Robbie Fulks

law & order, peace & quiet, love & happiness, country & western, black & white, reading & writing, Sam & Diane, rock & rye

[Robbie Fulks @RobbieFulks]

While at a Holiday Inn in rural WI last weekend I was passing by a table at the lobby breakfast gathering and heard a woman mutter darkly to her companion, "It's the Lake Geneva antifa." Make of it what you will

[Robbie Fulks @RobbieFulks]

In beats out

[Robbie Fulks @RobbieFulks]

@Old97s @rhettmiller Happy birthday maestro

[Robbie Fulks @RobbieFulks]

@ATRightMovies Results
Obscure Object of Desire
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
Backstreet
It’s A Gift
Evil Dead

[Robbie Fulks @RobbieFulks]

middle-aged gong-mallet-wielding personality, so brightened my days. The way she reveled in ripping off her shirt was great too!

[Robbie Fulks @RobbieFulks]

ranks of those, like Jeff Tweedy and Mavis and others, who flew from afar to sing old country songs on our record. It would've been a frickin' blast to spend a day with her, and I'm sure I'd have a story better than that one to share about this lady whose young voice and ...

[Robbie Fulks @RobbieFulks]

Barris has left the building, is of a lot more interest to the buyer than the seller. I had my budget and my little romantic vision, and why should she be interested in either.

All that said, I regret that I fumbled the negotiation, and that Jaye P. Morgan did not join the ...

[Robbie Fulks @RobbieFulks]

cross the room, for any reason whatsoever. Sure. The older I get the less I feel like crossing the room, so I get it. More pointedly, the difference between the value that someone like Jaye P. has, at any age, and her hard-ticket market value one generation after Chuck...

[Robbie Fulks @RobbieFulks]

lawyer's unforgettable sentence that stuck. "Jaye P. Morgan," he announced, "would not cross the room for one thousand dollars." Hilarious.

For me this was an early lesson in my business dealings with the older set of music people I revered. A lot of them don't really want to...

[Robbie Fulks @RobbieFulks]

travel to LA alone with an engineer and record her vocal as an overdub; it was contrary to the thrust of the record but we did that with Johnny Bush and it went OK.

But the highly ...decisive click on the line informed me that there would be no revised offer! It was the ...

[Robbie Fulks @RobbieFulks]

yours truly. Needless to say her expenses would be covered. But what would we pay her to sing? Taking into account her travel time and stress, too.

I decided to offer a thousand bucks. I know, I know. I was prepared to go higher, probably not past $2000. And I was prepared to...

[Robbie Fulks @RobbieFulks]

altogether, I'm not sure which she was) to travel to Nashville, hang out with people like George Jones (maybe?), Mavis Staples, Redd Volkaert, and Lloyd Green, sing for an hour, and otherwise receive adulation and a Woody Woodpecker battery of questions about Hank Penny from...

[Robbie Fulks @RobbieFulks]

I don't remember how, but I had his number in hand, and started to think about my pitch. If you remember the tribute record you probably remember she's not on it and so you know how this ends.

What do you offer someone who's old and out of the business (more or less or...

[Robbie Fulks @RobbieFulks]

active in music at that point, and she lived out in California, far from the center of the business there in Nashville where we were tracking the record. She wasn't in the SAG listings and I didn't seem to know anyone that knew her.

Finally we located, not her, but her lawyer...

[Robbie Fulks @RobbieFulks]

other singers might be a) old/authentic, b) associated reasonably with Paycheck, b) cool, c) totally unexpected. Jaye P. satisfied b) because of course Johnny was a Gong Show co-panelist who sat next to her.

But locating her wasn't so easy. Unlike George and Buck, she wasn't...

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on-key, and, uh, sexual. The silly anecdote now:

Jaye P. was one of the characters I most wanted for the Johnny Paycheck tribute record I worked on 20-some years back. Right after I committed Buck Owens and George Jones to the project I sat down and thought hard about what...

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great records such as "Fan It" and "The Wide Open Spaces." If you first came into parasocial contact with Ms. Morgan 20 years later on "The Gong Show" and guessed based on that what her 1950s California country vocal persona was like, you'd be on the money: sassy, audacious...

[Robbie Fulks @RobbieFulks]

Another day, another goddess. I couldn't help putting a brief and silly anecdote up on the fabulous Jaye P. Morgan. For us who dote on postwar C&W she will always be Mary Morgan, for it was under that name that she sang in Hank Penny's band and duetted with him on ...

[Robbie Fulks @RobbieFulks]

you could too. And either way, you had worth.

[Robbie Fulks @RobbieFulks]

Dolly.

Here's a weird thing I've been thinking about this morning. There are 3 people, all strangers to me, that I had brief, unexpected, somewhat intense talks about Dolly with in the last 6 years.

1. In 2020, Donna and I were walking around Falmouth Bay, Jamaica. We heard...

[Robbie Fulks @RobbieFulks]

thing, too -- that these three were older Black women not America-born. The customs lady I dunno but the other two were also poor, striving entrepreneurs. Gonna go out on a limb. There were 50 reasons to admire and attach to Dolly. One was that she strove and rose, so maybe...