THE FUGITIVE AND THE HILLBILLY

SOMEDAY YOU’LL CALL MY NAME, AND I WON’T ANSWER...Someday you’ll look for me, I won’t be there...................Stan Hitchcock, Epic Records, 1968

With the Morning show, on Channel 5 every day, and my own show, showing on Saturday Afternoon around the country, my visibility factor had gone up considerable, but the fact hadn’t sunk in to me yet. One weekend that I had time off, I learned the hard way how my fame had spread, and what a hard core of fans I was making.

In the mid sixties, I became friends with some of the men in blue that protected the good citizens of Nashville, The Nashville Metropolitan Police Department. When you think about it, the police and the pickers have a lot in common, they both run on a high degree of adrenaline, they deal with the public, they lead a dangerous lifestyle and they love staying up all night. I was fascinated with the Police and loved to ride with them at night, and I had made close friends with a few of them.

One Saturday Afternoon we were having a backyard barbecue at a friends house, and one of my Nashville Police Department friends, a Homicide Detective named Dave, asked me to ride with him to the store to pick up some more supplies for the party. He was off duty and driving his personal car as we came up Dickerson Road heading for the market. We stopped at a stop light and another car pulled up alongside us. Dave glanced over at the car full of tough looking men, and exclaimed, "Damn, that’s a murder suspect that I have been looking for!" At the same time the hood that was driving the car looked over, and recognized Dave. He immediately took off, ran the stoplight and the race was on. We were screaming down Dickerson Road at 100 miles an hour, lights flashing, horn honking and my heart just pounding. I was transformed into Dick Tracy.....I mean this was it....I was living it. The fugitives slowed down just enough to make a turn, on two wheels, up a side street, and into a residential area. They were going flat out.....when they ran out of road. The street was coming to a dead end, and at the very center of that dead end was the biggest oak tree you ever saw. Well, they slammed into that tree, smoke and oil and car parts flying everywhere, with us sliding to a stop right behind them. The doors flew open and hoods started jumping out to make their escape. Dave reached over and slapped open the glove compartment, reached in and brought out a gun and handed it to me. He then reached behind and pulled out another gun from behind his belt.....shouting to me to get the one on my side that was getting away......he leaped out of the car and started running after the ones on his side while I did the same thing on the passenger side. You cannot imagine the mind frame that I was in.......I was totally engrossed in capturing these hoods, no matter what it took.. My hood was running up an alley and I took off in hot pursuit. At the end of the alley, someone had constructed a chain link fence and my hood hit it going full speed, and started climbing it like a squirrel up a tree.....Just as he got to the top and was fixing to throw his leg over and drop to the other side, I reached the fence, took the standard police stance with legs spread, both hands on the gun, fire in my eye and a sense of command in my voice........."STOP RIGHT THERE OR I WILL BLOW YOUR HEAD OFF!" Well, the hood was hanging on the top of the chain link fence, and as he swiveled his head around to look at me, an expression of total amazement came over his evil, crooked-life face, and he uttered the words that I can still hear ringing in my memory today, "Oh God, don’t shoot......I watch you on television!" Yes friends and neighbors, I was holding a gun on a fan. He might not look like much, hanging up there on the fence, and yeah he was kinda ugly with that scar running across his face, but by golly, he was my fan, and I was proud of him. Every bit of adrenaline just ran out of me, and I felt like a deflated balloon standing there with a gun in my hand pointing it at this good ole boy, who was probably just misunderstood, and had a rotten childhood, and didn’t really mean to kill that guy. Well, I was saved from myself, and my changed feelings toward my prisoner, because someone had called the cops, and a patrol car screeched to a halt just behind me, a patrolman jumped out, relieved me of my gun and took control of the felon. Well, I was standing there wanting to say something nice to the guy, like thanks for watching, be kind to your neighbors and you’ll have better neighbors, or maybe, may the Good Lord Take A Likin’ To You, but, as it turned out, he got the last word as they were leading him away in handcuffs, and he turned to me and said, "Sumbitch, I sure won’t watch you no more."

Least I slip into egomania, having such dedicated fans, an incident about two weeks later brought me back to reality. I was working a tour with Ernest Tubb up in Ohio, and it was after the show and Ernest and the Texas Troubadours were all lined up on the left side of the stage, signing autographs, on pictures and albums. Ernest had a line of about two hundred people waiting for that all important autograph, and I was sitting there on the right side of the stage with five people lined up to meet me. Well, I thought, as I signed the first four autographs, it could be worse...at least I had these five fans. As I reached out to take what I thought was my picture to autograph from the last lady in line, she handed me a picture of Ernest Tubb, and said, "Just sign this To Linda, From Ernest Tubb, his line is too long." Yeah buddy, that will grow an ego for you.

This particular tour, with Ernest and the Troubadours, was to be quite a treat, and one I will never forget. I had been invited, by Don Mills, the drummer in the group and a friend of mine, to ride along on Tubb's bus for the duration of the tour. Now, everyone knew that Tubb’s tour bus was the home of an endless Poker Game for the entire time they were out on tour, and the guys in the band loved to get fresh meat, new players like me that they could strip a few dollars off of, and help to pass endless miles of highway that was the life of the traveling picker. Well, they had the perfect victim for their poker cleaning in me, cause as I told y’all earlier, I can’t gamble worth a darn.

One night, after a show in Findlay, Ohio, we were motoring down the interstate hitting about 78 miles per hour, and had a big game going, with Ernest being the big winner. We were sitting around the table, with Ernest on my left and the bulkhead and the window of the bus on my right, and there was about $300 of money in the pot laying in the center of the table , with Ernest raising and looking like he was going to take it all again. It came around to me and I folded, and it passed to Ernest to make his bet.....well, I noticed it was getting kinda warm in the bus, and losing my little dab of money was making it even warmer, so I reached over and sorta slid that big window open about six inches........and I learned a very important lesson......you don’t open the windows on those big tour buses when they are barreling down the highway at 78 MPH because the window immediately becomes a vacuum cleaner and sucks whatever is loose right out the window......in this case, the $300 in the pot that Ernest had just won. It was a moment frozen in time in my memory.,......the tens and twentys sailing right by my nose and out the window like butterflies heading for sweet nectar on a warm spring morning. After the last bill had zipped by, and I sat, paralyzed by the horror of what had occurred, Ernest, without even looking up from his cards, said, in that quiet, deep voice, " Son, you want to close that window?"

Well, that is a good example of the character of Ernest Tubb, he had a kindness and patience that is legendary, and a love for this Country Music business that knew no bounds. He was the happiest when he was on tour, in touch with his fans, living with his Band and traveling to do 300 shows a year......year after year.

Yeah, buddy being a picking gypsy is a beautiful thing.

Stan

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