The Story of The Stools

Back in 1950 Hank Williams came off the road and went to visit his wife, Audrey, in the hospital. She was suffering from the aftermath and infection from a self-administered abortion. Like Hank, she had no compunction about knocking boots when her spouse wasn’t around and the rumor around the whiskey cooler was that Florida Bandleader and general dickhead Pappy Neil McCormick was the father. He was a steel guitar player and fronted his band The Hawaiian Troubadours (so called to hide the fact they were all Creek Indians and not exotic Pacific Islanders).

It is unknown if it was racism or prudence that inspired Audrey’s self-mutilation, but when Hank got to the hospital, she refused to even kiss him hello, and blamed him for the whole affair. Later that night Williams struck upon the idea for the lyrics to Cold, Cold Heart. The melody he helped himself to from T. Texas Tyler’s You’ll Still Be in My Heart.

Williams biographer and all-around Rolling Stone Magazine douche canoe, Chet Flippo, claims that Paul Gilley actually wrote the song Cold, Cold Heart, as well as I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, but the truth of this claim could never be established as Hank Williams arranged for Gilley to be drowned in a swimming pool in 1957.

Legend has it that Audrey Williams also inspired The Stools song Drink Until You Want Me, when she was hanging around Cosmo Ditmar and he mused to Elvin Anderson about how much he would actually have to drink to want to sleep with the aging matriarch, but the real story is even more disconsolate.

It all started with Virginia Lucille Overstake, a Decatur Illinois high school kid with a knack for creating country songs and short-lived marriages. After having a couple of different singing groups with her sisters, she changed her name to Jenny Lou Carson and tried to make it as with a sharpshooting, bullwhip cracking, lasso spinning “Annie Oakley” act, but that didn’t pan out either.

However, in the 40’s and 50’s ‘Jenny Lou Carson’ was one of Country Music’s most prolific song writers, and the first woman to write a #1 Country Hit, You Two-Timed Me Once Too Often sung by Tex Ritter. In the 30’s and 40’s she was also married four times before chucking it all and moving to Texas with her mother in 1953.

That’s where she first met Elvin Anderson.

Not much is known about their relationship, although Elvin’s Bulimian Rhapsody, with its references to ‘Jenny’, was written around this time, and, although she claimed it was written about Hank William’s drinking, Jenny Lou’s Let Me Go, Devil was also written during their whirlwind romance..

With lyrics like:

First the gamblin', then the cheatin',

Then the bottles of rye.

Got the habit, had to have it, or die'

I lost m' pride, lost m' friends, it's the end, devil.

Let me go, let me go, let me go.

It is not hard to imagine them aimed right at Elvin. The couple seemed perfectly happy hating each other and exploring the depths of her roping and bullwhipping abilities when Mitch Miller reared his bald head.

Fiddle playing singer Wade Ray recorded Let Me Go, Devil for RCA in the summer of 1953 followed by a Georgie Shaw’s Orchestra cover on Decca a few weeks later (starting Decca’s long, twisted relationship with the song), then followed, in short order, Tex Ritter on Capitol and Johnny Bond and his Red River Valley Boys on Comlumbia. It was Bond’s recording that caught the ear of Mitch Miller, but he found the lyrics depressing and brought in Ben Weisman, Fred Wise and Kathleen Twomey to punch the lyrics up.

Weisman would eventually write more songs that were recorded by Elvis that any other songwriter, Fred Wise co-wrote the classic A – You’re Adorable as well as several songs for Elvis’ movies and Twomey, who, in addition to writing for Elvis, wrote songs covered by Sinatra, Doris Day, Eartha Kitt and even The Beatles. The trio totally reworked Jenny Lou’s song, turning it into Let Me Go, Lover under the pseudonym Al Hill.

That’s when Miller stepped up to work his magic. He had Joan Weber record a cover of the song and then got it placed on the November 15, 1954 episode of CBS’s Studio One, a murder mystery that revolved around a DJ. He even got his buddy, Franklin J. Schaffner (the episode’s director who had also directed an episode of Person to Person featuring Miller), to change the name of the episode to Let Me Go, Lover and the song was played 6 times during the broadcast. Then Miller sent 2,000 promo copies of the song to radio stations around the US and stocked the stores around the country with copies a week before the TV show aired on.

Let Me Go, Lover sold over 100,000 copies in the first week after the TV show aired.

The only problem with Mitch Miller’s plan was, unbeknownst to him, Joan Weber was knocked up when the song was recorded (some say with Miller’s own hoof-footed devil spawn) and she wasn’t able to tour or take full advantage of, or fully exploit, the song’s success.

Just as the single was cresting, Joan was crowning and gave birth to her daughter. This set loose the hound of hell that are the knock-off cover version. Teressa Brewer rushed one out on Decca with The Lancers backing her up, as did Patti Page on Mercury, June Carter on Columbia, Carmen Taylor on Guyden, and both Sunny Gale and Hank Snow released covers on RCA. Peggy Lee (Decca), Dean Martin (Capitol), and Mary Del (Cadence) followed suit over the next year along with Ruby Murray (Columbia), Penny Nicholls (Embassy) and Lita Roza (Decca) in the UK.

As an interesting side note, in the 60’s Kathy Kirby recorded Let Me Go, Lover for Decca with the Satan worshiping Jimmy Page on guitar and Let Me Go, Lover was the last song Billy Fury recorded for Polydor before his death in 1983. Polydor, of course, had just acquired British Decca’s catalogue. Jimmy Page, of course, played guitar on Billy Fury sessions in the 60’s giving birth to the idea that was a curse, the song certainly haunted Decca…

Franklin J. Schaffner, the director of the episode of Studio One that kicked this all off would later go on to direct the movies Patton, Papillon, The Boys From Brazil and The Planet of the Apes. From 1961 to ’63 he served as JKF’s TV counselor and advocated for a complete ban of The Stools from American TV; but more on that later.

The star of the Studio One episode in question was Joe Maross, who would appear with The Stools’ Antonio Moretti in the Deadly Cargo episode of B.J. and The Bear. Maross played Officer Frank and Antonio was a Guard at the Institute where they kept the deadly virus B.J. is racing to get to DC to show Congress the company Mary Louis Weller worked for is up to no good… Because everything cursed is connected to The Stools…

Singer of the original version of Let Me Go, Lover, 17-year-old Joan Weber, was reduced by the curse to being just another one of those cautionary music industry stories. Her husband, a 25-year-old small-time pimp of a bandleader and Navy Vet out of New Jersey named Harry Verfaille managed to get her hooked up with Charles Randolph Grean, a college dropout and pretentious A&R geek at RCA and Dot Records working out of the Brill Building in New York. Grean was a true shit bird of a former bass player on cruise ships and in the Catskills, who also played on some Eddie Arnold and Hank Snow tracks and had once ripped off Fred Spielman’s song Rendezvous with his own composition I Dreamed, which his ex-wife Betty Johnson had a hit with in 1956. The courts found in favor of Spielman.

Grean also “wrote” the 1950 hit novelty song The Thing for Phil Harris, although the melody was a direct rip off of the traditional The Taylor’s Boy. Charles Randolph Grean is also the genius behind Leonard Nimoy’s Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space album and he recorded a disco version of the Star Trek Theme in 1976…

Any who, after Joan Weber’s daughter was born and she was finally able to get back to work; she was booked on the Ed Sullivan show and recorded several more singles, but none of them did very much, and her husband Harry, now acting as her manager, wasn’t doing her any favors with the suits at the record company.

Columbia dropped her in 1959. Joan dumped Harry, became a librarian and basically fell off the face of the earth. Although she did release a single, A Girl’s Prayer in 1963 on Crosley Records in Philly (which is really just a step up from a vanity record) and she played Penny in a 1964 porno movie written and directed by Tony Orlando (no, not that one) called The Block. It was the first adult film for American Film Distributing Corp (AFDC), the studio that gave us The Stud Farm, Professor Lust and Blood Sucking Freaks

In 1969 Casey Kasem did a feature about Joan Weber on his American Top 40 syndicated radio program and Let Me Go, Lover briefly hit the charts again. Columbia tried to mail her a long over-due royalty check, but it was returned “address unknown” because by this time Joan had given up and checked into the Ancora Mental Hospital, where she died at age 45 of heart failure.

At any rate, back in the 1950’s, as all of songwriter Jenny Lou Carson’s relationships did, Elvin and Jenny Lou split the sheets and as Elvin always did, he wrote the cutting song, this time Drink Until You Want Me, as a swipe at Jenny’s Let Me Go song and her temperate ways.

Now you know.

In an attempt to make the song timely Drink Until You Want Me’s lyrics about Brad Pitt and his wife were added for the remixed release of the Draconian Messures album by Al Floss, not realizing Brad Pitt is already a little passe. Anderson refused to rerecord the new lyrics and an Elvin Anderson impersonator was brough in to dub the new lines.

Now you know, indeed…