Clay Ramsey Interview

CLAY RAMSEY  1/12/94

JD: Tell me about the Old Timers Barn.

CR: It’s still there.  The Old Timers Dance, somebody else built it, and they hired us to work there.  I had a little band going.

JD: That was Clay Ramsey and The Old Timers?

CR: Yes, we called it various names.  One time it was Clay Ramsey and his Haywire Band and various things, but it wound up as The Old Timers.  We were playing on all the radio stations, and had a little radio show for years and years, and sold my own ads.  I’d take the little ad in with the names and addresses of the people and the girl would make the continuity up.  I had an announcer on the program, and I did all the announcing of the tunes and all that stuff, because early morning we had an hour or two every morning, just the fiddle and the guitar.

JD: Five days a week?

CR: Yes.  And part time I had various people.  I had a harmonica player one time, just him and I.  And then I had various fiddle players, but just two of us usually would go there every morning.

JD: This is on KOY?

CR: Yes, it was KOY at that time, well it wasn’t KOY, but it became KOY.  Later on we had the full band, and we bought time on KPHO.  They had a studio in their transmitter that was down on Buckeye Road.  I don’t know if you know that.

JD: No, I didn’t.

CR: That was about the time we started the Old Timers Dance.  We called it The Old Timers Dance Club.

JD: Which would have been what year Clay?

CR: In the early 30’s.  We played on the station and in return plugged the dance along with their commercials and stuff and then later on it got to where I began to make transcriptions of the shows.  I dated them so I could use them over and over, a section here and there.  I could make up the programs later on if I didn’t want to take the band.  That’s how I got into The Old Timers Dance thing.  They hired us to play there on a 50/50 basis, and there were two partners that owned it at that time.  I don’t remember what it was called.

JD: How many nights did you have the dance?

CR: Two nights a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays.  Of course we played other nights all around town.  We had a school dance on Friday night and we got $10.00 for four of us to go out and do a whole job.  (Laughs)  But that bought a lot of beans! (Laughs)  Of course I was working in a grocery store for A.J. Bayless stores.  I came here in 1924 and he had the only store, the Bayless store, and he was down on 2nd Street and Van Buren.  Right across the street was the Arizona Republic building, and the canal there.  There was a canal there that ran just north of Van Buren, all through town.  And there was a big dance hall at 1st Street and Van Buren.  I knew the people that ran it.  But anyway, we took the dance job on commission and of course we were plugging it all the time on the radio and the crowds kept building up and building up but our take didn’t come up so much.  In other words, we weren’t getting any more than when we started.  It was maybe $10.00 a night for playing, which was good money then.  But they were taking the big end of it.  So, one night we took a sheep counter and counted our people that were coming in.  My wife sat out in the car and counted them.  They were paying us for about a third of what we were supposed to be getting.  So, we decided right then and there that was the end of it.  There used to be a dance place way out about Northern and 7^th Street, it was called The Orangewood Dance.  It was back in a bunch of orange groves.  So, we rented that and I bought 100 spots on KOY in one day.  We moved over there and we took all their people.  Every one of them. (Laughs)  Of course you know what happened to the other people, they didn’t have any business and they went broke.  About three months later they came to us and asked if we wanted to buy the building.  We said, “yes.”  So we bought the building for $1300, or something.  It was a 60’ by 40’ and I think we added another 20’ on it to make it that much bigger.  It was just kind of an open-air thing, we had flaps on the side so we could just raise them up and it would really be open air.  In the winter we could close it up and we had some old pot-bellied stoves that we kept the place warm with.

JD: What about the stage, did amplifiers and speakers….

CR: Oh yes.  We even had carbon microphones.  Every once in a while, if you would bump one that was it you know, it ruined it.  We got those in when we went to Orangegrove and then when we went we got everything and tried to keep up to date.  But we used amplifiers all the time.  We had a five-piece band.  We had a guitar, which I played, and usually a banjo, piano (Jimmy Salino), bass (Al Kyle) and drums.  Yea we had amplifiers and then as we went along, we bought better stuff.  The next microphone we had was a crystal mic and then we had a ribbon mic.  One of those RCA ones, with a ribbon.  And every so often we would have to replace that ribbon and Culver’s had someone that could do it at that time, so they would replace it for us.  Also, each of the instruments we had had contact mics and so we could handle a lot of people.  Our average crowd was about 300 on Saturday and 200 or 250 on Wednesday.  Which, back in those days, you know what we charged, 25 cents on Wednesdays and 35 cents on Saturdays, per person.  (Laughs)  Back in those days nobody had any money anyway.  Well, we did real well.

JD: Did you sell drinks and food?

CR: We had a little lunch stand and all we sold to start with was just cold drinks, soda pop.  We sold no liquor, didn’t allow liquor, it was a family affair.  We didn’t allow any drinking, inside.  Of course we couldn’t control the outside.

JD: Floyd as I understand, if he was around, would have to put the flaps up or down.

CR: (Laughs)  Yes we took him out, he was this long.  We took him out in a basket and put him on a table there.  That’s how he grew up.  (Laughs)

JD: How long were you there? 

CR: Yes, as I remember about thirty-five years.  I made my living, or part of it, playing music for over fifty years.

JD: Would you ever book other groups to play? 

CR: No.  I did know a lot of other groups.  Around that time, we opened the store and we had amplifiers.  We didn’t have TV but we did have radio and all that stuff.

JD: And then later you did have one of the first TV’s in Phoenix.

CR: We did have the first.  I think we still have it, it at Floyd’s.

JD: Mary told me that you would drive to California and take your TV with you to look for signals. You would look for skips. 

CR: Sure.  We put up a big tower with a rotary on top so we could turn it.  Seattle bounced in and Houston bounced in.  Almost every day, sometime of the day you could get a picture.

JD: How long, five minutes, ten minutes?

CR: Oh no.  Sometimes they would stay for three hours.  We had people coming in all the time because it was something.

JD: No sound though…..

CR: Yes, everything came in.  You had to fine-tune it a lot, but most times it came through real good.  And then KPHO put in Channel 5 (1949) and we had it made. (Laughs)  Because we were all set for TV.  At one time we had the largest store in Phoenix as far as TV’s.  I know we were the largest RCA dealer here in the state.   At one time we bought a carload of General Electric 10” TV’s, they were about that long, and heavy as a ton of rock.  But we finally sold them we thought we weren’t going to sell them but we did.  I think they were $259 or something like that.  We took on a line called Hoffman.  They were very good. Their cabinets and stuff, then we had Packard Bell.  Right after the War period we added a record department.  And that was RCA and Columbia and people didn’t want to bother with us because they didn’t have enough records to go around anyway.  So, we bought Country and Western stuff.  We had a record store department anyway and we advertised a lot on TV and radio so we had a good record.  After awhile they came to us, and we had the full lines of everybody.

JD: Before we go any further, you mentioned that you moved out here in 1924.  Where were you born and how did you get to Phoenix?

CR: I was born in Texas, a little town called Graham.  About 90 miles from Ft. Worth and Dallas.  The first town I ever went to was Dallas, in a wagon.

JD: How old were you when you came here?

CR: Oh seventeen or eighteen, I guess.  I had a brother that when he got out of the Army.  He had met a girl that lived in Phoenix and he married her, so we came out here to spend a winter.  We left our farm back there and we didn’t go back.

JD: At that young age were you playing in Texas?

CR: Oh yes.  There was a neighbor man that played fiddle, guitar and all that.  We just played straight stuff.  We just played for parties; we didn’t play commercially because back in that day they didn’t have such a thing.  (Laughs)

JD: Did you take the train out here from Texas?

CR: No, I was working in a little grocery store, and I saved my money and made a payment on a 1924 brand new Ford, Model T.  It was just a touring car with side curtains that you could put up.  And we brought about everything we owned in it.  We had on the running board; back in those days they had a thing that you could hook on, like an accordion, so we could carry stuff on the running board.  We also had a large canvas and at night we camped out and just put that canvas up and hooked it on to the car.  All of us would sleep in there, my mother, brother and younger sister, all four of us.  It took us….well we stopped in Burkburnett (TX) for a day or so to visit a sister and then we had an uncle living in New Mexico and we stopped there a few days.  Liked to never got through those mountains up in New Mexico.  (Laughs)  It took us at least two weeks from the time we left Graham till we got to Phoenix.  And it was in August and in Globe we were going up one long hill and my mother said, “I’m not going up there.  I’m just going to walk.”  So, we let her out and let her walk up the hill.  We drove up and waited for her at the top of the hill.  Se was scared to death of mountains anyway.  But we finally made it to Phoenix.  After we were here a little while I went down and talked to Mr. Bayless and got a job.  I guess that I was a country boy that looked very hungry. (Laughs)  He said, “Son, I don’t have a job, but I’ll tell you what if you want to come in next Friday and work in the back room, you can sack potatoes and beans and sugar and all that stuff, you can do that.”  So, I was really happy.  I don’t remember what he paid me, not very much, but I did that for a couple of weeks.  Then on one Saturday he came back and….he would look in every once in a while, because I worked like a son-of-a-gun.  I sacked tons of potatoes and tons of beans and sugar.  And he told me one time, he said, “A pound is 16 ounces.  I want you to remember something when you’re sacking this stuff.  It’s not 17, it’s not 14.”  That’s something that stayed with me all my life, you know.  He was a very honest man.  After I had worked there a couple of weekends he came back and said, “How well do you know Phoenix?”  I said, “well I know where Polk Street is, I know Van Buren and Monroe.”  There were three or four that I knew each way.  He said, “I’m going to have to let my delivery boy go, we’ve got a problem, and if you want that job and think you can handle it, you can have it.”  So, he hired me for delivery boy for Bayless and I had the best job of anybody at the store.

JD: They would deliver to houses in the area?  They would call up with a list of things that they wanted to be delivered?

CR: Yes.  And after I had worked that job just a little while I took all the orders of a morning.  They’d call in the morning, and I’d take the orders down and I’d deliver them.  I put in my full day, and I learned a lot of stuff in a hurry. (Laughs)

JD: Did you use your car then?

CR: No, they had a Model T with a little truck bed, about this long, in the back and A. J. Bayless who was J. B. Bayless’ son, he bought the produce and he used it in the morning and went down and got the produce and stuff.  Then when I got my orders ready, they turned it over to me and it was mine the rest of the day.

JD: In those days he would just get his potatoes in bulk, and onions, it wasn’t like they came in 10-pound bags from the distributor.

CR: No, uh uh.  They bought potatoes by carload all the time.  I’d see a stack of potatoes as big as this house and start working on them, putting them in 10-pound bags.  They sold 10-pound bags for a quarter or something.  And of course, sugar they bought in 100 pounds and beans were bought in 100 pounds.

JD: Potatoes were grown here?

CR: No, lettuce was grown here.  Potatoes were shipped in.  Most of them we got from Greeley, Colorado.

JD: So, you got pretty familiar with the lay out of the town and the retail business.

CR: Oh yea.  After I was there for a year or so he started me working in a new warehouse that he built.  He wanted me to spend six months there and learn that end of it.  And then after that he put me out opening stores.  I opened one on South Central at Broadway and I ran that one for a year and then the next one was Indian School and 7^th Street.  I opened that one and ran it for a year.

JD: How many people would you have working in these stores?

CR: In those days they were super stores because of their size.  We had eight to ten working at each store.  Of course, the manager had to do every thing and that was really seven days a week of work.  We were only open six days a week though.  When I was working at the 7^th Street and Indian School store, we had an extraordinarily good day I think we did about $4000 in business, which was a lot!  We did a real good business.  I told this cashier, “You know, I just feel like there’s something going to happen and I’m not going to put the money in the safe.”  By the cashiers stand we had a safe in the floor but for some reason I felt that I should hide it in another location.  Well sure enough when I went to check stock on Sunday morning and here, they’d blew that safe to smithereens.  They put sugar and beans to deaden the sound of the explosion.  Well, where that safe was lots of sugar and beans and silver dollars and quarters and all the change.  The big money I put in the walk in refrigerator in the back.  So, I called Mr. Bayless and he came out to look.  He said, “Son, never do that.  What if this store had burned down?  You would have had a hard time explaining where that money went.” (Laughs)  And I learned a lesson.  Of course they had insurance anyway.  And I thought I was doing a good turn.  It was big business in those days.

JD: Yes, I remember A.J. Bayless.

CR: Well, he was adopted, not everyone knew that, and he turned out to be an alcoholic and he didn’t really know where he was in his last days really.

JD: I remember that they had a store just West of Central on Indian School that they kept as an old fashioned one.

CR: Yes, I went down there many years ago and was looking through some pictures.  One of them was a picture of a 4^th of July picnic that they had for the employees at a park out on East Van Buren, about 32^nd Street.  There was a big park out there, I can’t think of the name right now; there was an open-air dance hall and an enclosed one too.  Here was a picture of me with some folks and I looked like a beanpole then.  (Laughs)    

JD: Were you playing then?

CR: Yes, I was playing on Friday nights and Saturday nights because I got off early enough so I could play dances on Saturday nights.  Then after I quit the stores, and we went in for full time music.

JD: When did Ramsey’s Radio open on 7^th Street?

CR: I was trying to think when we bought that property.  I had a little radio shop in my garage.  I lived at 19^th Street and Longview, near the school.  My old lot is now part of the playground at the school.  One day my wife and I were driving up 7^th and here was this old house that had weeds so high you could hardly see the house.  It had a long strip of ground, 1000 feet on Weldon Street and 98 feet on 7^th Street.  Back in that weeds and stuff there was a “For Sale” sign.  I told my wife, “Let’s find out what they want for that property.”  I called up and they wanted $4995 for it.  I made arrangements to buy it; I paid them so much, then pay it out.  We put our house up for sale, we had very little in savings, and right away our house sold.  So, I want back before the papers were finished and asked if they would knock off any money if I made a bigger down payment.  I think he took $95 off the total.  That strip of land was where we started Ramsey’s Radio.  And we had this brick house to live in.  We built a little thing out front out of concrete blocks, 20’ by 20’.  That was the first real store; the other one was in my garage, using radio (repair) to get my business.  I had a lot of fun.  I would go out and pick radios up and some of the things I couldn’t fix and there was a young fellow that had a radio store similar to mine in his backyard.   His name was Ralph Coggins?, his father had Coggins? Title and Trust in Phoenix years ago.  It was a very wealthy family.  Ralph was a good radioman so if I got stuck, I would take it down and he would fix it for me.  Nobody knew.  (Laughs)  In the meantime Floyd went to the Army.

JD: This was ’44 or ’45?

CR: I think we bought that land in ’44.  Well, he was in the Army and gone a couple of years and then when he got back, we expanded and I took him into the business.  I started it on my own, but when he got out of the service, I took him in.  And then we built another 20’ and then the next one we took up the entire frontage.  Meantime we had a little recording studio back in the old house.  When Floyd was in the service, he had built a….well first we bought a combination Packard Bell phonograph, and it had a recording thing on it.  And he could do things.  Then he sent away and got a kit that had everything in it.  It was portable in a way, you could take it with you, but it was pretty heavy.  That was our first recording equipment.  We had that back in the old house in the front room.  It was very low hi-fi I’ll tell you. (Laughs)

JD: On the Old Timers label it says copyright 1950.  It sounds as though you were doing things before that.

CR: Oh yes.  How I got into the recording business, at our dance place we did a lot of folk dancing.  We had one thing that we called “The Manitou.”  There was a teacher from El Paso, whose name was Greg, he taught round dancing all over the United States.  He happened to come out to our dance one night and he liked that tune. He had us make an acetate of the tune for him.  From that, everywhere he’d go, he’d use that disc and everybody wanted a record.  So, we would just cut them for a long time.  And then we finally got the idea to press them.  That was what started the Old Timer Record Company.

JD: Was that the first Old Timer record?

CR: Yes, it was the first official release.  We did maybe four or five records in our first pressing.  We did a Varsuvian and a Shottish and a couple of hoedowns and we did that Manatoe.  We had another that we called Chicago Glide.  I think we did five records on that first run.  We had a heck of a time getting them pressed because this was still after the war and the big companies controlled the plants, but we found a presser in Glendale California.  (Research Craft Company)  Floyd and I went over to check the place out and they offered that they could do our pressing for us.  All we had to do was do the acetate and they would take it from there.  They only made 78’s then, which weighed about 40 pounds for 100 records.  That’s what got up started in the records.  There was another little man that opened up a pressing plant near San Diego.  He was a funny kind of a guy, but was very good.  He worked with us and did a lot for us.  We had him do the pressings for a long time.  Then there was a young chap name of Wakefield, Sidney, who came out from Chicago and he talked to us and asked, “Well if I come out here would you let me do your work?”  That’s how Sidney got started because he did all of our work.  He only had one press at that time when he started. (Laughs)  But we kept him pretty well busy because of our Old Timer records, we were making a lot of them, we weren’t making any money but we did fairly well.

JD: Do you remember what your wholesale price on the records was?

CR: It seems to me around 45 or 50 cents and they sold them for 79 cents.  We were the first square dance company that put out 45’s.

JD: That would have been ’51 or ’52?

CR: Right, because we incorporated in the early fifties.  And the other square dance people thought we were crazy, but you know with in a year all of them had (45’s).

JD: Right, they were cheaper to ship, easier to handle, didn’t break.  They should have known that was coming.   Were you one of the first labels to put the call on one side and the instrumental on the other?

CR: Yes, we were one of the first to do that.  Now Mike Michele came along later with his Western Jubilee label, and he did them all kinds of ways.  Well, he wound up with three versions of the same record.  Of course, he didn’t last very long and we finally bought him out.

JD Oh you bought Western Jubilee out?

CR (Laughs)  Yes.  Of course, we had a wholesale square dance record company and we were selling to Mike all of them and that’s when he went into the record business.  He knew we were doing all right and he became our competitor in the dance business.  He did all right because he had little different class of people come to his place.

JD: He had a hall and a label both?

CR: Yes.  We had Old Timer and he put in Western Jubilee.  He was quite a promoter.  In fact, he worked on our money for quite a few years. (Laughs)   He wound up paying everything, but we did take over his Western Jubilee to help get him out of debt.  Of course, it didn’t pay off for us but then we got it anyway.

JD: Is Mike Michele still around?

CR: No, he died a couple of years ago.

JD: So, you were selling by mail order and any square dance record that was available you would sell to a customer.  What were some of the other labels?

CR: McGreggor and Windsor were really the top ones.  And then Square Dance magazine had a label called Sets in Order, they came along and they were pretty well into it too.  Several other people jumped in that were very good.

JD: Was McGreggor going before you started?

CR: No, we started around the same time.  If not the first, we were one of the first.  We got together with some of the other companies and set up distribution in California.  It had never been known before for competitors to get together to sell together.  When we first mentioned the idea people thought we were crazy, but we finally wound up doing it.  We had a distributing company here and I would go to San Diego and sell records.  Then when we set up this distributing company with Sets In Order, McGreggor, Windsor, Old Timer and one other label, I can’t think of the name….they were in Nebraska.  But any way five or six of us got together and put up $5000 apiece to start this distributing company all distributed out of that one place but they shipped all over the United States which made it a lot better.  Of course, when we set that up I turned our distributing end for California over to them and they took over.  I went to California cold and I think we had thirteen or fourteen records out and I went into one of the big stores there (Wallach’s) and I went in scared to death to even talk to them.  This guy on the counter said, “Where in the hell have you been?  We’ve had calls for two of your records and we didn’t know where to get them.”  Well, I filled him up on consignments and by doing that I got into every store in San Diego on one trip!

JD: You had the records with you at that time?

CR: Oh yea. 

JD: Your car must have been pretty full.

CR: It was! (Laughs)

JD: Were those Wakefield pressings?

CR: Yes, by that time he was doing them.

JD: So, Floyd was running the shop by that time?

CR: Oh yes.  But I’d go out and help sell them.  We of course were into it up to our necks.  It was fun.  As far as making money out of Old Timer Record Company, we didn’t.  We put it all back into pressings.  And then we got to dabbling with popular stuff, and some of the labels like Liberty Bell.  We had a lot of fun out of it.  We could go to the conventions, and it would pay for that.  (Laughs)  I got to do some traveling I had no idea I could ever do you know.  I’d go to St. Louis or Denver went to Chicago I guess.  And I went to all the square dance conventions doing plugging and it was legal.

JD: And selling records.

CR: Yes, I had a little stand, and I would take orders from people.  It was a lot of fun and of course we had a mail order service too that we sold all over the world.  We sold more records in Japan than any part of the country.  It was crazy.  Some of those people were really wise.  They would send us $200 or $300 and use it up order by order.  I don’t know how they got the money out in the first place.  They did enormous business.

JD: How many of a number would you order from Sidney?

CR: Five hundred, and sometimes a thousand of a record.  None of our stuff sold big or anything.  One time we got a call from a distributor in Denver or Chicago or St. Louis, I forget.  He said, “You know I’ve been out pounding the pavement today and I sold 1800 Old Timers,” which at that time was the biggest order that we shipped at one time.  Can you imagine what 1800 78’s would weigh? (Laughs)  Those boxes weighed 40 pounds apiece.  We had a lot of fun with our Old Timer Company.

JD: Do you know how many titles there were in your catalog?

CR: We had about 115 in the catalog.  And some of them didn’t sell of course, (Laughs) but some did.

JD: And you had to stock both the 78 and the 45 of each title.

CR: Oh yes.  We had everything available that way.  And when we made 78’s we made 45’s too.  We did everything all at once.  When we released a new record it came both ways.  And we did have a series of about ten records that were LP’s, 10” LP’s.

JD: With a hard cover?

CR: Yes.

JD: Wow, I’ve never seen any of those. 

CR: Usually, they were two long instrumentals, with a side for the calls.  Most of them were that way.

JD: All this time the dances were going on every Wednesday and Saturday.

CR: Oh yes.  Our dance thing slowed down because we didn’t have refrigeration.

JD: So, summers must have been rough.

CR: Well, we had some big fans going.  Usually, it was nice to get in there and sweat up a little bit then cool down under the fans.  In the wintertime it was cold.  We didn’t have good heat, and it finally dropped of to where my partners, I had two partners, they died off and I bought them out.  And finally, for a couple of years we just played records and we got by.  We didn’t have to have many customers when we played records.  We had fun. (Gets a picture of the band playing at the Old Timers Dance.) Everybody had big ears. (Laughs)

JD: Who were your partners?

CR: Al Kyle and Jimmy Salino.

JD: What would a typical night be? What time would you start and end?

CR: We would start at 8:30 ‘til 11:00.  On like, New Years we got as many as 600 people in the place.  Of course, you couldn’t stir them with a stick but we made good money.  We raised the price too.  One night we had an earthquake, and I don’t remember what year that was, but it was near El Centro and it did some damage in that area.  All of a sudden something happened.  It felt like we were a little tipsy.  One lady rushed up there and sat down and we had little seats all around and she said, “I’m having a heart attack.”  And it dawned on me what was happening.  I got on the microphone and said, “No you’re not having a heart attack, we’ve had an earthquake.”  The lights were swinging and it was the queerest feeling.  It felt like the building moved 6”.  Which it didn’t but it was an old wood building, and it would sway anyway.  If you want to see the building, it’s still there.

JD: What was the address then?

CR: About 3100 West McDowell.  After we moved out I rented it to a furniture store.  The property belonged to Wesley Bolin’s family.  We should have bought it.  I had a chance to buy it when the Bolin’s died.  They wanted $10,000 for it and I talked with my partners at the time who thought that it was way too much money.  I didn’t buy it and who ever did turned it over for $30,000 six months later.  There were a couple of acres there.  So, I missed out on that one.  (Laughs)

JD: According to my discography, the first pop label in Phoenix (Arizona) was Liberty Bell.  The first three records though were by Keith King and Cal Golden who was a square dance artist, who also had his own square dance label in California.  Tell me about the beginnings of Liberty Bell.

CR: Yes, Cal Golden was a square dance caller, but he did some other stuff too.  Keith King I can’t remember, I should know.

JD: Whose idea was Liberty Bell?

CR: Well either Floyd’s or mine I guess.  Around that time, we had that boy, oh he went on to become big in Nashville……     

JD: Marty Robbins?

CR: Yes, Marty Robbins.  We had him under contract and Columbia came in and we had just started making some dubs to send out.  They offered him a contract so we let him out of ours because they could do so much more with him.  But we did have him under contract.

JD: Wow!  There was never a Phoenix Marty Robbins release that I know of.  I know that Frankie Starr has some acetates by Marty from 1949 that he cut at your studio.

CR: There was another one who started here too; she had the song, Happiest Girl In The USA.

JD: Donna Fargo.  Yes, she had several Ramco records early on in her career. 

CR: Yes, Floyd took her to Nashville for a session and then Dot picked her up after that.  We missed that one too.

JD: Well, there was Sanford Clark and Duane Eddy too.  Duane was just inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year.

CR: Yes, that’s right.  It was just one of those things.  At the time we didn’t think too much about it.  He did have something for sure.   

JD: (At this point I start running down the titles of some early Liberty Bell records….)

CR: Oh, I remember Griz Green, he was quite a character.  (Laughs)  They were talking about him the other day.  He’s still around.

JD: Do you remember the black group, The Tads?  What wonderful harmony they had.

CR: Yes, that harmony was out of this world.  You know they were boys that worked for the Sanitation Department in Phoenix.  Their harmony was good.  I remember that song was beautiful.

JD: Yes, I talk with Leroy Fullylove in California.  Your Reason was one of the best records ever cut in Phoenix.  It was fantastic.  I think that Hazlewood was involved with them too.

CR: (He looks at the record and notes Renda Publishing on the label and the pink label on the flip, The Pink Panther.)  The music publishing was Floyd’s I remember, Renda.

JD: I know that Old Timer didn’t have any publishing listed on the labels for the most part.

CR: No, it was mostly public domain material….we hoped anyway.  (Laughs)  We did one thing….we did a square dance to it.  And the guy who wrote the lyrics to it came through Phoenix years and years ago looking for work.  He was starving so I gave him a job on this morning radio program.  Maybe I paid him $3 or $4 something to do it, and he played the fiddle and the guitar.  He played everything, he wrote songs, and he came up with a dozen songs.  They all had the same background, more or less, but they had different words.  His name was Jimmy Driftwood.  Come to find out he wrote a lot of stuff for Ernie Ford.  I happened to pick up a magazine here some time back and I read something about him being in Missouri, so I wrote him and it tickled him to death and around the time I wrote him he was in an automobile accident with his wife.  About two months later he called me one Sunday morning and invited us back to his place.  They have a guest ranch back there.  One time I had a long letter from him thanking me for putting him to work.  He said, “If it hadn’t been for you I would have never been into music like I am.”  He spent that one winter here just about starving to death, poor guy.  That’s all he worked I guess, all the time writing songs.  But he turned out to be a pretty prominent guy in the music business.  We made a square dance out of one of his songs, The Battle of New Orleans, and we never did pay him for that.  I didn’t dare tell him about it because we didn’t sell enough to pay any thing anyway.  We had mentioned about going to Branson and he said, “When you get ready to go call me and I’ll meet you there.  And we want you to come to our place and stay.”  They lived about 100 miles away.  I haven’t heard from him for about a year because I got sick a while back and that put the quietus on that.

JD: Here are some more records….Judy Faye, Loy Clingman, and Dave Lowe with So Young…..

CR: Yes that one came awful close to making it.  I remember Dave.

JD: By now Floyd was pretty much running the label?

CR: Yes, he was, he was taking care of that end of things.

JD: Then there was Glen Morris, George Peck, Ralph Smith with Bob Taylor, and then Joe Montgomery was the last release.

CR: We had fun with that but it never paid off of course.  The one that made a hit but we couldn’t handle it, Floyd’s still getting royalties….

JD: Plaything by Ted Newman?

CR: I think that was it.  If we could have promoted it better we might have had a big one.  Did Floyd ever tell you the history of our studio?  Besides the one in the old house.

JD: Please tell me.

CR: We built this….to us it was an enormous big building out front.  It was about 60’ long with a little tail on it, maybe 30’ by 20’.  And we made it into a studio, that was what we made it for.  We had a little section glassed off for the control room and all that, and we did a lot of stuff there.  I guess the whole thing inside would be about the size of this room.  That’s where we first started doing our stuff.  And then when we had something bigger we moved out into the store.

JD: Then the old studio became the control room.

CR: Yes.  Then after building the building in front, which was a long building, 40’ back.  Then we built a shop, then that left a space in between and we finally filled that in and made the studio there.  We did some big stuff there.  One time there was a musician’s strike in Hollywood and they all came over here to do a session.  You know I went in and watched those guys and I never enjoyed anything as much in all my life.  They had a bunch of musicians and like that they did everything right on the button, exactly right.  You just couldn’t imagine people working like they were doing.  They brought over two big semi’s with their equipment and they parked in back.  I don’t remember what it was but they did the sound for the whole thing.  Then we sold off our business and I took the Old Timer Record Company and the mail order and Floyd took the recording business and built the big studio with Bill Thorne.  After that Floyd was doing all the studio work.

JD: Was there another famous singer that recorded in the old house, out back, with you?

CR: Roy Acuff.  He didn’t record but he spent the whole afternoon with me one time because he had a concert.  I recorded weddings in the Catholic church and of course we were doing it on acetates and when we got to the end, I’d hold up my finger, and they would stop while I put on a new blank on the machine then they would go on.  They boy was stationed out at Like Field and he wanted to send it to his family in New York.   I recorded one Jewish wedding, which was to me kind of funny because I had never seen one of their ceremonies before.  It was very interesting.  Then one time a fella had a big church organ at his house and he asked me if I could record him.  Floyd had been doing most of the recording by then, but he was out of town or something.  I said that I would try.  The organ took up the whole front of his house.  But it turned out pretty darn good and he was really happy with it.  There wasn’t anyone else doing recording stuff at that time.

JD: This was before Ray Bolie?

CR: Oh yea.

JD: What year did you and Floyd split things up?

CR: Seems to me in the early 60’s.  We sold off the service department and then we sold the rest of it.  There was a different fellow that owned the record department and we decided to get out of it because the labor was killing us.

JD: There was a barbershop in the building too.  He leased space from you too?

CR: Yes.  He was there for a long time. In back of that we had a nice sized store that we never had much luck renting.  It was a used clothing store at one time.  So one time it was empty and I got a hold of a newspaper ad somewhere and it was for red wood canoes.  So, I sent away and got the pattern and I looked at it and realized there was no way that I could do that by myself so I had a friend that was a good carpenter.  In the meantime we had started the YMCA Rock Hound Club with about three families who got together at the Y.  They came to this meeting, and I asked him if he would be interested in helping me build this boat.  He was really interested, so we looked this over, and I happened to have all kinds of sawing equipment and stuff.  We bought 12” red wood and the first boat we built was 16’ long out of beautiful red wood.  And it was a beautiful thing.  Another friend heard us talking and said, “If you are going to build a boat can I watch or help?”  So, we built that boat in the vacant store in the evenings.  We spent about 100 hours building that one boat.  It was 16’ long and had air under each seat.  We could carry six people in it.  For a canoe thing it was big.  There were air things under two seats, and it was our first experience working with fiberglass.  (Laughs)  After that one we built two more and they were easier because we had the framework.  We did those in about fifty hours of time.  We had a lot of fun doing it.  I wish I would have kept it, but I got to where I couldn’t go out fishing, so I sold it to somebody.  It weighed 100 pounds and I had a little set of wheels I could screw onto it and I could load and unload it by myself.  That’s one thing that we used that part of the building for.

JD: Whom did you sell Old Timer to?

CR: We sold it to a square dance caller, I can’t remember his name right now, because I wanted to retire and get out of it, and he bought the whole shebang.  I think I sold it for $1500.  We let him have it all.  And then he didn’t do anything with it.  He thought he was going to set the world on fire with his own calling stuff, but it didn’t sell at all.  And then he sold it to this boy that’s in the park here.  He’s a national known caller, he goes all over.  His name is Dick Kenyon.  He does live here and he does have all the tapes.

JD: There are some early Al Casey things, as The Four Notes, that I would be interested in.  There was another local label, BalMar, run by Johnny Balmar.  I have some of his records. 

CR: I think I wound up with BalMar too.  Along towards the last he died.  Johnny did a lot of stuff for us; he was a fiddle player and a very good one.  His wife worked for me for about a year back in my mail order thing.  This Bob Grim has a square dance record store in Long Beach, California.

JD: Here’s another one, on the Smart label by Jimmy Whittle.

CR: I think, unless he’s passed away….he’s a very smart fella.  He was on the radio for a long long time.  He could do anything.  I’ve often wondered if he’s still alive or not.  He was a piano player, and he did a lot of electric gadgets and stuff.  In fact, he had one invention that made him very rich during the war.  The government took it away from him, but they finally paid him off and it made him very rich.

JD: Do you remember Bill Hillman at all?

CR: Bill Hillman, I remember the name.

JD: What happened to that property at 7^th and Weldon?

CR: We sold that to my sister-in-law and brother in law, and they also bought the mail order record service and they continued that out of the house and out front.  They did a tremendous amount of business, and they finally decided to sell it to some people that worked for them. I tried to retire in 1962 or 63, after we sold the store and I went back and worked with my sister-in-law quite a bit, part time, and them we moved to Prescott and I got a job and worked for 10 years, until 1975.  I was working for a beauty supply company selling to the local beauty shops.  Shortly after that my wife passed away.  I enjoy Prescott and I built my place up there in 1945.  I bought a lot, sight unseen for $300 and when I went up to look at it I thought to myself, gosh what did I do here?  It was just a big pile of rocks.  A week or so after that we went up with a tape measure and started measuring and come to find out it was next to the rocks.  We had to cut out 13 pine trees to build a house, and it was out on Copper Basin Road, right at the edge of town.  At the time most of the houses were little shacks and we build a concrete 24’ by 24’ place and then when I retired, we built another 24’ by 24’ addition to the place and made a real nice house out of it.  We enjoyed it because we stayed there when I was in the beauty shop business.  And that got me down, so I had to quit it in 1975.  But I’ve had a funny life in my lifetime, I did a lot of things, enjoyed life.  After my wife passed away a couple of years, I met Leta here and she was a retired schoolteacher.  She sold her house and I sold mine at Weldon and 7^th, and we decided to see the world and we have, just about.  We’re not going to have any money left, but we’ve had fun with it.  (Laughs)  I told Floyd the other day, I was over at the house visiting, the kids don’t give much time, they don’t have the time you know, their out going, and I don’t mind, but I said, “You know I’m getting almost to the end of my road, my cash.  As I remember when you guys were in the army for about three or four years I sent you $100 a month that was hard for me to do and I think maybe one of these days its gonna be a time for you to do a little for me.  I don’t know if they’ll do it or not.  (Laughs)  I can go back and live on my social security, which I can, but my money’s about to run out.  (Laughs)  But I’ve had fun with it.  I did everything I wanted to do, just about.

JD: That’s wonderful.

CR: I was eighty-eight in December and I’m pretty lucky to be around.

JD: What was your birthday and when were you born?   

CR: December 4^th, 1905.  Ten years ago, I broke my hip, but up until then I danced four or five times a week.  In fact, I ran the dance at the Washington Senior Citizen’s Adult Center for eight years.  I did all the calling and announcing, and kept the equipment up and all that stuff.   I enjoyed that but when I broke my hip that put a stop to that.  But my wife and I enjoy dancing.  I had two motor homes and we run the wheels off of them.      

                 

                     

 

John Clayton “Clay” Ramsey
(4 Dec. 1905-19 Mar. 1995)