‘Best of Webb Pierce’ Recalls a Forgotten Country Legend

Big record sales don’t guarantee a glowing legacy. Just look at the career of Webb Pierce. He was once dueling Hank Williams and Elvis Presley at the top of the country charts, yet he’s largely unknown today to any country fan under 30.

In 1955, Pierce pulled off a trifecta by having the year’s three most successful country singles. Together, “In the Jailhouse Now,” “Love, Love, Love” and “I Don’t Care” spent some 40 weeks at No. 1.

Yet Pierce’s records are seldom featured in “memory” segments on country radio stations, and he has been passed over repeatedly by Country Music Hall of Fame voters.

Pierce’s lack of standing today is even more puzzling after listening to a dozen of his biggest hits, which are collected in “The Best of Webb Pierce/The Millennium Collection,” a retrospective album just released by MCA Nashville.

Pierce’s pure honky-tonk style, heavily spiked with fiddles and pedal steel guitar, is far from the slick country-pop strains of today’s country charts, but there’s a deeply rooted energy and spirit to his best work that gives it an appealing command.

Rich Kienzle, a noted country and rock historian, suggests that a key factor in the hall of fame’s snub of Pierce is that the late singer alienated so many of his peers in Nashville.

For one thing, Pierce quit the Grand Ole Opry, country music’s most beloved institution, in 1956 to protest the firing of booking agent Jim Denny.

After being dropped by Decca Records in 1972, Pierce fought aggressively to maintain his “star” presence in country music. He encouraged tourists to visit the guitar-shaped swimming pool he had built on the grounds of his Nashville home. Some 3,000 fans a week took him up on the offer.

“The added traffic led to friction with neighbors, including singer Ray Stevens,” Kienzle writes in the album’s liner notes. “After local officials barred bus tours, Pierce irritated many in the music industry by building an identical pool as a commercial tourist attraction--right on Music Row.”

Whatever the personal disputes and however out of style his musical approach may be today, Pierce’s music carried a proud, personal stamp that places him among country music’s legendary figures. This best-of collection is one of two in today’s edition of From the Vaults.

**** Webb Pierce, “The Best of Webb Pierce/The Millennium Collection,” MCA Nashville. Born in West Monroe, La., in 1921, Webb Michael Pierce showed so much interest in music that his mother bought him his first guitar when he was 5. By his teens, Pierce was singing on a local radio show.

After World War II service, he moved to nearby Shreveport and eventually joined the cast of the Louisiana Hayride, a sort of junior Grand Ole Opry and a showcase for such other major country figures as Williams and Presley.

Pierce was such a hit on the Hayride that he was signed by Decca in 1951, and his aggressive honky-tonk sound was an immediate hit. The MCA Nashville collection opens with “Wondering,” a lovesick ballad that went to No. 1 on the country charts in 1951. The tune, written by Joe Werner, benefits from a lilting arrangement, but Pierce’s vocal is the track’s chief strength.

He sings in a straightforward, declarative style that feels stiff and even clumsy when measured against the more subtle interpretation of Merle Haggard or Lefty Frizzell, two of country’s most influential singers. Still, Pierce has an open, self-assured presence that enables him to hold your attention with the right song.

Pierce was at his most powerful on “There Stands the Glass,” which spent three months at No. 1 on the country charts in 1953. Written by Russ Hull, Mary Jean Shurtz and Autry Grisham, the song is a classic barroom expression of emotional desperation.

The song’s success left Pierce second only to Williams in country music popularity in 1953. After Williams’ death that year, Pierce took over the No. 1 position, which he held in 1954 and 1955.

He was so popular in those years that he seemed invincible. His remake of Jimmie Rodgers’ “In the Jailhouse Now” may even be his most memorable recording--a rollicking tale of hard times that conveys a joyful resilience.

But Pierce had the misfortune of being in the way when the rock ‘n’ roll revolution hit country music. Young country fans raced after Presley, who took over as the most popular country artist in 1956 and 1957, followed by Johnny Cash in 1958 and 1959.

Pierce tried to battle back with the rock-leaning “I Ain’t Never,” a song he wrote with Mel Tillis that reached No. 2 on the country charts in 1959. The record, also a Top 40 pop hit, caught the ear of John Fogerty, who did a commendable version of the song on his “The Blue Ridge Rangers” solo album in 1973.

Though Pierce continued to have hits into the 1960s, his defining work was in the 1950s and that’s what this album properly focuses on. Pierce died of heart failure in 1991.

*** Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, “The Teen Kings,” Fuel 2000/Varese Sarabande. There’s certainly no debate over the legacy of Orbison, whose emotionally charged ‘60s hits are among the most celebrated of the modern pop era. In such recordings as “Running Scared” and “Oh, Pretty Woman,” Orbison’s soaring, near-operatic style conveyed marvelously the romantic obsession of his songs.

The music in this album gives us a look at Orbison and his band long before those hit days in Nashville.

Orbison, whose first vocal hero was country star Frizzell, was a teenager in Wink, Texas, when he put together his first band--the Wink Westerners. The group played at high school dances and on various radio stations before changing its name to the Teen Kings and moving toward rock after the arrival of Presley in 1954.

The Teen Kings included Billy Pat Ellis, Jack Kennelly and James Morrow at the time the album was recorded for a live TV show in Odessa, Texas, in 1956. It’s not clear from the liner notes, but the songs were probably recorded before Orbison’s version of “Ooby Dooby” became a country-pop hit that year on Sun Records.

The recording quality is ragged, but it’s a treat to hear him and the group offer their versions of songs associated with such artists as Presley (“Trying to Get to You”), Carl Perkins (“Blue Suede Shoes”), Fats Domino (“All by Myself”) and Marty Robbins (“Singing the Blues”). It would be years before Orbison would develop the melodramatic pop-rock style of “Running Scared,” but he already exhibited a winning edge on these tracks.

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