongside their heroes, The Blackwoods and The Statesmen Quartet. Payment in cash was a rare event, mostly the family sang for a good meal at the end of it, something not to be sniffed at at the time. 

Bobby had a go at learning to play guitar, but around the age of nine he switched to playing the family’s old upright piano. In his autobiography, “Walking Among Giants – From Elvis To Garth”, Bobby remembers “…..in the first or second grade kids would pay pennies, nickels and dimes for me to [play and] sing for them” .  

The family singing group was making more and more appearances and attracting quite a following. Entering a talent contest, they got through to the final held at The Ellis Auditorium in Memphis and won first prize, a paid trip to perform at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. A second trip to Memphis with family friend and pianist Dorothy Shields in support led to a suggestion by the pianist that the group should try and make a recording. She knew someone who had a recording studio. That man was Sam Phillips, the studio was The Memphis Recording Service, the home of Sun Records. 

The kids recorded two songs, This Old House and Heavenly Love and while waiting to make their goodbyes were introduced to one of Sam’s new artists, Elvis Presley. It was Bobby’s first meeting with Elvis, but not the first time he’d heard about him. The daughter of another family, Peggy Scott, had shown Bobby a picture of Elvis, telling him “….he is really going to be famous one day….I have seen him perform and he is really good”. That’s Alright had just been released, Elvis’s career was about to explode. Thirteen year old Bobby almost did the same when Elvis told him he liked their singing. 

Rock ‘n’ Roll had arrived, Elvis was on his way, adding to his growing number of fans by the day, if not the hour, and worrying their parents in equal measure. Everywhere teenage boys were picking up guitars or doing their best to copy Elvis’s vocal style in the hope of being part of this musical revolution. In Union County, fifteen year old Bobby Wood had put together a group with fellow  Ingomar High School students, Ronald Young on drums, Joe Young on bass and Sammy Allen on guitar. Bobby played piano and together the group was becoming more and more popular with students, so much so that WELO offered The Bobby Wood Band a half hour programme on Saturday lunchtimes. This only added to the group’s appeal and soon they were firm favourites with the kids at all five schools in the county.      

When Bobby heard Jerry Lee Lewis’s Crazy Arms (also released on the Sun label), he knew that was how he wanted to play music and the band soon adopted many of Jerry Lee’s tunes to their repertoire. Entering a talent competition organised by the Future Farmers of America, (an organisation dating back to 1925 and founded to help develop leadership skills, personal growth and career success through education), the Bobby Wood Band would achieve second place, beaten only by a group led by Bobby Emmons, someone who would figure again later in Bobby Wood’s story. 

The next step for Bobby and his band, now with a couple of personnel changes, was to try to make a record. Sam Phillips’s studio was their first port of call, but that door didn’t open for them and after knocking on several other doors that also remained tightly shut, the band found OJ Records, a wannabe start-up by Bill Biggs and songwriter Red Mathews with Bill Cantrell (later to be a founding partner of Hi Records) in charge of day to day activities. Love Is My Business, co-written by Cantrell and Quinton Claunch (another co-founder of Hi) was coupled with a Red Mathews’ song Kiss Me Quick. Whether these recordings did actually see light of day on OJ (the OJ came from Old Judge Music, the publishing company owned by Mathews) is debateable, but they were certainly released on Johnny Vincent’s Vin label (Vin 1009) in early 1959. 

Memphis beckoned. As he told Tom Moran of Inside Nashville in 2017 as soon as he graduated in 1959 he moved to Memphis determined to make a go of it as a singer or musician, although as he also told Moran, he had a “knack” for acting, but “didn’t have the money to go to California“. His brother Billy was already living in Memphis and Bobby duly moved in with Johnny while earning forty-eight dollars a week in a local auto parts company, but it wasn’t long before Bobby and Billy put together a band they called The Starlighters. Billy played bass, Bobby did lead vocals and played piano along with Elbert Adair (guitar), Gene Keller (drums), Charlie Chalmers (sax) and Stacy Davidson, Billy Tubbs and Fred Stewart did back-up vocals. Together the band played the clubs in and around Memphis venturing further afield from time to time in Mississippi and Arkansas, but eventually settled on a weekend residency at a six hundred capacity nightclub in Memphis called the Starlight Club. 

It was while he was a member of The Starlighters that Bobby met Stan Kesler who’d moved to Memphis from his home in Mississippi in 1950. As a child he mastered the guitar and mandolin and then learned to play steel guitar while serving in the U.S. Marines. In Memphis he became a member of the Snearly Ranch Boys, a group of musicians who all lodged at a boarding house on North McNeil Street run by Omah “Ma” Snearly and which the musicians had dubbed the Snearly Ranch House. In February 1955 the band provided the backing for Bill Taylor on two songs, both  co-written by Kesler, he recorded for Sam Phillips’ Flip label. As a result Kesler and the other Ranch Boys became regulars on sessions at Sun with Kesler assuming the role of recording engineer. Late the same year Kesler (and Bill Taylor) supplied Elvis Presley with I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone and then I Forgot To Remember To Forget (written with Charlie Feathers). 

It was Kesler who was to give Bobby Woods his real introduction to recording though an early audition at Sun that Kesler arranged for Bobby was to end in disappointment. A big fan of Jerry Lee Lewis, Bobby had fashioned his style on “The Killer”. After a couple of songs Sam Phillips dismissed Bobby with the words “….I don’t need another Jerry Lee. I’ve already got one. You go back and bring me Bobby Wood”. Kesler persevered with Bobby and eventually in September 1961 Bobby recorded two songs  at the Sam Phillips Recording Studio at 639 Madison Avenue, Memphis. Human Emotions and Everybody’s Searching (both written by Starlighters member Stacy Davidson) and with Bobby playing piano, Scotty Moore and Elbert Adair on guitars, brother Bobby on bass, Gene Keller on drums and Ace Cannon on sax, the record, produced by Stan Kesler, was scheduled for release on October 9th 1961 (Sun 369). 

Scheduled it might have been, actually released it probably wasn’t. Bobby remembers that about two hundred copies were pressed and some promotional copies are known to have survived, but most of the pressings seem to have been junked, due in some way or other to what’s been described as “contractual difficulties”. Whatever those “difficulties” might have been, Everybody’s Searching did see light of day in early or mid 1962 when it was released on Kesler and Gene Lucchesi‘s Pen label c/w a new A side, The Day After Forever (written by Kesler) (Pen 113). By August of ’62 both tracks appeared on Gene Autry’s Challenge label (Challenge 9160) based in Hollywood. Music trade paper Cashbox gave the record a B + review saying “…[the] side could develop into something” while Billboard gave the record a four star review commenting (unawareof how Bobby’s career would turn out) “…Floyd Cramer piano sound is also a feature” and summing it up as “Satisfying wax”. 

By then Stan Kesler and Bobby Woods had become firm friends. Both spoke highly of each other when interviewed by Roben Jones for her book Memphis Boys, the story of Chips Moman’s   Studios in Memphis. “Me and Stan just kind of hit it off the bat”, Bobby said. “Stan’s a nice guy. Too nice for his own good sometimes” he added while Kesler said Bobby was “…so talented, he picked up on things real quickly”. After the disappointment of The Day After Forever not making much headway it would be June 1963 before Bobby would have another record out. 

I Still Hurt Just The Same (written by Kesler) c/w You’re Gonna See (another Stacy Davidson song) was released on the Joy label based in New York in mid-June.  Joy was an offshoot of a music publishing company started by George Joy and Lester Santly in 1934. When Santly retired in 1951, Joy’s son Eddie, who also managed Guy Mitchell and Mindy Carson, (a popular singer who was also Eddie’s wife), assumed day to day management of the company and launched the Joy label in 1958. The label had had some success with records by Jamie Horton, Ronnie & The Hi-Lites and Sleepy King and was ‘hot’ a few months before Bobby’s debut on the label with James Gilreath’s Little Band of Gold.  A positive Cashbox review concluded the record had “hit possibilities” and that Bobby was “…a talent to be reckoned with” was followed by encouraging news in his home area when a company supplying most of the juke box operators in and around the city reported excellent sales. Jake Khan, the boss of the Tri-State Amusement Company told Billboard magazine Bobby’s debut on Joy was “….going best on his boxes”. Interest in Memphis was, perhaps, to be expected. The problem was that in the rest of America, interest was minimal. 

Similarly positive reviews followed for Bobby’s next release. Do Darlin’ (Do Remember Me) c/w That’s All I Need (Joy 279) was released in the August. Again, the songs came from Kesler and Davidson and initial reaction at radio was again encouraging. Stations in Buffalo, Detroit, Trenton (New Jersey), Wilmington (Delaware), Phoenix and Tuscaloosa (Alabama) playlisted the record straight away with WIBG in Philadelphia and WHBQ in Memphis following soon after, but the radio play didn’t stimulate enough sales to propel it towards the charts. 

As with so many artists at the time, military service was to interfere with Bobby’s musical ambitions. In 1963 he enlisted in the National Guard M.A.S.H. unit in Memphis and was posted to Fort Knox, Kenticky to do his basic training. Stan Kesler hadn’t stopped trying to ‘break’ Bobby as an artist and in the Spring of 1964 he was on the phone to Bobby urging him to get a weekend pass to be able to leave camp and make a record. Kesler had written a song that he thought would be a hit……..and he was right ! 

I’m A Fool For Loving You was recorded at Sam Phillips’ studio; at the session Bobby played piano, Gene Chrisman was on drums, Mike Leech played bass and Reggie Young played guitar. Janice Saunders (soon to be Bobby’s wife) was one of the background singers. Released in mid-April 1964, with another Kesler song, (My Heart Went) Boing! Boing! Boing!, on the B side, interest in the record was almost immediate. By the end of May, Billboard reported the song as a ‘breakout’ in Nashville, Memphis and Atlanta. In Ohio, radio stations in Cleveland and Akron were early supporters and before long it was on the radio in Miami, Chicago, Philadelphia, Tulsa and Washington, but Joy Records didn’t have the best network of distributors so sales were slow and it would be early August before the record made it into the all-important Hot 100 and even then it only climbed as far as number 74. Bobby would later remark that sales spread slowly from city to city, so although he reckons I’m A Fool For Loving You sold a quarter of a million copies, sales were spread over many, many weeks. “By the time [the record] had reached number one in Birmingham (Alabama) and was going off the charts, it had caught fire in Atlanta. This continued from town to town” he says in his autobiography, Walking Among Giants. The record would be the one to introduce Bobby to British record buyers too – Pye International released the record (7N 25264) on 2nd October 1964, including it in their weekly advertisement in Disc. 

Record sales paid poor royalties back then and even when an artist had a big hit, it would take a year or more for them to get all, or as much of their money as they could, much of it skimmed off in the wheeling and dealing of the time before they received their cheque, so singers with anything like a hit had to rely on touring to earn their money. In Memphis the only agency in town worth signing to was Ray Brown’s National Artists Attractions. Brown was a former WMPS  dee-jay who referred to himself on-air as Mother Brown’s Round Mound of Sound. It was Brown who teamed Bobby with J. Frank Wilson (currently hitting the charts with Last Kiss), Haunted House man Gene Simmons, Travis Wammack (Scratchy) and Murray Kellum (Long Tall Texan) on a tour that would last a full month travelling in two cars and often covering three or four hundred miles between gigs. Ticket sales were good well in advance of each date, the tour was going to be popular, all the artists were looking forward to it. 

Day five of the tour was in Wheeling, West Virginia. The next show was two hundred miles away in Lima, Ohio. Leaving Wheeling, Bobby was driving, but in the wee small hours, J. Frank Wilson’s manager Sonley Roush took over. Simmons, Wammack and Kellum in the second car saw the station wagon in front weaving from side to side on the road and frantically sounded their car’s horn to attract Roush’s attention. Just before dawn on October 23rd 1964, the station wagon hit an on-coming articulated lorry head on. Twenty-seven year old Roush was killed and Wilson sustained chest injuries, but Bobby who was also in the front with Roush and Wilson sustained the most terrible of injuries. 

He woke up in hospital in Lima three days later, having lost his right eye, sustaining severe lacerations to the right hand side of his face and a broken jaw. He’d lost seven of his eight pints of blood, his brain had swollen as a result of the impact and he went into cardiac arrest in the operating theatre. He’d also broken his left leg. He was in that hospital for two weeks, then flown back to Memphis where he went through three episodes of plastic surgery and a long period of convalecense, some of it spent at Stan Kesler’s home 

While his fight back to health was going on Joy Records continued to put records out. First came That’s All I Need To Know in September 1964 which made number 46 on Billboard’s country chart, but could only manage three weeks ‘Bubbling Under’ the Hot 100, its highest position being 130. Its B side was This Time, the Chips Moman song that Troy Shondell had had a Top 10 hit with back in 1961. Moman would later become a major plank in Bobby Wood’s long career. In the December Joy released So Cruel c/w (With All My Heart) I’d Do It Again and in mid-March 1965 came Bed Of Roses c/w  Show Me. By this time Joy had also released an album, simply called Bobby Wood, which contained several of the tracks that had been released as singles, as well as the Bobby Bland song Cry, Cry, Cry and a standard from the Joy Music publishing catalogue, Lavender Blue, the latter a song Bobby didn’t care for much. “[That] wasn’t really me”, he told Roben Jones. Billboard gave it Special Merit Pick status, Cashbox said the package “…should sell like hot cakes”.  

Two more singles would follow on Joy, the first being the A side of the aborted Sun label release from 1961, Human Emotions (Joy 298) coupled with a New York song written by Joy label staffers Tommy Kaye and Al Ham called When A Lonely Boy Meets A Lonely Girl in June 1965 and finally Fool’s Paradise (yet another Stacy Davidson song)(Joy 301) c/w What Am I Gonna Tell Myself?, another Tommy Kaye song, in the September. 

The fact that three of the last five releases on the Joy label were by Bobby Wood probably indicates that despite not achieving much in the way of chart positions, the company kept faith with Bobby right to the end, the end that is of the label’s life. Eddie Joy shut the doors soon after the release of Fool’s Paradise. 

It would be eight months before the next Bobby Wood single would be released. Bobby Helms had had a hit with My Special Angel in 1957, Connie Francis, The Crests, Bobby Vinton and Frankie Avalon, among others, had already recorded the song by the time Bobby’s version came out on Mala (526), a subsidiary of Bell Records in New York in April 1966. With Stan Kesler still in the producer’s chair, the arrangements were scored by former Starlighter Charles Chambers. It was to be a one-off for the label and the last the record buying public would hear of bobby Wood for over a year. 

Meanwhile in Memphis, the city’s stature in the music business had been growing. Apart from the Sun and  Hi labels, Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton’s Stax / Volt operation had been successful with records by The Mar-Keys, Booker T. & The MGs, Rufus Thomas and Otis Redding and 1966 would see more singles success with Sam & Dave and Eddie Floyd. Stewart and Axton had made a ‘family’ out of their company with a house band centred on The MGs and a studio in which to produce their records in-house. One of the members of that ‘family’ was Lincoln Wayne ‘Chips’ Moman, a native of La Grange in Georgia who’d quit school at fourteen, moved to Memphis, worked on the road with Johnny and Dorsey Burnette and been a session guitarist at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles before fetching up at Stax and helping produce the company’s first hit record Last Night by The Mar-Keys. 

A row over money saw Moman storm out of Stax in 1962 after which he set up his own American Sound Studio at 827 Thomas Street in Memphis. One of the first successful records to come out of American was It’s Wonderful To Be In Love by The Ovations (Goldwax GW-113) released in May 1965. Bobby was recruited by Moman to play the organ, Bobby’s old friend Gene Chrisman was on drums.  

Across town at Phillips, Stan Kesler had discovered Domingo Samudio, Sam The Sham. Wooly Bully apparently came together in half an hour and would be one of the great party records of all time, but before it got a national release, Kesler released it on his own XL label. Getting encouraging local sales, he tried to shop it to  a major label, but nobody wanted to know. Eventually MGM agreed to release it and got themselves a number two hit. Later in 1965 Chips Moman would approach MGM’s Jim Vienneau, placing Keep On Dancing by local Memphis group The Gentrys. It would make number four. Sandy Posey would cement MGM’s relationship with Moman, Kesler and Memphis. 

Bobby Wood benefitted from this hit-making relationship and  was signed to MGM in early 1967, debuting on the label with a re-make of the Floyd Cramer / Skeeter Davis hit from 1960 My Last Date (With You).MGM launched it with a full page advert in Billboard and radio reaction was good as was a Cashbox review, “Poignant” it said adding “Could make it”. It had been the same story throughout Bobby’s recording career to date – radio liked him, reviewers liked him, record buyers liked him too. The only problem was record buyers weren’t buying his records fast enough or in sufficient quantities. 

A John D. Loudermilk song was chosen by Vienneau and Kesler for Bobby’s next MGM outing. Break My Mind was issued in mid-October 1967, again with a full page advert in Billboard. Record World, the third ranking music trade paper of the time treated it as a pure country release saying little more than the record had an “attractive beat”. WHBQ in Memphis supported the record from the off and by mid-November it was number one on the station’s popularity chart, but it would be the end of December before stations in San Diego and San Francisco on the West Coast picked up on the song which suggested two things. First, it took a while for programmers to be convinced about the record’s hit potential and secondly, to MGM’s credit, they didn’t give up on the release. In the end Break My Mind would ‘bubble under’ Billboard’s Hot 100 for five weeks from the beginning of January 1968, just missing out on a Hot 100 placing by ten spots. MGM would release the record in Britain the same month (MGM 1377). 

The Dallas Frazier song Say It’s Not You would be next, released in March 1968. Record World didn’t award it much space, its two line review ending with the message “Watch”. Bobby co-wrote the B side Is That All There Is To It with Stan Kesler. Dickey Lee and Allen Reynolds (later to be a producer for whom Bobby would be a session musician on sessions for, among others, Crystal Gayle) wrote the A side of Bobby’s penultimate MGM release.  Mary (Don’t Read Between the Lines) with Charles Chalmers once again handling the arrangements was released in the summer of 1968 with (Margie’s At) The Lincoln Park Inn written by Tom T. Hall rounding out Bobby’s two years with the label in March 1969, although he did leave behind nearly a dozen unreleased tracks including versions of Please Help Me I’m Falling and She Thinks I Still Care. 

There would be a few other Bobby Wood singles released over the years. There was One Day Behind c/w Sound of Sadness on the Lucky Eleven label in 1973 and a Stan Kesler produced re-recording of his 1964 hit If I’m A Fool For Loving You on Cinnamon Records in March 1974, but for a long time before those releases Bobby Wood had been a member of The Memphis Boys, the incredibly successful team of studio musicians put together by Chip Moman at his American Sound Studios in Memphis. 

Together, they’d worked on classic recordings by B. J. Thomas, Dusty Springfield, Sandy Posey, Merilee Rush, The Box Tops, Joe Tex and most notably Elvis Presley when he went to Memphis and recorded In The Ghetto, Suspicious Minds, Kentucky Rain and the hit album From Elvis In Memphis. They were the sessions that rejuvenated, even rescued, Elvis’s career. Later Bobby would move to Nashville where he would team up with former banker turned music producer Allen Reynolds. It was with Roger Cook (the British singer / songwriter who had started out as one half of David & Jonathan), and for Crystal Gayle, that Bobby co-wrote the country number one hit Talkin‘ In Your Sleep. It was also Allen Reynolds who first introduced Bobby to Garth Brooks, bringing him in to play piano on Brooks’ first sessions for Capitol Records. From that session on, Bobby Wood has played on every Garth Brooks recording session.  At the back of Walking Among Giants, the book Bobby wrote with Barbara Wood Lowry about his life and career, there’s a list of artists on whose records Bobby Wood has played. Apart from the ones already mentioned, the list of nearly 130 names includes Roy Orbison, Emmylou Harris, The Everly Brothers, Dolly Parton, Dionne Warwick, Neil Diamond, Johnny Cash, Ringo Starr, Willie Nelson, Johnny Mathis and Kenny Rogers. 

We’ll leave the last word to Garth Brooks. “I bet Bobby has played on more records sold than any other player, bar none”. You’ll find Bobby’s name in the credits on records by many more artists than are mentioned above. 

 

Austin Powell