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By ROBERT PRICE He never had a big hit record, never became a bona fide star. But it’s hard to imagine what direction the Bakersfield music phenomenon of the 1950s and ’60s might have taken without Bill Woods. Almost every prominent Bakersfield musician of that era seems to have crossed paths with Woods, a versatile entertainer and disc jockey who came to be a trusted and influential mentor. He gave Buck Owens his first big job as a performer and encouraged both Cousin Herb Henson and Ferlin Husky to move to Bakersfield, where both became vital links in the early evolution of the Bakersfield Sound. Woods once sat down and tallied the names of performers whose lives he had changed in some significant way, either because he had advised them, hired them to play with his Orange Blossom Playboys or found them a job elsewhere. He came up with 47 names.
“Bill Woods started a whole bunch of talent in this town,” said singer-guitarist Tommy Hays. “He could play keyboard, guitar, fiddle, darn near anything. And, man, could he talk. That was his real talent. He could sell an Eskimo an icebox. “He got me a recording session with Smiley Maxidon, who had a radio show. He said, ‘Smiley, this fella plays guitar.’ Smiley said, ‘Well, Bill, we’re in pretty good shape right now as far as guitar players go.’ Bill said, ‘Well, I know you can find something for one as good as Tommy.’ Smiley says, ‘Well, uh, OK, Bill.’ ” Woods, the son of a Pentecostal preacher, was born in 1924 in Denison, Texas, a town along the Red River separating Texas from Oklahoma. Dwight Eisenhower was born there, too, back in 1890, and Buck Owens was born just down the road in nearby Sherman. Woods got his first guitar, a Regal, at age 12, not long after his family followed a late-’30s oil boom to Longview, Texas. He didn’t show much interest in playing at first, but things changed at the tent camp where the Woods family settled. “A Mexican family lived next door and they played trumpets and guitars most every night out in front of their tent,” Woods said. “One day I asked if I could take my guitar and sit out there and watch them, and maybe play along. They said, ‘Sure,’ and it grew from there.” In August 1940, the Rev. L.F. Woods brought his family to Arvin. Bill, just 16, took a job driving a grape-hauling truck for a winery. “The winery was really just a hole in the ground, with a couple guys who had boots and pitchforks, stomping on grapes,” Woods said. “After seeing them stomp on those grapes, spitting their tobacco juice and Lord knows what else, I decided I would never drink wine. But I have drank enough coffee to kill me.” After a year, the family moved to Woodlake, near Visalia. Woods played his guitar in church, but when the war broke out, he moved north to Richmond, where he worked as a boilermaker in the shipyards.
I played upright bass with the Arizona Wranglers and (bandleader) Elwin Cross, out of Fresno. It was really swinging back then.” After the war, Woods played a little in Bakersfield, then in Las Vegas, and then, returning again to Bakersfield, at the Clover Club. Then came his biggest gig to that point: a job playing piano and fiddle for Tommy Duncan, the vocalist who had become famous as the frontman for Bob Wills.
It was while he was on the road with Duncan in 1949 that Woods met Husky, then a budding singer-guitarist trying to find his way in the music business. Woods eventually suggested Husky move to Bakersfield, where the club scene was rapidly evolving into something special. Husky took that advice: He got a job as a disc jockey and a lead performer at the Rainbow Gardens, where he subsequently “discovered” Tommy Collins and Dallas Frazier, who would become notable stars in the coming decade. Husky also met Jean Shepard, with whom he recorded the duet that launched both singers. A few years earlier, Woods had made the same suggestion to Henson, then a little-known musician living in Fresno. Woods suggested Henson try his luck in Bakersfield, and by 1953 Henson (along with Woods and Billy Mize) had his own daily program on KERO-TV, “Cousin Herb’s Trading Post.” Viewers could pick up Cousin Herb and KERO, one of the first TV stations in the San Joaquin Valley, clear up to Fresno. In 1950, Woods moved back to Bakersfield and started what would be a 14-year run at the Blackboard, the Bakersfield honky-tonk whose stage attracted most every major country-music star of the era. Woods hired Owens to play guitar, and eventually encouraged him to step up to the microphone and sing. “I played eight times a week - seven days a week and twice on Sunday,” Woods said. “And on top of that I had a job DJ-ing at KPMC, which later became KNZR. I must have been crazy.” As if all that weren’t enough, Woods also became a stock-car racer of some note. By the early 1960s, however, he had virtually retired from racing to concentrate on music. In 1963, his song “Truck Drivin’ Man” was released. “I was out at Bakersfield Speedway doing a remote broadcast for KWAC radio,” Woods said. “I’d already quit racing by that time. This guy had a car all set up to run in the destruction derby and his driver didn’t show up to drive it. I said, ‘Hell, I’ll drive it.’ ” Just as the competition started, Woods sensed that something wasn’t right. He turned the car toward the pit area, intending to locate the problem. But before he could escape the melee of shredding sheet metal, his car was hit almost simultaneously from the front and back. Two vertebras in Woods’ back popped loose. Woods reinjured his back three years later and was never quite the same. After two years of couches, beds and television sets, he took a job as assistant manager of a Mojave radio station, then came back to Bakersfield and played yet again in the clubs. “But my fingers were messed up, my nerves were shot, from that wreck,” Woods said. He improved well enough to land a job playing piano on tour with Merle Haggard in 1972-73. Woods also helped record several songs as a member of Haggard’s band, including “It Ain’t Love But It Ain’t Bad.” Haggard recorded a song about Woods, a Red Simpson composition appropriately named “Bill Woods From Bakersfield.” (Simpson also recorded his own versions of the tribute.) Woods, in turn, named a son after Haggard. Merle Haggard Woods, the fourth of his seven children, was born prematurely in 1971, so undersized that the Woodses put off naming him for fear he wouldn’t make it. But the baby pulled through, and Woods, figuring the infant had, in a sense, endured tribulations as serious as those of his singing ex-con friend, gave the baby his name. Woods has endured some serious tribulations himself. In recent years, he’s undergone an angioplasty procedure, followed by a debilitating flu, and then a broken hip. For a year now, Woods has been wheelchair-bound following surgery for a total hip replacement. Therapy and recuperation are going slowly. Today he is modest about his contributions to Bakersfield’s unique musical reputation. “I was just one of the gang,” he said. “I didn’t get them all started, but if they were from Bakersfield I probably did. We were just a lot of friends trying to help each other. It wasn’t like it is now, where you have a band here and a band there. We all ran together, we’d all meet at a certain cafe. It was special, I guess.”
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