I got out at noon on that Saturday, and by three o’clock was pitching a crucial game for the Toccoa city team. They let me out to pitch that game. That’s when I learned there’s no such thing as law—coming or going. They gave me too much time in the first place, then they tore up the courts when they wanted me out.
At Lawson Motors, the Oldsmobile dealership where I had my job, I washed and greased cars and cleaned up around the car lot, like my daddy had done at filling stations in Augusta. I was sad about not being able to go back home and be around him. Years later, when I was living in one of the best neighborhoods in Augusta, I met Solicitor Haines’s son and told him, “Your father sent me away and didn’t want me to come back, but I want you to know I don’t hold it against him.” I think the boy was embarrassed.
As part of my parole I had to have a stable place to live with someone who would act as my sponsor. Finding a place wasn’t easy. I saw Bobby Byrd around town—the population was only six or seven thousand—and he invited me to come home with him. I was able to stay with his family only temporarily, though, because there were already seven people in the household, but it gave me a chance to keep looking. Pretty soon I found a room at Miss Lena Wilson’s, but it was available for only a couple of months. Almost as soon as I moved in I had to start looking all over again. After I had asked around a lot, some peole who had seen me pitch were talking about me in a barbershop run by a couple named Dora and Nathaniel Davis. Mrs. Davis overheard them.
“All he needs is a place to live?” she said.
“That’s all,” they told her.
“Well, he can stay with us,” she said.
She had never met me or even seen me, and she was willing to do that. Before long I was calling her Mama and trying to give her some of the money I brought home from Lawson’s. I laid the bills out side by side on the supper table. When I was finished, she pushed all the money back to me and told me to buy clothes with it.
I attended Trinity CME Church with the Davises and joined the choir there. I also started getting together with Bobby’s sister, Sarah, to sing gospel. She sang in the Mount Zion Baptist Church choir. We liked each other right off, our voices blended well, and before long we were making guest appearances at churches in the area. Sarah also belonged to the Community Choir, a gospel group run by a man named Detroit Steeple and made up of the best singers from the black churches and the community at large. The choir sang all around town at churches and schools and sometimes appeared on a local radio station, WLET. Sarah talked me into auditioning for the choir. Mr. Steeple liked my singing well enough to take me on and to feature me sometimes when we were on the radio. Sometimes quartets and other small ensembles were spun off the choir to go out to various churches or to be spotlighted during a performance by the entire group. Sarah and I, along with two sisters, Yvonne and Johnnie May Wheeler, developed our own group that way, and Mama helped us and encouraged us all she could. We called ourselves the Ever Ready Gospel Singers.
In a lot of ways it was a good time in my life. I was out of prison, I had a job and a good home, and, like I’d promised, I was singing for the Lord. And I was falling for Sarah.
Meanwhile, Bobby still had his little musical group going. Besides him, it consisted of Sylvester Keels, Doyle Oglesby, Fred Pulliam, Baby Roy Scott, and Nash Knox—all friends from Whitman Street High School in Toccoa. They didn’t have any instruments, just voices, and originally they started out as a gospel group. About the time I got to town they had switched to rhythm and blues, doing mellow stuff like the Moonglows and the Dells, and they had started calling themselves the Avons. They couldn’t really get it going, though, because Troy Collins, a promising singer they were bringing along, had been killed in an automobile accident when the Whitman glee club made a trip to Atlanta.
I’d see Bobby when I went by his house to be with Sarah, and he started trying to talk me into joining the group. I was happy with the gospel thing I had going, and baseball, church, and my job at Lawson Motors took up the rest of my time, so I told him no. Working at Lawson’s was rough, though. There was a man working there who treated me like dirt. He was nasty to many people of my color and he was always cursing me out, calling me all kinds of names and ordering me to redo work even though I’d done a perfectly good job. In Atlanta, long after I had become well known, he apologized to me publicly for the way he had treated me. I said, “You don’t have to do all that, I’m not mad at you. Because you’re ignorant. You should be mad at yourself.”
Back in those Toccoa days, though, he wasn’t doing any apologizing. One day he told me to wash a car all over again that I’d just finished washing and waxing. It was a 1950 Ford, one of the first really modern-looking cars, and I promised myself that I would take it for a drive before I did all that work over. Might as well get it dusty and make the job worthwhile. Nobody saw me take it out of the lot. Once I was clean away I really opened it up. A fine automobile, driving good. I drove it all the way to the prison so all the fellas could see me driving this new car. I drove real slow by the fence and honked at ’em and waved. They couldn’t believe it. After I was done showing off, I had to drive fast to get back because I’d been gone a long time, but then I took this particularly sharp curve and couldn’t handle it—I didn’t get much driving practice in prison—and wound up in a ditch. I had managed to keep from turning over, and when I got myself together and realized that me and the car were both in one piece, man, was I relieved. But when I backed out of the ditch and headed back toward the lot, one of the wheels started wobbling real bad. Somehow I had warped it.
Meanwhile, the fella who owned the car had come back to the lot to pick it up and discovered it was gone. Here I come driving the car real slow, sort of limping in, and I see the owner and a crowd of white fellas waiting for me. As soon as I jumped out of the car, the owner—a great big fella—came at me with a tire iron. All those other white men were going to stand around and let him do it. This grown man wouldn’t jump on me with his bare hands; he was going to beat me with a piece of iron. That told me right away that the man was a coward. He cornered me against the car and raised his arm to hit me, but I was too quick for him. I grabbed the tire iron with my left hand and held him off with my right without really hitting him. I knew that with the other white men watching I was a dead man if I actually hit the fella. Instead, I just kept a grip on that tire iron—I was still small, but boxing and football had given me a lot of upper-body strength—and I just refused to let him beat me. We wrestled that way for a long time until he started feeling silly, I guess. He let go of the tire iron and stomped away.
Naturally, I lost my job. I didn’t mind leaving Lawson, but it put me in a jam with my parole officer. As soon as he found out, he threatened to have me sent back to prison. When I told Sarah how worried I was about it, she got her mother to stand up for me. The Byrd family was well known and well respected in town, and their support really helped. Mr. Matthews spoke up for me, too, and when I got a job working at a plastics factory, the parole officer decided to let it drop.
I was willing to do any kind of job, to get a foothold in anything. I even thought boxing might be a way to go. Some fellas in Toccoa had formed a boxing club and arranged matches. I told them I wanted to fight, so they set up some bouts. I wound up having three fights—two wins and a draw. The biggest mistake I made was fighting another left-hander, which I had never done before. We kept knocking each other down. That was the draw. I figured that was enough boxing.
After that, I sang even harder for the Lord. The Ever Ready Gospel Singers were doing well, singing in all the churches, and I thought it was time we made a record. I kept my eyes open when the Community Choir was in WLET’s studio, and I thought we could make a tape there without too much trouble. We got permission from the owner of the station and taped “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” the song Ethel Waters made famous. We took the tape and had it pressed into an acetate, the kind that is cut from the inside of the record to the outside to keep you from competing with record companies.
Now that we had a record like this, we had to get somebody to play it. I vaguely knew that air play might attract the attention of a record company or at least help our little group get real gigs; beyond that, I didn’t really have any sort of strategy figured out. But I did know which radio station I wanted to air it—WLAC in Nashville.
WLAC was all we ever listened to. In the daytime they played country music, which we didn’t listen to, but late at night Gene Nobles, John “R” Richbourg, and Hoss Allen played blues, rhythm and blues, and black gospel. You could hear the station all over the eastern half of the United States. Gene Nobles hosted “Randy’s Record Mart,” and John R hosted “Ernie’s Record Mart,” both offering mail-order packages of records. The funny thing was that a lot of people, including black people, thought those disc jockeys were black, talking all this smooth jive, and then you’d go in the station and find out they were white.
Somehow word had gotten around that the WLAC disc jockeys were willing to listen to new things, including dubs and acetates, and if they liked something, they would play it. They helped a lot of artists get started that way. So I got someone to drive me to Nashville with the record. We found the WLAC studio, but instead of going in we waited at the back door until the jocks came out. We first asked Gene Nobles to play it, but he turned us down. We waited until 3 A.M. when John R came out. He listened to it but said he couldn’t play it either. At least he took more interest in me than anybody else did, which is why he will always be number 1 in my book when it comes to disc jockeys. Later on, he helped me a whole lot.
I went back to Toccoa not really discouraged but sort of at a dead end. The Community Choir became less active, and the Ever Ready Gospel Singers had about saturated the local market. Like always, I listened to all the new sounds and wanted to try all kinds of music. With the gospel record and the trip to Nashville, I had made my first move toward trying to be a professional musician. The idea wasn’t full blown yet, but the next time Bobby Byrd asked me to join his group I said yes.