The singing human headline
DAVID THRUSSEL explores the forgotten songbook of Red River Dave McEnery, whose often fortean subjects – from the disappearance of Amelia Earhart to the Manson Family murders and the Jonestown Massacre – were torn straight from the headlines, recorded within days, and released in mythically tiny private pressings.
What do Adolf Hitler, Marilyn Monroe, Charles Manson, Lee Harvey Oswald, John F Kennedy, Patty Hearst, Neil Armstrong, Amelia Earhart, Ronald Reagan and E.T. have in common? All were immortalised on record by Hillbilly troubadour extraordinaire, Red River Dave McEnery.
Notorious for his 1970 song ‘California Hippie Murders!’ – a ghoulish, harrowing, yodelled retelling of the infamous, Manson-masterminded Tate-La-Bianca slayings – Red River Dave was a genuine cowboy singing star turned tabloid balladeer. While ‘California Hippie Murders!’ might initially seem both chilling and bizarre – its graphic verses punctuated by howling, heartfelt yodels – it makes perfect sense when seen in the context of Red River Dave’s greater body of work, an epic American songbook described here in detail for the very first time.
HILBILLY SONG-MILL
Singing human headline, prodigious topical balladeer, industrial songsmith, inspirational speaker, vigilant town crier, professional patriot, landscape painter, TV pitchman, realtor, roofer, appliance salesman, musical instrument retailer, tireless self-promoter, Freemason, Baptist, preacher-man and rope-trick carny, McEnery embodied the American Dream of boundless energy, frontier individualism, fortean autodidactism and bottomless entrepreneurial spirit, with all its attendant triumphs and unavoidable pitfalls.
Through some alchemic accident, he was destined to channel the tumultuous events of the later 20th century US experience into an astounding series of largely privately-pressed and hand-crafted 45s, sold via mail-order, hawked at modest public appearances, touted over local radio or proffered from the boot of his roaming steer-horned Cadillac.
The Moon landings, the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst, the Vietnam conflict, the assassination of JFK, the murder of young Emmett Till, Korean
War ‘Manchurian Candidate’ brainwashing, patriotic tirades and Cold War dirges – all were grist to the great, yet largely forgotten, Red River Dave hillbilly song-mill that operated from the 1930s right through to the 1980s. Often cut within hours or days of the events they addressed, the songs were pressed in minuscule editions. Some of his sides are now so rare as to be near-mythical, an eccentric country-folk song-cycle on the margins of musical history.
The tall, flamboyant, ‘Buffalo Bill’bearded McEnery cut a dashing figure with his gold-sprayed cowboy boots and cracking lariat. An obscure yet somehow legendary figure, Red River Dave was the kind of storied travelling troubadour who deserves a weighty volume to fully chronicle his countless exploits and adventures.
David Largus McEnery was born on 15 December 1914 and raised as a cowboy yodeller and lasso twirler “within a rifle shot of the Alamo” in San Antonio. He was forced to leave home and Depressionhit Texas at the age of 16 as his family struggled with poverty, and spent the next five years hobo-rambling on freight trains from New York to California, searching for work and singing for nickels in restaurants. Eventually, he was hired as a singing radio cowboy in Petersburg, Virginia. The year was 1935, and in nearby Hopewell tragedy struck.
A school bus drove through an open drawbridge and crashed into the river below. Moved by the scores of drowned children, McEnery picked up his pen.
“I called it ‘The Hopewell Bus Tragedy,’” he said. “We
Dave was a cowboy singing star turned tabloid balladeer
got bushels-full of mail. I just said to myself, ‘I have to write more of these things.’”
Never allergic to publicity, in 1936 McEnery boarded a Goodyear Blimp and sang live on CBS radio station WQAM while hovering over Miami.
A year later, Dave and his band were in New York State, trying to raise money to get to a radio date in Chicago by playing churches and nightclubs along the way. Aviatrix Amelia Earhart had recently vanished into the Pacific Ocean void, and one night around the campfire McEnery sat on a rock and picked out a new song as his stew cooked. The sublime ‘Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight’ was the result, and when he debuted the song in Buffalo it brought the house down.
“The nightclub said, ‘we’re not going to pay you anything but if you want to go ahead and be on the show, any money that is thrown out on the floor, you can keep,’” he remembered.
“She’d been in the news and was still hot on everybody’s mind. So I just began to sing. ‘Air ship out o’er the ocean, just a speck against the sky…’ I tore the house down. The money and the dollars. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. I said, ‘I’ve really got something. I can live off this song.’ I really felt I had a real piece of Americana written there.”
THE BEST YEARS
By 1938, ‘Red River Dave’ (so named for his propensity for singing ‘Red River Valley’ when in high school) was a genuine singing cowboy star. Then resident in South Ozone Park, Queens, he was beamed coast-tocoast on radio WOR from New York and was soon recording prolifically for Decca, Continental, Musicraft and many other labels.
As Dave told it, he was also the first ever hillbilly to sing live on television and, indeed, the first ever paid television performer, broadcasting ‘Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight’ with his band from the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Eventually, the song would sell in the millions and became a timeless folk/country standard performed by Kinky Friedman, Joan Baez and countless others. “I still get royalties on that one,” he noted years later. At this point, WWII intervened and McEnery signed up for two years’ service as an infantryman before returning stateside and resuming his singing career.
Dotted amongst his busy post-war discography of cowboy and Western fare were also some notable topical ballads and emotive journalistic odes, like ‘Hitler Lives’ (recorded to great affect by Rosalie Allen in 1947), a remarkable song that highlighted rumours of the Nazi leader’s reputed survival in Argentina after the war, as detailed in recently released FBI memos, counterpointed against the plight of neglected WWII veterans.
“Back then, a lot of guys sang songs about whatever was happening in the world,” Dave recalled. “Kidnappings, murders, disasters, famous people dying – it was all grist.”
For a couple of years, McEnery moved in and out of Hollywood and featured in horse-opera ‘talkies’ like Swing in the Saddle (1944), Hidden Valley Days (1948) and Echo Ranch (1948) – the video-jukeboxes of their day – strumming his guitar and dazzling the gals with a high lonesome tune.
Once, in 1946, at San Antonio radio station WOAI, he took a bet that allowed him to display his prodigious songwriting skills. He sat handcuffed to a piano for 12
hours (“not goin’ to the bathroom or nothin’”) and composed 52 songs (“Every tune was different, too”) with lyrics inspired by news magazines or topics suggested by the crowd. “Indeed, I did, yes I did, I surely did, yup!” he recalled with pride.
“Those were my best years,” he remarked concerning the 1940s and 50s. His songs were often recorded by big Country music stars like Ernest Tubb, Eddy Arnold, Tex Ritter, Jimmie Davis, and Flatt and Scruggs (Elvis even did a couple of takes on ‘A Hundred Years from Now’ in 1970) as well as a host of lesser-known artists. McEnery remained a New York radio fixture until 1952, when he moved back to San Antonio and headed up a popular TV show for seven years. “The hurting started when filmed TV came along and live TV died. For 14 years, I was just forgotten.”
SINGING COWBOY REALTOR
Dave moved into property, operating as the president of Red River Dave Real Estate in San Antonio, with sidelines in mailorder musical instrument sales, numerous further topical 45rpm releases (sometimes billing him as the ‘Singing Cowboy Realtor’) and an unsuccessful tilt at public office in 1968 as a Democratic Party candidate for County Chairman, in which he invited “people of all races, creeds and occupations to take part”. In June 1974 tragedy struck: Dave’s wife of almost 35 years, Alberta, died horribly in a domestic fire. He “arrived home as the fire was being extinguished, but was unable to identify the body.” Devastated, he moved to Nashville to try his luck but found “thousands of songwriters who were sleeping in cars.”
But the still flamboyant-looking Dave was a natural showman and inveterate entrepreneur. He soon opened a ‘Cowboy Church’ at the Country Music Hall of Fame Motor Inn where he would perform rope tricks while preaching to wayward musicians. He was reputedly the “first and perhaps only person ever to deliver a sermon entirely in CB jargon.”
“What I was doing had real flair. I made the front page of The Tennessean. It was a fine thing fundamentally, but I ran afoul of my second wife [Velma Lee]. So, I went to Texas, got a divorce and headed to California.”
All the while Red River Dave continued to write and perform, working at Knott’s Berry Farm, swinging his lariat and singing about the Falklands War, Korean Flight 007, the Ayatollah Khomeini, E.T. and other hot topics, until his death on 15 January 2002 at the age of 87.
As a valiant sunset troubadour in the epic tradition of saga or event songs, Red River Dave knew no equal; his output was prodigious, articulate, witty, artful and heartfelt. A patriot and a humanist, Dave’s work sometimes invited controversy: a live rendition on WOAI of his heartbreaking Civil Rights lament ‘The Ballad of Emmett Till’ generated both anger and praise in equal measure.
Much of his unique songbook has lain dormant or neglected for decades. The 45rpm sides seen here were sometimes pressed in tiny runs of just 100 or 200, and often recorded mere hours or days after a tragedy or news story. ‘Answer to the Death of a President!’ was, for example, pressed on 23 November 1963 – the day after President Kennedy’s assassination (see FT333:42-46 for the musical history of the JFK assassination). Sides like ‘Games of Death – Olympics 1972’, ‘The Fate of Lt. Calley’, ‘The Ballad of Three Mile Island’, ‘Atlanta’s Black Children’, ‘The Watergate Blues’ and a song about the Jonestown massacre are even more mythical; some might only ever have been live radio broadcasts or sold so few copies as to have completely vanished.
McEnery’s most outlandish recording, ‘California Hippie Murders!’, dealt with the gruesome slaying of film director Roman Polanski’s then-pregnant wife Sharon Tate and members of her entourage by followers of mystic/jailbird/Beach Boy consort Charles Manson. The song was written and pressed during the height of the Manson Family trial and sold in sadly unremarkable numbers from the boot of Red River Dave’s Cadillac in Nashville. Today, three original copies of this astounding 45 are known to exist, one of them reputedly changing hands in private dealer circles for over $5,000.
Effortless and yet often sublime, the topical songs of Red River Dave are precious musical portals into other eras and forgotten landscapes. Every day, McEnery would rise, read the morning paper and write a song: “It must be part of my karma, I write them so well and so easy. Indeed, I do, yes, I do, yup! I think it`s important to balladise the news. I’m kind of like Johnny Appleseed. Yes, I am, indeed I am.”
“I’m the last of the red-white-and-blue singing cowboys and that’s all… but I never missed a meal.”
✒ DAVID THRUSSEL is a musician/ composer/writer/record label mogul/ filmmaker/closet-hillbilly who lives deep in the Australian outback and is best avoided.