June 4, 2020 —– Chart #39
Hello Musical Friends,
Its Thursday and I just got off a Zoom call with our BYO musician membership. Boy was it nice to see some of your faces. You inspired me to knock out another chart of the day tonight. For this one I am going back to high school and a song I have been playing ever since. I first knew this song as a hit from Jerry Jeff Walker, but the original writer and artist for this one was Ray Wylie Hubbard.
Hubbard was born in the town of Soper, Oklahoma. His family moved to Oak Cliff in southwest Dallas, Texas, in 1954. He attended W. H. Adamson High School with Michael Martin Murphey. Hubbard graduated in 1965 and enrolled in the University of North Texas as an English major. He spent the summers in Red River, New Mexico, playing folk music in a trio known as Three Faces West.
During his time in New Mexico, Hubbard wrote today’s chart of the day “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother”, first made famous by Jerry Jeff Walker’s 1973 recording, and covered by a wide variety of other artists since. Bolstered by the success of the song, he was signed by Warner Bros. Records. Hubbard then assembled a band of friends and locals and, in 1976, released Ray Wylie Hubbard and the Cowboy Twinkies. Unbeknownst to Hubbard, producer Michael Brovsky had decided to “Nashville-ize” the sound by adding overdub mixes and female backup singers to the recordings. The result was “a botched sound” that Hubbard disapproved of vehemently, but the album was released despite his attempts to block it.
In the early seventies, Ray Wylie Hubbard lived in Dallas but spent his summers in Red River, New Mexico, playing music with other long-haired expats, like Texans B. W. Stevenson and Bob Livingston. There were only two places to buy beer in town, a hippie bar and a redneck bar, and one afternoon, when it was Hubbard’s turn to make a beer run, he decided to go to the redneck joint, the D-Bar-D, because it was closer.
He regretted it immediately. “I walked in and there were thirty or forty people drinking, including one old woman,” he recalls. “The jukebox stopped and they all turned and looked at me.” He nervously asked the bartender for a case, and while he waited, he found himself getting baited by the woman and her son. “How can you call yourself an American with hair like that?” she asked. Her son added, “You want me to beat him up?” Hubbard got his beer and fled, but not before eyeing a pickup truck in the parking lot with a gun rack and a redneck bumper sticker. Once he was safely back with his pals, he picked up his guitar, strummed a G, and made up a song on the spot, about a redneck mother whose son was “thirty-four and drinking in a honky-tonk, just kicking hippies’ asses and raising hell.”
Hubbard eventually returned to Dallas and forgot about the song until a year later, when he got a call from Livingston, who was playing bass with Jerry Jeff Walker. Livingston had performed the song for Walker, who wanted to record it. But it needed another couple of verses. So, standing in his parents’ bedroom, phone to his ear, Hubbard once again made up some lines on the spot, about the pickup he’d seen in the parking lot, the gun rack, and a “Goat ropers need love too” sticker.
Walker included the song on his album ¡Viva Terlingua!, jump-starting Hubbard’s career. “If I hadn’t gone into the D-Bar-D,” says Hubbard, “that song never would have existed. It’s so strange that it all happened, still kind of a mystery.”
And live with lots of funny commentary in the middle: https://youtu.be/erikrks4KqY
Keep Rockin’,
Stan