The Session
I suspect that most of you reading this will have some knowledge or memory about the song this story is about. You may know one or two lines of the chorus or maybe even a verse or two. You might know some of the story behind it and its composer, Merle Travis, or the impact that it had on the lives of so many millions of people. You might’ve read somewhere that it was certified as one of the biggest selling single records of all time, and called one of the most important songs ever recorded. A two-minute and thirty-four second chapter of American history, reminding us of the enduring strength of common people and the power of those who would keep them down.
The song was called, ‘Sixteen Tons’. I suspect that some of what follows is part of the story you might not know.
By the time the summer of 1955 was in full swing, Rock Around The Clock had become the first rock and roll single to reach number one on the U.S. charts. In April, Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was approved by the FDA and Ray Kroc’s first McDonald’s opened in Des Plaines, Illinois. In May, Chuck Berry cut Maybelline for Chess Records and in June, Pete Seeger was subpoenaed to appear for the August hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee. In July, Disneyland opened its gates in Anaheim, and my old man closed his biggest gig at The Thunderbird in Vegas since he first took the stage there in the winter of forty-nine; a split bill with Kay Starr that sold out every show for an entire week. He and his team would board the Union Pacific Streamliner back to L.A. the next morning, get the last few of the NBC morning shows for the season in the can, then back on the Super Chief for a four week sold-out tour of the Midwest.
By all accounts (if his press agent, Mickey Freeman, had anything to with it) he was killing it. Variety was calling him ‘The hottest up-and-comer in show business’. His last two singles for Capitol broke the Top 10 Pop and Country.  His turns as Cousin Ernie on I Love Lucy exposed him to a massive prime time TV audience of millions of people, and his own morning variety show on NBC was a hit with every homebody from Sacramento to Schenectady.
But at some point since that first gig in Vegas in ‘49 (though he was never able to get a fix on exactly when), he’d stopped being an up-and-comer, and had become a property. He was the toast of the town, he was on a fast track up Hollywood Boulevard with the top down. But for Ernest Jennings Ford, youngest son of Clarence and Maude Ford, late of Bristol, Tennessee, the ride had been dizzying, too fast; he’d been white-knuckling the hand-grip all the way and the pedal wasn’t even close to the metal yet.
In the summer of 1955, nine out of ten up-and-comers in Hollywood would’ve given their eye teeth to have been in Ernie Ford’s shoes. But what you want to remember is that Ernie Ford really didn’t care. He never looked at himself as an up-and-comer and he never intended to be a star in the first place…it was never his dream. (He told me more times than I can count, “I fell into this business, son…”). No, Ernie Ford’s dream was that of any ordinary man: regular work, doing the work he loved. But in the short span of seven years, he had become precisely what he never intended to become; he’d gone from an eighty-five dollar a week deejay in Pasadena living the post-war American Dream to one of the biggest new stars in show business. From a man with simple dreams of a normal life to a man whose life was largely no longer his own.
Look, don’t get me wrong. He knew a public life meant some loss of privacy; it came with the territory and he understood that. But it had become oppressive to him, an albatross around his neck. He wasn’t built to have every moment of every day orchestrated, photographed, scripted and publicized. It wasn’t in his DNA. Making matters worse, just as he was beginning to recoil away from the spotlight, he was watching his wife and children gravitate towards it, like moths, morphing into a sitcom family in front of his eyes, reveling in a life that was anything but the life he wanted for them. It was the summer of 1955, decades before Leaving Hollywood would become the fashionable thing to do, and Ernie Ford was talking openly of getting out. Of seeking a life apart. A life that would take him off this fast-track, take Betty Ford off the cocktail party circuit, and ground his sons in values they would learn in the real world.
Look, don’t get me wrong. He loved what he did, but he hated what came with it. Hated the falseness of fame and what he believed living with it was doing to his family. In eighty-four months, he’d achieved and made more than many people would in their entire lives; people he knew worked far harder for far less in work he believed mattered far more. And now, two months before a three hour recording session that would change his life forever, Ernie Ford was questioning the reality of his own success, the fame that had come with it, and the price he was paying for both.
He literally owed his soul to the company store.
Ernest Ford was an uncomplicated man, a creature of habit, and he made it a habit for most of his life to stay as far away from politics as he could—if he could help it. He harbored an innate distrust of politicians, politely declined their persistent entreaties, and kept his own counsel. The war was over, he was working, his family had a roof over their heads and the bills were being paid. He came from a long line of Tennessee Democrats, but didn’t really have any problems with Eisenhower; had a grudging respect for him, actually, military man and all. Beyond that, he dutifully ignored the issues of the day that didn’t concern him; taking pains to avoid both the message and the messengers—religiously. But on a July morning on the soundstage of the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood, in rehearsals for the last week of the season, the message dropped right in his lap.
Historians like to tell us that by the summer of fifty-five, the power of McCarthyism was waning, but they’d be closer to the nut, maybe, to say that the power of Joseph McCarthy, himself, was diminishing.  His censure by the senate, coupled with his prime-time humiliation and exposure at the hands of Edward R. Murrow, painted a very different profile than that of the heroic hunter of American Communists he’d portrayed himself as. He’d become a laughing stock in the halls of The Capitol, weakened the legitimacy of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and had been reduced to all but a shadow of his former self.
But the toxic ideology that bore his name did its best work in the shadows, and it was neither waning nor diminishing. On the contrary, it was merely adapting, taking another form, like a mutating virus. Having put the careers of dozens of members of the film, television, and theater worlds on life support, it metastasized, and attached itself to what McCarthy, Hoover, and their allies called “the wellspring of Marxism in America”.
Folk music.
Stay with me, here.
Five years or better before the revival that would become the soundtrack for the counter-culture movement of the sixties, the folk singers of the late forties and fifties were writing the protest song template. Woody Guthrie, The Weavers, Pete Seeger, Odetta, The Almanac Singers and others were giving a voice to common folks that had none in the post-war boom that had seen so many of the poor and blue-collared taken advantage of. Working conditions, fair, livable wages and unionization were the themes, and their songs became clarion calls for the rights of the working class. Themes that made their singers unlikely celebrities and the heralds of the burgeoning labor movement; the primary plank in the platform of one of the more popular independent political wings in the country: the American Communist Party. Which put them all squarely in the sights of the FBI, the HUAC, and on the West Coast, a growing subculture of hard right Western entertainers and disc jockeys who fancied themselves Hoover’s Posse; Singin’ Cowboys standing tall in the saddle of the airwaves, defending America against the Red Menace, under the tin star of Christian Fundamentalism, turning their weekly radio shows and live performances into anti-communist tent-meetings, with a few bars of fiddles, guitars and yodeling thrown in to keep the folks in the bunkhouse happy, and to counter the growing din of voices coming from that ‘wellspring of Marxism’.
Unknown to Ernest Ford, counted among those voices was a young singer and guitar player who, like himself, had also been discovered by Cliffie Stone, the man standing across from him on the NBC set that July morning in the El Capitan Theater. An artist who’d become one of Dad’s closest friends; whose talent had taken the burgeoning Western scene by storm, and made him one of the most popular guitar players, singers and songwriters in Hollywood. A fellow Capitol Records act, he’d been scheduled as the last guest on the last show of the season, and was up for rehearsal, but was nowhere to be found.
His name was Merle Travis. 
He’d cancelled, according to Stone, but not for the reasons Dad presumed, regardless of how well he knew, or thought he knew Travis. And in truth, he knew him pretty damned well. They’d both been regulars on Stone’s groundbreaking variety show, Hometown Jamboree, both were managed and published by Stone and both were signed to Capitol by Lee Gillette. They’d played hundreds of dates together back in the day, and Travis (along with Jimmy Bryant), had been the go-to guitar player on virtually all of Dad’s earliest singles. Add to that the friendship between Mom, Cliffie’s wife, Dorothy, and Travis’s wife, Judy Hayden, and the bond between the two was only strengthened. They were like a family. But, like somebody somewhere said at some time or another, ‘family is always the last to know’. And in this instance, on this afternoon in the summer of fifty-five, on the darkened soundstage of the El Capitan, flanked by his publicist, Mickey Freeman and Stone, Ernest Ford was, apparently, the last to know that his friend, his partner, and his brother, Merle Robert Travis, late out of Rosewood, Kentucky, had canceled because he’d been flagged as a suspected Communist sympathizer.
Merle Travis.

Word was he’d come up on Hoover’s radar eight years earlier, in the summer of ‘47, when Capitol released his first album, called simply, ‘Folk Songs of the Hills’. A 78 rpm four-disc package of eight songs performed by Travis accompanying himself on guitar, the album predated boxed sets by more than half a century, and would go one to be regarded as one of the most important and influential recordings in history, preserved by the Library of Congress in the National Recording Registry, and establishing Merle Travis as an icon of American music.
But in the summer of 1947, nobody in the HUAC or the FBI was thinking about icons or the brilliance of Travis’s fingerpicking style. They were paying closer attention to the last song on the fourth disc; one of five songs out of the album’s eight that were Travis originals: That’s All, Nine Pound Hammer, Dark as a Dungeon, Over By Number Nine, and the last of the five, the song that brought Travis up in Hoover’s sights. A song some people in his trenches thought sounded dangerously close to sedition. A song that grew out of Travis’s memories of his brother’s years working in the coal mines of Kentucky, years long before the unions and miners’ rights. Years of backbreaking, lungscarring work deep in the ground and in the pitch. A song that painted a grim picture of life in the mining camp in 20th Century America; a picture of a life just shy of indentured servitude. A song that earned country and folk stations around the Midwest and south unannounced visits from dour HUAC conscripts politely discouraging DJ’s from playing the song. That it was union propaganda. That it was Anti-American. Or, as J. Edgar, himself was quoted as calling it: ‘Blatantly Marxist’.
It was called ‘Sixteen Tons’.
Travis had cancelled, Stone said, because they had to send network codes a list of every guest and a list of every song for every show a week in advance. A list that was also reviewed by HUAC adjuncts who scanned for material the government deemed subversive. One of the songs on the list of three Travis was going to perform was ‘Sixteen Tons’. It was flagged, Stone said, and when the network told him to tell Travis to replace it with another song, he bailed.
Dad knew the song, of course; he’d heard Travis play it countless times, onstage and backstage; in front of the mic on the air, and on the Magnavox in our den. He knew the pattern of Travis’s picking, and the breakdown at the end of the chorus. He knew the kind of man Travis was singing about; and knew that ordinary people everywhere knew him. He was them, and they were him; he was the classic everyman; he was anyone—man or woman—who struggled every day working for a living that never seemed to pay enough to make a living. Common people—people made out of muscle and blood and skin and bone.
That’s who and what this song was about; and in Ernie Ford’s heart and mind that morning on that darkened soundstage, if that added up to sedition, then so be it. This was the land of the free.

While he rarely, if ever, spoke about this moment—this chapter—in his life and career, the full weight and impact of the news and the reason behind it rocked Dad to his core. Like him, Travis was a veteran; they’d both served their country—honorably—and wouldn’t hesitate to put the uniform on again, if asked. That anyone—anyone, particularly anyone in the government—would question what color Merle Travis bled was beyond Ernest Ford’s understanding, but not his anger threshold. He was, in a word, furious; furious he’d allowed himself to be so blind to what was happening, furious that such a thing could be happening in his lifetime, and furious that it had landed on his own doorstep.
Against Stone’s advice, he put a hold on rehearsals and left the soundstage and Hollywood Boulevard for Travis’s little place just outside Woodland Hills, hoping for some kind of resolution, hoping for his partner to reconsider, hoping for maybe a drink, and hoping for the two of them to saddle up, ride into the sunset, and back to the soundstage together.
But Travis was adamant. It was the principle of the thing; these people were calling him a subversive, a communist sympathizer, over a song none of them understood—and no amount of heart-to-heart, money, or bourbon was going to change his mind. Dad urged him not to back down, to stand on his principles. That it was one of the best songs he’d ever written, and folks needed to hear it. But Travis told him he didn’t have any choice. But hell, Ford, he told Dad as he was leaving, you like the damned song so much, you sing it.
Back at the theatre, the decision was made to fill Travis’s slot with regulars; Molly Bee and Joanne Drew would partner with Dick Farell for a trio thing they’d been rehearsing, and Dad would cover with one of the numbers off the last EP. The songs filled the hole, the team in the booth was thumbs-up, the cast and crew were good, and Stone was happy. They had a new script, they had a day off, and an early call on Friday for the last show of the season.
And then, Ernie Ford did something that would flip that script and begin a series of events that would change his life forever.
Cornering his bandleader, Jack Fascinato, in his dressing room, Dad placed a copy of Travis’s ‘Folk Songs of the Hills’ set in Jack’s hand, and gave him the nickel version of what he wanted to do. I wanted Jack to work his magic; I asked him to take a finger-picking song with a quick tempo for a tenor, slow it down a little, and arrange it for a baritone.
None of which was a problem for Jack Fascinato; the man was a musical genius. The problem came up when Dad told him he needed it by the morning, and wanted to rehearse it with the band—at the house—the next day.
And then he told him why. And then, knowing he couldn’t keep Stone in the dark, he told him.
‘I told him he was making a mistake’, Stone told me in ’91. ‘It wasn’t about Travis anymore…Ford was putting himself in jeopardy.’
But Ernie Ford was determined. It was most definitely about Travis, he told Stone; his friend was being wronged—the government be damned—and he was going to do something about it, the outcome be damned.
But none of them, neither Stone, nor Jack, nor Dad, or Travis could have ever imagined the outcome. Within hours after the last notes of the song faded away from the soundstage of the El Capitan that Friday morning and on the screens of Philcos and RCA consoles in dens and family rooms across the country, the telephone lines at NBC began melting. Hundreds of calls were coming in by the hour. Within days, a separate office was commandeered to handle the overflow of fan mail. Before he’d left town for a short tour of the Midwest, the Los Angeles HUAC was threatening to force NBC to cancel the morning show and to censure my old man.
But it was too late; the barn door was open and the horse was gone.
When he came off the road at the end of August, three things were waiting for him at the office on Gower: a Western Union satchel with some four-hundred telegrams and a shipping container from the NBC mail department with more than 20,000 fan letters; virtually every piece of mail and every wire about the song. That it had touched a nerve was an understatement.
The third item was a single letter; this from Capitol’s legal department, cordially reminding him that his contract was up for renewal, but he was behind on his recording schedule, and needed to cut two sides by the end of September, or he’d be in breach.
Welcome home from your record label.
Exhausted, he went into a huddle two days later with Stone, Fascinato, and Lee Gillette to pick the sides. Stone arrived at the meeting with a shoebox full of fan letters and telegrams.
‘Ford, Jack and I thought it was a no-brainer,’ Stone told me. ‘We had a hit and we hadn’t even recorded it yet. It was like a shot in the arm—for Travis and Ford. We felt like the label couldn’t say no.’
But that was exactly what Lee Gillette came back with. He’d earmarked an old tune from Bob Merrill and Terry Shand called, ‘You Don’t Have To Be a Baby To Cry’, that Ernest Tubb had cut some three years earlier; a country thing that Jack took and completely revamped, changing the tempo, dropping the register, and hipping it up with a horn line and a Big Band feel that just killed it. They’d done it on the morning show a few months earlier, and on a handful of club dates, and the crowds loved it. Gillette was sold on making it the A-side.
Yes, he’d seen the morning show turn on the Travis number, and yes, he dug it and thought Jack did a great arrangement, and yes, he thought it might do well on the charts. But the decision was out of his hands. The Government blowback from the show had reached the label, making the decision for them. It wouldn’t matter if there were cratesfull of letters; it was too hot, Gillette told them, too controversial. ‘Too communistic’ is how he put it. It’d be the worst kind of mistake the label could make, he said, and it’d be the end of Ernie Ford’s recording career.
But the threat backfired, taking Gillette, Fascinato and Stone by surprise, when Dad stood, and put his contract from the label’s legal department on Gillette’s desk. It’ll be the end of my career with this company if I don’t record it, he said. He looked to Stone. They can’t hold me in breach if I don’t renew, right? He asked him. But Stone, like everyone else in the room was too slack-jawed to answer. Ernest Ford was drawing the line. He’d made Capitol Records more money than they could ever possibly count and he knew it. He was one of their biggest acts, and he was walking, willing to give it all up for a song. For a principle. For a friend.
When he left Gillette’s office on Melrose, he didn’t expect to return. In fact, he meant not to. He’d done what he could but now he was just…done. Done with the pressure, the stress, the fame, the politics, all of it. He put the top down and turned the radio up, and he could feel the weight of it all sliding off of him. By the time he took the on-ramp to 101, he was making plans to go to the lake with Mom. Maybe even take a look at that little ranch he’d heard was for sale.
But when he pulled in the drive, Mom was waiting in the kitchen with the phone in her hand.
Gillette and the label had blinked.
It was a compromise, of course; the label agreed to the cut, but it’d go on the B-side, and Gillette knew, hell everybody knew, that the hard truth of the record business in 1955 was that putting anything on the B-side was a death sentence. Songs were forgotten in weeks, if not earlier, depending on the PR push and the popularity of the A-side.
‘None of that mattered to your Dad,’ Stone told me late in 1990. ‘He stood up for what he believed was the right thing to do. He didn’t give a flip about the politics, or the threats, or what was on the A or B side or any of the rest of it. He stood up for the principle, for the song and for Travis. End of story.’
But it was far from the end of the story.
Gillette booked Studio A on Melrose for 10 am on Saturday morning, September 17th. The session was all but effortless; with no time to book rehearsals and hire Capitol’s A-team of session players, Jack brought in the band from the morning show. Six cats that knew both numbers backwards and forwards. Everything’d be cut live, no overdubs, no background vocals. Dad, Jack, and a six-piece band. They ran through a few bars of each for levels, and in three short hours they were wrapped, casing axes, lighting smokes and listening to playbacks.
On Monday, the mastered tracks went to press, and on October 1st,  Capitol shipped the first Promo copies to radio flagships nationwide, confident that Ernie Ford had his next hit with ‘You Don’t Have To Be a Baby To Cry’. And this is where the lines of the history blur.
No one could ever say for certain, but the prevailing myth still stands today that it was a DJ in Kansas City, manning his on-air morning shift at KMBC when the mail arrived on an already cramped corner of his control board, and...
He grabs the first package on the stack and opens it. Inside is a .45 record. The single. He opens a promo one-sheet inside, his eyes landing on what he needs to know: the A side. He flips the record to ‘Baby’, just as a commercial ends, and leans into his mic.
‘And now the newest record from Capitol recording artist, Tennessee Ernie Ford. It’s a swinger called, ‘You Don’t Have to Be a Baby to Cry’. Hit or miss? The lines are open!’
He kills his mic, but as he does the record slips from his hand. He saves it from falling, but doesn’t know he’s inadvertently flipped it. He quickly drops it on the turntable, and lowers the needle down. In seconds, the first bars of ‘Sixteen Tons’ fill the room.
Hard-core record collectors, music historians and pop culture curators tend to skip over the fact that the success of ‘Sixteen Tons’ was a fluke; an accident. They focus instead on the numbers when the subject of the song arises; that less than two weeks after its release, nearly half a million copies are sold. In twenty-four days, more than a million. By December 15 (less than two months after its release) more than 2,000,000, making it the fastest selling record in Capitol’s history, and for years after its release, the most successful single ever recorded.
But the impact couldn’t be measured in numbers alone. The song became a cultural phenomenon, finding its way into newscasts, television programs and ad campaigns. Its chorus became part of the national dialogue; a rallying cry for anybody in debt, that owed more than they could ever hope to repay; to the bank, the credit card company, the bail bondsman. Every line spoke to every American, regardless of their station in life. By the end of 1956, it had become the single most influential thread in the fabric of American popular music, etching the names of Ernest Ford and Merle Travis into the annals of history.
But in the heart, mind and soul of Ernie Ford, the impact ran much deeper. It became his signature, attached to him at the cellular level. The song that would accompany his life for the rest of his life.  It was, as I look back now, the best and the worst thing that could have possibly happened to him. I look back, and imagine… imagine that the session had never happened. That he’d simply left Gillette’s office that day and kept driving. Picked up Mom, Brion and me and kept driving, never looking back, the highway stretching out before him; Hollywood, the business, the fame—all of it—slowly disappearing in his rear-view mirror.

J. Buck Ford

... forcing him to give up mining and farming, putting him and my grandmother on relief. They'd received boxes of food from the Penna Dept of Agriculture. Thank the Almighty for the UMW and Jock Yablonski. They did much better after that and Granpa Churley got effective medical treatment that allowed him to live a better life though still shortened life.

Some of the things he did to bring money home while they were still on the farm was he'd sit next to his lilac bush brushing Japanese beetles into a little jar of alcohol that he got pennies for from from the University of PA agricultural dept for insect studies. He had an old Union 36 loom (I have one, too) and wove rag carpets, Grandma would sew the strips of rags together that they'd buy at an auction, and in the summers different troops of grandkids would come out for a rotating couple of weeks and pick concord grapes, and different berries to sell to a man would come around regularly to buy the grapes and berries.

Coal mining made only the people who owned the mine any kind of decent life, and it still that way for 90% of shaft miners.

Screw Peabody and the like.