The Grand Tour by Rich Kienzle Page B

J. Hal Smith, who also managed Ray Price, worked out of Nashville.
    George started recording in Nashville in 1957, using the Bradley Film and Recording Studio on Sixteenth Avenue South, an old house purchased by Owen Bradley, soon to become one of Nashville’s preeminent producers, and his guitarist brother Harold. They built a studio in the basement. Hoping to attract industrial filmmakers, they attached a Quonset hut, a prefab, half-cylindricalcorrugated metal building widely used by the military during World War II. When a producer filmed a series of color movies there featuring Opry artists, the Bradleys built wooden sets inside the hut resembling the interior of a barn. Those sets, left behind after filming ended, inadvertently rendered the studio an acoustic marvel perfect for recording. It became known to all as Studio B, or just the Quonset Hut, one of Nashville’s most iconic studios. George would do the bulk of his Nashville recordings there, but did his second Nashville session at RCA Victor’s newly opened studio on March 18, 1957, resulting in the hit “Too Much Water,” credited to George and Sonny James. Among the Nashville musicians on the date: T. Tommy Cutrer, Hank Garland, fiddler Shorty Lavender, and pedal steel guitarist Lloyd Green. “Water” became the first of many Nashville hit singles Green would play on over the next three decades.
    GEORGE’S TV VISIBILITY STEPPED UP WITH OCCASIONAL APPEARANCES ON Town Hall Party , the weekly Compton, California, stage show hosted by Tex Ritter that was filmed and syndicated nationally as Ranch Party . He made a February 1957 appearance on Ozark Jubilee , the ABC variety show broadcast from Springfield, Missouri, hosted by former Opry star Red Foley. The road was a constant as he performed on so-called package shows with a specific group of stars at stops around the country. He generally got along well with his costars, yet the amounts of booze ingested by all could change that. Sober, he had Clara’s noblest attributes. A binge summoned forth the obnoxious, abusive spirit of George Washington Jones. If he realized what he’d done after sobering up, remorse set in and apologies flowed—until the next whiskey was poured. He and fellow Opry star Faron Young proved to benatural combatants. Both were short and slight; the liquor could turn them aggressive, hostile, and foulmouthed. Each could easily provoke the other. They took a crack at the same groupie during one tour. At another stop, they got into a verbal battle as a local radio personality interviewed Faron live on the air, with the local mayor and his wife standing by. Backstage at another show, Faron got into it with the equally feisty Little Jimmy Dickens. George jumped to Dickens’s defense, and in seconds, George and Faron were battling as the audience heard pounding and screaming. Afterward, both appeared onstage in what was left of their fancy, expensive Nudie suits. Most of the time, Faron came out on top in these confrontations.
    Still writing songs, George created a few with up-and-comer Roger Miller, one of Pappy’s Starday hit cloners, now recording for Mercury. Miller, who was about to establish his compositional genius with hits for Ray Price, Ernest Tubb, and Jim Reeves, cowrote two of George’s more cheerful, effervescent recordings from this period: “Nothing Can Stop My Loving You” and “Tall, Tall Trees.” Neither were hits, but they reflected his continued evolution into a vocalist able to evoke emotions across the spectrum. He rolled around the country in the fall of 1957 with Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis, still appearing at country concerts despite his success as a rocker. Later that year, George joined Rusty and Doug Kershaw, Lone Star honky-tonk fountainhead Floyd Tillman, and Canadian singer Wilf Carter for a swing through New Jersey.
    Among his close friends within the Opry community was Stonewall Jackson, the