From the Archives: Rockabilly Comes Home
It's Christmas Day 1956 outside the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre in New York City. The faint strains of rock 'n' roll disc jockey Alan Freed's Christmas Jubilee Extravaganza dribble out from inside the theater.
The bill is stacked with the up-and-coming rock 'n' roll stars - George Hamilton IV, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, the Cadillacs and the Moonglows.
Teenage girls clasp autograph albums and talk about boys. Teenage boys comb their ducktails and talk about girls.
And then he steps out onto the sidewalk.
The girls go crazy. The boys stand there, awestruck before shaking his hand. He signs a few things before he's whisked away.
Mac Curtis, a skinny 17-year-old from Weatherford, can barely take it all in.
It wasn't that long ago, he was just another junior at Weatherford High School, listening to Big Joe Turner records and driving out on a clear night to pick up radio stations playing songs by Elvis Presley and Little Richard.
Now, here he was, a bona-fide up-and-comer, with four singles, including the rockabilly hit "If I Had Me a Woman" on the legendary King Records to his credit, and the world ahead of him.
"Beyond question, that was the high point of my career," says Curtis, now 70 years old. "It was a lot of fun."
Fast-forward nearly 53 years from that New York Christmas. It's a cold, rainy Friday night in March 2009 at Spring Creek Musical, and Mac Curtis is standing backstage, looking over his set list. He's still thin and energetic. The band onstage finishes their last song, and then he takes the stage.
Hoots and hollers rise up from the crowd. Just like in New York, fans are still screaming.
The band is a little under-rehearsed, but Curtis tears into the classic songs "If I Had Me a Woman," and "Little Miss Linda" - with the gusto of a much younger man. He still shimmies and shakes a bit, though less than he used to, and he still curls his lip and growls in that classic rockabilly way.
Curtis breaks into "Keep on Rockin’," which says it all:
I grew up singing country and then I found the blues/but when I started rockin'/I found somethin' I can use! I'm gonna keep on rockin'/Ain't nobody gonna stop me now
He's kept true to his word.
He's had hit records in the U.S., and he still regularly performs for fervent audiences in Europe. Beyond that, he's also had more than 50 years as a DJ and programming director, a career that's taken him from Atlanta to Los Angeles to Dallas-Fort Worth.
His dual career – in music and radio – made him a world traveler, but these days, Mac Curtis has returned home to Spring Creek, Weatherford.
"You couldn't take one part of my career out," Curtis says. "It wouldn't be the same. It's all come together."
SINGING IN CHURCH
Mac Curtis was born Wesley Curtis on Jan 16, 1939. His grandparents, Jim and Ida Scott, raised him in Olney, about two hours northwest of Weatherford.
His mother, Dorothy sent him to live with her parents while she worked. The two would remain very close through her life. He never knew his father.
His uncle, Howard Dunn, loved to sing songs made popular by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. Curtis loved his voice.
"He was a fine vocalist, which I always wanted to be," Curtis says. "All of us guys are just stylists."
His biggest musical influence was church. Jim was superintendent of Sunday schools at Padgett Baptist Church, and Mac grew up singing gospel music in Padgett's pews.
Curtis drew his inspiration to perform from the gospel quartets that traveled the country. He was entranced by the showmanship of quartets like the Stamps Quartet, the Oak Ridge Boys and the Blackwood Brothers. He especially loved the Stamps-Ozark Quartet from Wichita Falls. He loved the gospel flourishes of Henry Slaughter's piano and the guitar of lead vocalist Ford Keith.
Even when he wasn't in church, music surrounded Curtis, and radio was the medium that carried it to his young ears. Shows like the Louisiana Hayride from Shreveport, The Big D Jamboree from Dallas and, on a good night, the Grand Ole Opry from Nashville, brought "hillbilly music" to Mac – artists like Hank Snow and Webb Pierce. He still wistfully recalls those days.
"It's too bad there aren't any venues like that for young people to play anymore," Curtis says. "That's what keeps our music alive, is people who hear it and have to get involved." As Mac finishes his sentence, Elvis Presley's "Blue Moon of Kentucky" plays under the racket of the busy Weatherford Starbucks where we've met. The old radio shows might be gone, but the music isn't.
Mac stops in mid-sentence and holds a finger up, pointing toward the speaker. He smiles and says, "I believe that's Elvis Presley."
"TM" AND A $10 GUITAR
As a boy, Mac heard music, but he didn't play music.
Then one night when he was 12, he went to visit a neighboring farmer named TM Mills. Mills accompanied his two daughters on guitar.
"His guitar looked like he'd found it under a tree," Curtis says. "It looked like it had been out in the weather for too many years."
Mills would play Delta blues songs – "East Texas blues," as Mac calls them. Curtis was hooked. He would beg Mills to play those songs over and over, and finally he begged him to teach him how to play. The only problem was he didn't have a guitar.
Curtis saved money from his $2-a-week job as a janitor at the church to buy a $10 guitar at a music store in neighboring Graham. Mills promised he would take him to the store and help him buy it on one condition: Mac had to learn the chords Mills taught him.
The day arrived and TM took Curtis to the music store. The store clerk pulled the guitar off the rack and handed it to Mac. The total cost was $10.50. Mac was 50 cents short. Without blinking an eye, Mills, a poor, hard-working farmer, covered the extra 50 cents.
Curtis pledged to pay TM back, and Mills agreed, but not with money. Curtis had to come back and play with TM.
Curtis learned the chords from a little book of major chords TM gave him. He struggled and stretched and grappled with the guitar, making frightful noises until, one day, while playing "Weary Blues" by Hank Williams, he realized he could play. "It scared me! I just changed a chord in tempo," Curtis says. "I was happy, and I was embarrassed, and I was proud."
He learned "Mexican Joe" by Jim Reeves and "Honeymoon on a Rocket Ship" by Hank Snow.
"I knew every Hank Snow song there was," Curtis says, "and then Hank Thompson and Hank Williams, you know, all the Hanks."
A NEW KIND OF MUSIC
Curtis found a whole new sound in 1954 on East Belknap Street in Fort Worth while visiting an uncle, at a little store called Melody Shop Record Store, run by Lena Mae Ball. The store sold used 78s from jukeboxes in the back of the store for 10 cents.
It was there Curtis heard music like he'd never known before.
What caught his car was, as Mac calls, it, a "grits piano" recording – a style later made famous by people like Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich – by an artist called Piano Red. On one side was "Rockin' with Red," and on the other, a tune called "Red's Boogie."
"It was devastating to me," Curtis remembers. "I wanted to find out all about it."
From there, Curtis dove headfirst into rhythm and blues, blues and jump blues or, as it was called at the time, "race music." All of a sudden, his ears were opened to musicians like Big Joe Turner, the Spiders and the Midnighters.
"The roots of rockabilly lie in 'hillbillies' playing rhythm and blues," says John MacDonald, host of Texas Blues Radio on KNON 89.3 FM and an occasional backup guitar player for Curtis.
The intermingling of many different styles of rural music – blues artists borrowing from country, country artists borrowing from gospel and gospel artists borrowing from rhythm and blues is the basis of the music of early rock 'n' rollers like Elvis Presley, Mac Curtis and Jerry Lee Lewis.
"Musicians don't pay attention to anything but talent and not many other things," MacDonald says. “All and they care is if you can play and if it's good. What color someone is doesn't matter - it's great music!"
To Curtis, race meant nothing.
"There used to be a radio format called 'middle-of-the-road," " Curtis says. "I'm all over the road."
ROCK 'N' ROLL REBEL
Jim and Ida moved to Weatherford in 1954, and Curtis moved with them. He started at Weatherford High School, where he was to meet Jimmy and Kenneth Galbraith, sons of a local plumber. They quickly formed a little band, with Jimmy on lead guitar and Kenneth playing first on piano, then slap bass. Mac sang lead vocals and played acoustic rhythm guitar.
They called themselves "Mac Curtis and the Country Cats," and before long, they were enraging the older folks. At a school assembly, the band tore through two songs before the teenagers started screaming, and even worse, dancing.
"The kids liked it," says Raymond Curtis, the high school principal (and no relation to Mac). "Some of the teachers didn't care for it, though."
It landed Curtis and the band in hot water. The only thing that kept them from suspension was active fighting on their behalf by the student council, who eventually landed them at second gig at the school.
In the meantime, they rehearsed and rehearsed. They learned "That's All Right, Mama" a song written by Arthur Crudup and recorded by Marty Robbins. They were unaware that a young man named Elvis had cut the same record.
"It was the version everyone heard in this part of the world," Curtis says, "because Sam Phillips [owner of Presley's label, the legendary Sun Records] didn't have distribution set up in this part of the country."
One day, while Curtis and the Galbraiths were practicing, one of Mac's friends came bursting in the doors of the Galbreaiths' father's shop.
"He said, 'Hey, you got a record!'" Curtis says.
They had no record that they knew of, so they went to the Dairy Queen to hear it.
It sounded just like Mac and the Galbraiths. Some of the phrasings and guitar licks were different, but to Curtis and the boys, Elvis Presley sounded just like them.
By 1955, Elvis Presley, not even four years older than Mac, blew the doors off the music business with his legendary sessions at Sun Records. The world would never be the same.
"It had to happen because all the record labels the major labels controlled everything you bought," Curtis says. "Not unlike today.”
All of the sudden, rockabilly started to gain national prominence.
"It caught teenagers," Curtis says. "Which I was."
Mac never played with Elvis, but he met him when he played the North Side Coliseum in Fort Worth in 1956.
As big as Elvis was, for teenagers in Weatherford, Mac Curtis was equally big.
"To us," Nadeen Murphree, a former classmate who helps run Spring Creek Musical, says, "there was Mac and then there was Elvis."
The rise of rock 'n' roll in the mid-'50s correlated with the rise of teen culture in the U.S. All of a sudden, young people had their own style of dress, their own music and their own hobbies.
Murphree remembers eating hamburgers, sitting around the Weatherford Square, watching other teenagers drag race their cars.
"It was a good time, it was a bad time." Curtis says wryly. "We didn't know any better."
Though Mac's grandparents had moved into town to retire (and brought Mac with them), times were still hard, and they struggled to provide for themselves and Mac. His friends remember the family as hard-working and poor but very happy and friendly.
Regardless of his financial situation, Curtis was a burgeoning rock 'n' roller, and his classmates knew him as a personable guy and a good friend. Classmate Nancy Jordan says he was well liked and respected at Weatherford High.
"He was very friendly," Jordan says. "Everybody knew him and liked him – it's hard to believe he was only here for two years."
Mac loved to socialize, but his single focus was music. He didn't involve himself in many extracurricular activities other than rehearsing with the band.
The big payoff came when Mac and the boys played at Dick Danner Ford Motors on West Seventh Street in Fort Worth. A DJ named "Big" Jim Randolph from KNOK AM, a local station that played rhythm and blues, booked the boys with a rhythm. and blues band called Tom Patrick and the Shamrocks. The guys. played a few songs live on-air and spent the rest of the day playing for folks on the car lot.
The phones started ringing off the book. Randolph promised, and succeeded at, getting an audition for Curtis and the band with at record label.
Curtis and the Galbraiths didn't expect much from Randolph's promise. They went back to school, which is where Curtis got the call that took them to New York.
Actually, Raymond Curtis, the principal, got the call and didn't know what to do with it.
"A man called for Mac Curtis," Curtis says. "I didn't know Wesley was using his stage name, so I told him I had a brother named Mac and gave him his phone number."
It wasn't the right Mac, and the man called back and said he was looking for Mac Curtis, the student at Weatherford High School who played music. Raymond realized he meant Wesley Curtis and called him out of class to answer the phone.
Ralph Bass, a famous producer who would go on to work Sam Cooke and James Brown and be inducted into the Rock 'N' Roll Hall of Fame in 1991, wanted to see the band in Dallas at 4 p.m. for an audition. The band hurried over. Bass loved them and asked them to return in a few weeks to record at Jim Beck Studios.
Mac Curtis made his first recordings for King, one called "If I Had Me a Woman" with a B-side, "Just So You Call Me," on April 1, 1956, at Jim Beck Studios.
Those recordings, and the ones that followed - songs like "Grandaddy's Rockin', "You Ain't Treatin' Me Right" and "Little Miss Linda" went straight to the ears of Alan Freed, the self-proclaimed "father of rock 'n' roll."
Curtis went on Freed's radio program show twice in New York to promote the upcoming Christmas show, which featured Mac. His career was taking off in a way he hadn't imagined.
And then the military called.
To avoid being drafted, Mac joined the Army in 1957. He would remain in uniform until 1960, broadcasting on American Forces Radio and playing in a GI country band, most of his service time spent in Seoul, South Korea.
"King Records didn't know how long I was going to be in the military, and so we mutually parted ways," Curtis says. "When I got out, and I saw how rockabilly had lost popularity. I was glad I didn't have a contract."
He took a variety of radio jobs across the U.S. He still played music regularly, mostly country. He wouldn't find his second wind as an artist until 1971, when in Los Angeles he met an energetic, rockabilly-loving Italian immigrant named "Rockin'" Ronny Weiser.
ROLLIN' ROCK
Ronny Weiser came to America because he loved rock 'n' roll. He moved to Los Angeles and started a magazine called "Rollin' Rock," which he deemed the leader of the "under-underground."
Weiser has discovered Mac's King singles in the '60s, and when he heard that familiar voice on the radio on KLAC in Los Angeles in 1971, he called him and arranged an interview.
From there, a partnership was born. Weiser started releasing Mac Curtis recordings in Europe in 1973, where rockabilly was experiencing a revival.
Popularity continued to build, and in 1977, the year punk swept the music world, Mac Curtis toured Europe for the first time, along with Ray Campi and his Rockabilly Rebels.
Starved for authentic American rock 'n' roll, the crowds went crazy for Mac and his classic sound. When the "Rollin' Rock Tour of Europe" barreled through, Curtis and Campi were treated like kings, one of the reasons Curtis still regularly tours there.
"Mac has a unique style that's very captivating," says Weiser, who currently lives in Las Vegas. "He's both plaintive and energetic. It just takes you over."
Weiser isn't sure why rockabilly still has such strong legs in Europe.
"Maybe it's because the grass is greener in somebody else's back- yard," Weiser says. "People respond- ed to the energy and the sound of the music."
As Mac experienced a career revival, rockabilly's leading light, Elvis Presley, died in Memphis. At the end of his life he was a sad caricature of the young, lean dynamo he had once been. Where he once twirled his hips, he was now overweight, drug dependent and barely lucid.
"It made me so mad," Curtis says of Presley's death. "He had all that talent, and he just wasted it, while the rest of us were out bustin' our butts. It took me a long time to get over it."
THE SURVIVOR
Mac continued to tour Europe and work in radio throughout the '80s and '90s, including at KLIF in the Metroplex, where he worked largely off-air. By the end of the '00s, DFW life was beginning to wear Mac out. In 2008, he came home to Weatherford.
"Your home never leaves you," he says.
Mac continues to write and record when he has time. He's planning dates in Spain for the end of the year. Even at 70, he still loves traveling overseas. He talks about the sights, the food and most of all the fans, whom he describes as "terrific."
In 2006, he released the DVD Live at the Cruise Inn with backing band Phil Friendly & the Loners.
Mac Curtis is a true rockabilly survivor. Many of his heroes and contemporaries - Elvis, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and Carl Perkins have passed away. Curtis, on the other hand, says he feels fortunate to have had a career that has outlasted many of his peers.
"It's fun," Curtis says. "There's no "retire' in rockabilly."
