Authors: Alanna Nash
“He used to tell people in New York, ‘Call me in my office at two o’clock,’ ” remembered Parker’s carnival friend Jack Kaplan. “He’d sit there and
wait on it, just so everybody would think he had a big office in Nashville.”
Primarily, Parker handled a tour of several hundred dates for Ernest Tubb. With a huge hit like “Soldier’s Last Letter” and a pair of quickie movies, Tubb was now a big enough
star to headline a package of Opry newcomers, including comic Rod Brasfield and, as an extra added attraction, the Poe Sisters, real-life siblings just barely into their twenties who used the stage
names Ruth and Nelle.
As usual, Parker traveled two weeks ahead of the dates, booking auditoriums and theaters, billing posters, arranging for newspaper ads and hotel accommodations, and in keeping with Joe
Frank’s brand of broadcast promotion, setting up fifteen-minute early-morning radio programs for the troupe to come in to advertise the show.
Somewhere along the route, Tubb would get a telegram from Joe Frank telling him where Parker would catch up with him, usually in one of Tom’s favorite diners. There, Parker would fill him
in on what he’d lined up, writing it all down in his meticulous, methodical handwriting and passing the schedule sheet across a table ladened with double orders of chicken-fried steak served
on green, sectioned plates, with plenty of sweet tea to wash it down. Afterward, Tubb would silently lay a deck of cards or a pair
of dice on the table, and he and Parker
would adjourn to get up a friendly game. “He’d take a chance on anything,” says Gabe Tucker.
In contrast to his shabby, vagabond appearance with the Jamup and Honey tent show, Parker, as an agent for the distinguished Joe Frank, dressed in the kinds of clothes that had once delighted
the young Andreas van Kuijk.
“He would always wear a white shirt with a nice sport jacket and slacks,” recalls Nelle Poe. “He was already heavyset and balding, but he really looked like a gentleman. He
traveled so hard and fast promoting us that he would have a whole suitcase of white shirts, but he wouldn’t have time to get them laundered. He’d say, ‘I’m sending them home
for my wife to do them. I’ll pick them up on the next trip.’ ”
Parker was in unusually good spirits on the tour, and soon he grew so bold as to insinuate himself into Tubb’s stage act, impersonating the comedian Smiley Burnette and his character Frog
Millhouse, Gene Autry’s faithful sidekick. With his penchant for costumes, Parker had acquired an outfit similar to Burnette’s signature look of checked shirt, loose black kerchief
draped at the neck, and a floppy black hat turned sideways.
Nelle Poe remembers that Parker, who had studied Burnette’s moves and could mug his poses, was able to play the comic with unnerving accuracy. “As soon as Ernest walked out on the
stage,” says Poe, “Tom would start down the aisle, brushing people’s shoulders off with a little broom. He would do that on both sides of the audience, and Ernest would just stop
and stand there with his guitar and look through the crowd like he didn’t know what was going on. Of course, Ernest couldn’t sing, because people were just howling at this big commotion
of Tom’s. He was really hilarious.”
The heady reception fueled Parker’s honeyed dreams of fame. “He always said to me, ‘I’m going to Hollywood someday,’ ” Poe adds. “He had big ambitions,
and he was sure he was destined for great things.”
Yet Parker surely knew that his best chances of succeeding in Hollywood were not as a performer, but through his management of an alter ego. To that end, he continued to keep a vigilant watch on
Eddy Arnold, who had just been tapped to host Ralston Purina’s “Checkerboard Square” segment of the Grand Ole Opry, a plum spot.
As Eddy began to rouse the attention of national advertisers, Parker repositioned himself to strengthen his relationship with the budding star. Working with freelance promoter Jim Bulleit, who
had headed the Opry Artist Service Bureau before the war, he booked Eddy for two weeks of
theater dates in Florida during the winter of 1944–45. The idea was to show
Arnold that he could bring him up a level, to get him away from the little piss-ant county fairs Eddy had played with Pee Wee King, where the people came up to grab a piece of the star or get an
autograph. Once he was able to manage a top-notch act like Arnold, Parker vowed, he’d take him only to the bigger rodeos and fairs, and restrict that kind of fan access. To get the crowds
lathered up, and then declare his star untouchable, was to rend him a god.
In the fall of 1945, Parker made a handshake deal with Arnold for exclusive representation. It was not the clear, round tones of Eddy’s baritone that called to him, nor the Western bent of
the tenor end of Eddy’s register, reaching to surreal high yodel. With the understanding that Parker would take 25 percent of Arnold’s income and Eddy would pay the expenses, Parker was
not even overly concerned with the money he hoped to realize in bringing Eddy to prominence, although his funds were so tight that Marie had to temporarily hock her wedding ring to finance his trip
to Tennessee. For him, the chance to couple his fate to Eddy’s was a matter of personal power, of showing folks how to play the game.
As before, in the name of promotion, he was shameless. Joey Hoffman, Peasy’s son, remembers seeing him hand out pictures in front of the grandstand at the Tampa fairgrounds to advertise
Eddy’s show, telling passersby, “It’s free today, but the next time you see this face, you’ll be paying for it!”
Yet Parker saved his boldest move for the day of the show, when he ambled down to the opening of Jack Shepherd’s grocery store on Howard Avenue and approached a hillbilly band playing live
on the air. Brashly, he went up to the microphone and asked the lead singer if he knew Eddy - Arnold’s favorite song, “Mommy, Please Stay Home with Me.” The singer sheepishly said
he didn’t, so Parker invited the band—and the listening audience—to come out to the fair to hear Eddy sing it himself, thus wangling a free radio advertisement out of the
station.
“He was a ball of fire, he worked hard, he got up early, and he was a nondrinker,” Arnold says, reflecting on Parker’s tireless efforts on his behalf. “He had a lot of
energy. Actually, he was good at everything. He understood business, he was good with the record company, and he was good with the personal appearances. He was absolutely dedicated to the
personality that he represented.”
Although other managers stayed in their office and used the phone to complete their advance work, Parker crisscrossed the country setting up
tours, often staying away for
two months at a time, and bringing along for company either Bitsy Mott, Marie’s diminutive brother, or Bevo Bevis, the twenty-six-year-old boy-man. Behind them, Parker towed a humpbacked
trailer emblazoned with cartoonish renderings of Eddy’s face, and filled it with posters, fly sheets, signs, pictures, and banners—anything to spread the word that “Eddy Arnold,
the Tennessee Plowboy and His Guitar,” as the trailer boasted in foot-high letters, was coming to town.
“When he was settin’ up a tour,” says Gabe Tucker, “he’d try to get enough money from whoever was promoting it, and, hell, he would go back to the same places
sometimes two or three times if it was necessary, makin’ sure folks knowed Eddy was a-comin.’ And he’d tell the promoter, ‘Put it on the radio. My boy can’t draw you
no people if they don’t know he’s gonna be here,’ see. He would work on it and stay on it. That’s one reason Eddy got in the bracket that he did, ’cause Tommy worked
his ass off. If he was awake,” adds Tucker, “he was preachin’ Eddy Arnold to anybody that’d listen.”
And like a member of any secret society, Parker knew just where to go when he needed help, back to the place and the people who still churned in his blood. To promote Eddy’s early records,
especially, Parker went home to the carnival, where the bearded ladies and the sprightly midgets and the fixers in their pin stripe suits and diamond rings took him in, blaring Arnold’s songs
over their loudspeakers as a favor to one of their own.
Yet “Tommy’s boy,” as the carnies affectionately called the singer, was embarrassed by such display and, on tour, quickly tired of the out-of-the-way drives to thank a
hard-bitten carny manager for playing and selling his records.
“We got somebody up at this turnoff we need to go see,” Parker would begin, driving out in the middle of the pitch-black nowhere, on a night pierced only by the light of the stars.
Eddy, knowing what was coming, and chagrined about having to meet some leopard-skinned strongman with a neck like a pillar, finally began to voice his discontent. “Tom, do I have to? Do I
have to . . . ? ”
Eddy was not the only one who chafed at some of the new manager’s methods of doing business. Almost immediately, Parker began to expand Arnold’s tours beyond the bankable South and
Southwest, taking the band and the opening act, the straw-hatted comedy duo of Lonzo and Oscar, as far north as Pennsylvania. He also stepped up the schedule, booking more dates than they’d
ever played before, which meant they
performed five nights during the week, drove all night Friday to get home by Saturday to play the Grand Ole Opry, and then left again on
Sunday.
“It was really too much,” remembers steel guitarist Little Roy Wiggins, who had played behind Paul Howard at fourteen and Pee Wee King at fifteen before joining the Tennessee
Plowboys. “I told Parker he was queer for that white line in the middle of the highway, because he just had to run up and down that road like crazy.”
Once, after Eddy got rolling a little bit, Parker booked him into the city auditorium in Chattanooga, where the promoter had a reputation for not paying the artist. Parker had already gotten
half of his money in advance and intended to collect the remaining half in cash before the show started.
“Tom came back backstage while the musicians were standing there, strumming their guitars, waiting,” Eddy recalls. “And he said to me, - ‘Don’t you hit a lick until
I go [waves his hand].’ That would mean he had gotten the money. Well, he went to this gentleman [the promoter], and he said, ‘You know, those singers, they’re funny. They
won’t sing a note unless I wave my hand.’ A couple of minutes later, I peeped through the curtain and he waved at me, and we did the show.”
Despite Arnold’s cachet as an RCA Victor recording artist and a member of the Grand Ole Opry, in the early days the idea of playing any city auditorium would have been a mere pipe dream
for Arnold, whose tenure with Parker got off to a modest start. Bitsy Mott remembers the dates included towns in Texas that were so small and remote that the show was literally staged in a
barn.
“We used to play all those places,” he says, “and sometimes you had to kick the debris out of your way before you could let people come in—cows had been in there, you
know. We set up wooden benches, and it was ‘A dollar a ticket, sit where you like.’ I used to hear him say that all the time.”
The early tours were heady experiences for the young troupers, who were constantly learning something new about the business, and about each other. Parker vowed to always carry a fresh cigar, so
that when the negotiations started and the questions came, he could light the stogie, puff some fire through it until he coaxed an orange hue at its end, and set it up for business in the corner of
his mouth. By then, he’d had time to consider his answer.
Parker’s habit of seeing how much he could get for as little as he could give reached new heights of audacity as Eddy’s career heated up. The
manager found it
increasingly necessary to remain in Nashville when the group came in off the road. As he had done from the beginning, Parker took it for granted that he was welcome to stay with Eddy and his wife,
Sally, a Kentucky girl whom Arnold married in late 1941 while performing with Pee Wee King.
One guest in the house had been enough for the Arnolds, who tried to keep their business and home life separate. But now Parker brought the hapless Bevo, whom Parker called Arnold’s
“tour manager” in the press, and Marie, who exuded a certain chilliness to both Sally and Roy - Wiggins’s wife, Joyce. And before long, Bobby Ross, who hoped to become a manager
or promoter after apprenticing with Parker (he would eventually handle Slim Whitman and assist the Colonel in winning - Whitman’s first record contract), came up from Tampa and moved in right
along with them. The foursome stayed anywhere from three or four days to nearly a month.
This parasitic arrangement fit the pattern of Parker’s freeloading days of old, and seemed not to bother the thrifty Dutchman in the slightest, no matter who it inconvenienced. Eddy and
Sally had recently bought a five-room redbrick bungalow in Madison, about seven miles west of downtown Nashville. But since Eddy’s mother, Georgia, often lived there, too, and the couple
welcomed the birth of daughter Jo Ann in December 1945, the house was full.
Fifty years later, Sally Arnold still rolled her eyes when the subject came up, too much of a Southern lady to say more. At the time, Eddy managed to keep his composure, until Parker also took
over Arnold’s newly rented office in the upstairs of a Madison real estate firm.
“Tommy told him, ‘Plowboy, you need a place where you can store all of your songbooks,’ ” Gabe Tucker remembers. “And hell, he just dropped the shuck on him then.
Eddy paid for the whole thing, and Tommy had a bigger office than Eddy did and never paid a nickel on it. Eddy started to say something to him about it, and Tommy said, ‘Well, me taking care
of you. Give me a better place to do it.’ He never paid for office space, nowhere, his whole life.”
It was at this point, after the Parkers had imposed on the Arnolds’ hospitality for a particularly long and grating stay, that Eddy prompted one of Parker’s most famous lines. As the
singer wrote in his autobiography, “I said to him once when he was managing me, ‘Tom, why don’t you get yourself a hobby—play golf, go boating, or something?’ He
looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘You’re my hobby.’ ”
The Arnolds found relief only after Parker bought a small but stately fieldstone home nearby on Madison’s Gallatin Road.