Roy Clark was barely into his teens when he played a two-week tour with the late, fabled Hank Williams.
“The audience would start hollering for different songs-`Hey, sing “Mansion on the Hill,” ‘ `Hey, sing “Cold Cold Heart,” ‘ and he’d say, `Wait a minute now,’ ” Clark remembers. “He didn’t smile. He’d say, `If y’all shut up, I’ll sing ’em all. But if you keep hollering, I ain’t going to sing a damn thing.’ And he didn’t, like, laugh or anything. And everybody shut up, and he sang.
“Through the years I’ve thought about that millions of times. If I was to walk out in front of an audience and say, `Y’all shut up,’ they’d run me out of town on a rake.”
Clark, the singer-comedian who recently mined his past to produce an autobiography (“My Life in Spite of Myself!” with Marc Eliot, Simon & Schuster), has always exhibited the antithesis of the Williams style of stage persona, but in his own way he has been as rebellious. In a business long overrun-offstage and on-by business people, Clark has been the quintessential artist, a genial free spirit surrounded by legions of number-crunchers.
From his inglorious firing nearly four decades ago by clock-watching country impresario (now sausage mogul) Jimmy Dean through such later high points as his 25-year co-hosting of the syndicated TV series “Hee Haw” with radio magnate Buck Owens, Clark has been quietly, amicably at odds with the businessman’s approach to creativity.
As such, he does appear to have succeeded, as the title of his self-told story proclaims, in spite of himself.
“Business only happened in my life by necessity,” he says now. “I don’t want to go onstage trying to entertain people (while) thinking about some business deal that’s pending. That’s just not what an entertainer is.”
What an entertainer is-a great one-is Roy Clark. And country music didn’t have anyone like him before he came along.
“They hadn’t seen anybody like me,” he recalls of his first real tour as an adult. “All they’d seen was guitar players who played guitar, singers who sang, and comedians who did comedy. They hadn’t seen anybody who came out there and did all this `garbaaazzh’ that I was doing.”
Clark’s “garbaaazzh” (as anybody who has knowledge of country music previous to, say, Dwight Yoakam knows), consists of wisecracking conviviality, dramatic instrumentalism and disarmingly effective ballad-singing. Although Clark has some big-selling records in his past, he always has been a performer best experienced live.
His prodigious gifts enabled him to become the country toast of Las Vegas, a TV phenomenon and frequent guest-host of Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show,” as well as a pioneer popularizer of Branson, Mo.-and the scourge of acts who had to follow him onto stages, country or otherwise.
In his book he recalls that in 1966, as a rising name fresh from a guest shot on Jimmy Dean’s weekly ABC-TV show, he opened for pop icon Mel Torme at a college reunion in Ada, Okla. Everybody had seen him on TV the night before, and he characteristically attributes the favorable response to the TV exposure.
“I . . . could do no wrong,” he writes. “I walked out and tripped and they gave me a standing ovation. I mean I destroyed them. The parting of the Red Sea couldn’t have followed my act. They were still screaming and throwing babies in the air for 15 minutes after I left the stage.”
Torme then went on, to a markedly underwhelmed reaction. Later that evening, Clark’s agent let him out of a big Lincoln at the bus station in a drizzling rain and set out to drive Torme back to Oklahoma City. After a 25-minute silence, the agent later reported, Torme turned to him and said:
“Don’t you ever, ever, ever book me with that hillbilly s.o.b. again!”
Clark was born in Meherrin, Va., down in the southwestern part of the state from which country music’s archetypal rural Carter Family hailed. In 1942, when Clark was 8, his father got a wartime factory job and moved the family to Washington, D.C.
The musical melting pot of the nation’s capital-which was filled with service personnel from a half-dozen surrounding military bases along with hordes of country girls who’d come to the District in search of government jobs-became his diverse training ground. He estimates there were 200 nightclubs in the area, most of them offering entertainment by two- or three-piece musical groups, and these provided him with a diverse apprenticeship.
He spent a lot of his early years “bouncing,” as he puts it, and he was never to become the kind of person preoccupied with direction. The first such performer he ran into on the District music scene was Jimmy Dean, who was basically a peer during the first years of their acquaintance. Then, during a “weak time” in Clark’s own fledgling career, Dean hired him as an employee, and they started playing a killer schedule of six-day-a-week morning radio shows, five-day-a-week afternoon TV shows, and seven-night-a-week club gigs.
“Jimmy’s was the first organization I ever became part of,” Clark remembers. “He knew where he was going, why he was going and the different roads to get there. He was gonna be successful. While the rest of us would go out and maybe have a drink and play somewhere after the night’s job, he went straight home and was up early the next morning on the phone.”
Dean ran his operation with the synchronicity of a drill sergeant, and Clark, who was exploring other musical realms-such as blues and jazz-in the early morning hours, got into a habit of arriving at the morning radio rehearsals 10 or 15 minutes late. After tolerating “a lot of made-up stories” in explanation of the tardiness, Dean finally fired him.
“We never had a cross word,” Clark recalls. “A couple of days later I ran into him somewhere, and he put his arm around my shoulder and said, `Friend, you’re gonna be a big star in this business someday, but right now I can’t afford you.’ I was holding him back from what he wanted to do.”
For a while Clark continued bouncing, but by 1960 it had dawned on him that he was playing a lot of shows with men twice his age who had no security and no future. He decided he didn’t want to end up like that, so when star Wanda Jackson offered him a chance to front her show for a two-week stint in Las Vegas, he pulled up his Washington stakes and took the chance.
Jackson’s manager, Jim Halsey, was another driven businessman, and he saw money in Clark. After the Vegas debut, he booked Clark into a two-week engagement in Kansas City, then on a tour of that area of the Midwest. From there, the bookings never stopped. Halsey wound up booking him for 348 days that first year, and Clark and his wife, Barbara, gave up their Washington-area apartment to live on the road.
By the mid-1960s he was a regular TV guest as well as a road warrior, his screen profile so high that when “Hee Haw” was launched in the late ’60s, he was selected to be a co-host with Owens, a performer whose business ambitions were reminiscent of Jimmy Dean’s.
Clark was the first nationally famous performer to build his own theater in Branson, Mo., a town now teeming with them. He was the first performer who wasn’t a pure singer to win the Country Music Association’s pinnacle Entertainer of the Year award and was probably the first country performer ever to command substantial five-figure-per-night fees in Las Vegas and elsewhere.
To say his talents have made him rich is no doubt an understatement, but he seems still to be a man less concerned with money than with humor and music and the experiences and emotions that make both ring true. One of the not-so-pleasant reminiscences in the book is that of his marriage as a 17-year-old to a 22-year-old woman with a child. He had a son by that brief union, and he says he recently talked to the son about the book’s portrayal of the mother, who died a few years ago. The son gave the account his blessing, Clark says.
The least enjoyable aspect of writing a book, Clark adds, is trying not to “hurt or abuse anybody” while still telling the truth.
“You’ve got to tell the truth or there’s no reason for a book,” he says. “You can’t just sit down and make up stuff. If somebody calls you on it later and says, `I did a little research and this ain’t true at all,’ you can’t just go, `Hmm, is it too late to call it a novel?’ “
