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The Ballad Of Candy Barr (MP3)
George McCoy The Balladeers - The Ballad Of Candy Barr (2:30)
Born Juanita Dale Slusher in 1935 in Edna, Texas, Candy Barr skyrocketed to fame in the 1950s on the Dallas burlesque scene. She suffered through a miserable childhood (her mom died when she was 9 and her dad remarried a cruel hag), left home after the ninth grade and made a beeline for the bright lights of Dallas. Shortly after arriving, Juanita was strong-armed into appearing in Smart Aleck (aka Smart Alec) an early stag film about a motel room romp with a sleazy traveling salesman that did gang-buster business on the bachelor party circuit of the day.
In Dallas, she worked in various bars as a cocktail waitress and a cigarette girl before landing a job as an stripper at Abe Weinstein's Colony Club, where she and Abe cooked up the Candy Barr handle. Candy adopted a tantalizing cowgirl costume consisting of a western hat, cowboy boots, and a pair of six-shooters holstered on her hips and large crowds flocked to the nightspot to witness her riveting bump and grind routine. The Colony Club was situated just two doors down from Jack Ruby's Carousel Club. Candy and Jack struck up a friendship and there are those who believe that she was privy to some inside details about Ruby and his decision to kill Lee Harvey Oswald in November 1963. Incidentally, Abe Weinstein is the "old Uncle Abe" mentioned in the lyrics of The Ballad Of Candy Barr.
In January 1956, she made headlines and inspired the disc above when she shot her ex-husband (number 2 of 4) after he showed up at her apartment in the middle of the night, drunk and belligerent, and threatened to beat her. She was arrested for the shooting, but never indicted. In 1957, Candy again ran afoul of the law when she was busted for possession of a small quantity of marijuana, less than an ounce. Since we're talking about a drug offense involving a notorious stripper in Texas in the 1950s, this was serious business: she was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years in prison, though she was released after only three. In 1968, she was issued a pardon by Texas governor John Connally.
If you'd care to read a lengthy profile of Candy Barr, I recommend this one, written by Gary Cartwright and published by Texas Monthly in December, 1976. Also well worth your time is Josh Alan Friedman's article on Jack Ruby from Lowest Common Denominator, the former house organ of WFMU. Candy passed away in 2005.
After the jump: one more Candy Barr photo. It probably does not fall into the NSFW category, but since there are pasties involved.....
Bright Lights And Go Go Girls
I've been obsessively hoarding "country go go" records for several years now.Of course, given the fact that there were very few such records ever made, the hoarding opportunities are really pretty limited to begin with. Still, there's something inherently fascinating about the absurdly improbable collision of two worlds which could scarcely be more different.
As with country twist records, country go-go records are propelled by the engagingly offbeat intersection of the world of country music with the youth pop culture explosion of the early 1960s and 70s. For further explorations on the topic of country music's assessment of a rapidly changing world, check out the country songs about hippies here
For years, I thought Johnny was saying "Hippy In A Blender", not "blunder". Either way, it is a true "Hippy Hater" anthem. Issued on the aptly-named Cornball. (Be sure to check out Johnny Buckett's smutty "Let Me Play With Your Poodle" for further inspiration).
From California's Central Valley comes this Hippy Hater duet. Ole Vic seems to have confused hippies with hobos on this one, but at least both parties involved are hairy and dirty. The flipside "My Little Hippie" offers more questions than answers. Issued on the C-C label.
Sounds like they really knew how to handle the longhairs in Tulsa. Ed Faucett is now reportedly running a vegan snack shack in Venice, California. This one was originally issued on the Oil City Label.
Note how Mr. Bennett includes academics and "intellectual nuts" with the hippies and derides them for their grant money. Jimmy Bennett now chairs the Heritage Foundation. This one came out on the Battlewood label from swingin' Franklin, Tennessee.
Issued on a CD-R from 2006, Alvie proves that the hippie menace is still with us. When asked if there where still hippies out in Northern Arizona, Alvie emailed back a simple "Yes" as a response.
and here.
Keep America Beautiful, Get A Haircut! Part Two
More of those are on the way, I promise.Just in case you dozed off and you missed it, Rex and Debbie recently threw down the gauntlet and posted a series of scathing country 45's that were notable for their extremely rancorous rantings about hippies. OK, they did not actually throw down a gauntlet, but I figured as long as they were spreading good old-fashioned hippie hatred, it would be ungracious of me if I neglected to help out the cause.
In any case, the post was an eye-opening reminder not only of how fast things were changing in American society in the late 1960's, but also of the fact that it's difficult, if not impossible, to imagine two groups more radically opposed to each other than socially conservative small town southerners and the dope smoking flower children of the Now Generation.
It's probably worth noting that quite a few country artists cut hippie-themed 45's that took an approach that was more bemused than confrontational. Maybe I'll do a follow-up post with some of those. Today's effort, though, is all about condescension and contempt.
Guy Drake was not one to mince words. Check it out as he goes straight for the jugular:
"Now I asked this one big hippie what that sign was on his back
He said "Peace" but the darn thing looked to me like just like some American chicken track."
Drake is probably best known for recording Welfare Cadillac, a #6 hit in 1970. He can be seen here, via youtube, doing Welfare Cadillac live on the Porter Wagoner Show.
Smokey sings about returning to the states after an Army hitch overseas and finding himself more than a little disenchanted with what he finds back home. Sample lyric:
"They can carry their signs go marching in the streets, all that's good and well - But to my way of thinking if they don't like our country, there's a place for them called hell."
Smokey's actually a pretty nice guy, though. Despite all the hostility in the air he generously offers the hippies and yippies free baths and haircuts.
More hippie-hatin' fun after the jump:
Chesley Carroll's version is the original and was mentioned here a few months back in an exploration of country records using fuzztone guitar, which can be heard blaring as the record comes to a close.
Rusty Adams' version, released on the Plantation label, maintains a bit more of the melody from Merle Haggard's Okie From Muskogee, which was obviously the inspiration for Hippie From Mississippi. .
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Bowman was a parodist / satirist who first hit the charts in 1964 with Chit Atkins Made Me A Star. He appeared in the movies Las Vegas Hillbillys (1966) and Hillbillys In A Haunted House (1967) and was the original host of the syndicated American Country Countdown radio program. He currently resides in Tarzana, California and has just released a new album, according to his Myspace page, which is exceedingly difficult to read due to font colors and background graphics. Seriously, if you spend more than a minute or two there you may well go blind.
Somehow I felt compelled to include this Don Jarrells record because, believe it or not, I bought it back in 1997 or 1998 on my one and only visit to the fabled WFMU Record Fair.
Don's son is a militant protester with a job on campus where his work duties apparently do not interfere with his hobby of "tearing down the USA."
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This one was a late arrival on the hippie hater scene, having been released in 1981. Joe Richie recorded this song in San Jose, California and it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that his close proximity to hippie haven San Francisco finally pushed him over the edge. Richie gets bonus points for mentioning Ernest Tubb as part of his hippie removal plan, though his Tinkerbell references make him unlikely to win any awards for sensitivity.
It's worth noting that the production team for this tune included Gradie O'Neal, famed for his 1958 recording The Turkeyneck Stretch, released on San Jose's Bella record label. Gradie's still in San Jose and since 1967, he and his wife Jeannine have run Tiki Studios.
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Bright Lights And Go Go Girls (MP3s)
just got back from reading and posting theCandy article in Texas Monthly you point to. Great stuff! Glad I have you as a refinement on my MP3 Google CSE engine.
via Posted by Listener Greg G
