I first encountered the name, purported rank, and 45-rpm serial number of Major Bill Smith during my schoolboy days of the early 1960s: Roy Orbison, a certified rock ’n’ roll star, visited my eighth-grade drama class in Amarillo as a guest of the teacher, Dan Johnson.
At that time, Bruce Channel and Delbert McClinton’s Fort Worth recording of “Hey! Baby” (1961-1962) — a gradual breakout hit — was ascending the charts. Orbison handed out copies of his recent hit, “Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream?)” (1962), and invited questions. I asked him how it felt to see his style imitated by some upstart — Channel and Orbison’s voices had struck me as similar.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say ol’ Bruce is imitatin’ me,” Orbison answered. “And you’ve got to remember, I don’t come from any big-time beginnings, my own self.” Orbison and I already were acquainted through our connections with country-rock producer Norman Petty in Eastern New Mexico, who Orbison had outgrown to become a mass-market hitmaker.
“If anybody’s tryin’ to imitate my style,” Orbison said, “it’d be the guy who produced the record. Y’all ever heard tell of an ol’ boy named Major Bill Smith?” My keener interest lay in whatever Roy might reveal about this record-producing racket.
“So then, does Norman Petty know about this Major Bill guy?” I asked.
“I’m surprised Norm hasn’t mentioned him to you,” answered Orbison. “Bill Smith is downstate, in Fort Worth. I’m not even certain he’s a for-real military major — like [Elvis Presley’s handler] Colonel Tom Parker isn’t any kind of a colonel — but Bill presents himself that way. Tried to horn in on Norman Petty’s operations off and on, some years ago, in hopes of gettin’ himself a piece of that Buddy Holly action. Approached me, too, he did, but Norman warned me better…
“So, no, I don’t have any experiences with Major Bill Smith, although I’ve heard some stories ’bout him, cheatin’ this or that singer…, and he’s kind of semi-notorious for puttin’ out covers [imitations] and take-off records that’re intended to sound like other artists’ hits. So, any sound-alike business goin’ on — that’d have to be the doin’s of Major Bill.”
A major-label edition of “Hey! Baby” sold in ever greater numbers, eventually reaching the much-coveted No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100. And for a stretch, William Arthur “Major Bill” Smith (1922-1994) managed to sustain a streak of Top Tenners. I recognized no consistency of style between “Hey! Baby” and follow-up, “Hey, Paula,” which featured vocalists Ray Hildebrand and Jill Jackson. Where “Hey! Baby” had sizzled, “Hey, Paula” merely wallowed in a saccharine oath of suffocating love, but, like its predecessor, it would attain the peak-of-peak positions at No. 1.
Smith’s third breakthrough of 1962-1964 was J. Frank Wilson’s version of “Last Kiss,” a morbid and sanctimonious lament that would have been enough to sour me on Major Bill even without the flabby accompaniment of Wilson’s vocalizing. Of course, the basic rule of any form of appreciation is that there is no accounting for taste, and “Last Kiss” became a hit.
Major Bill Smith, born in Oklahoma, had grown up with a fondness for country and gospel music. He spent World War II with the Army Air Force and survived a shot-down combat mission over Germany.
“Guess I was more of a major on paper,” Smith told fellow journalist Jeffrey M. Guinn and me in 1981. “I was a sergeant... My promotion [was] somethin’ we negotiated as part of my retirement deal — the brass figured I’d have made major sooner or later, anyhow, and I was always pretty good at browbeatin’ people into goin’ along with me.”
At his basement storage-room office in a West Side hairdressing parlor, Major Bill Smith had greeted Guinn and me with this: “’Bout time y’all cotton-pickin’ Star-Telegram people started showin’ some serious interest in the ol’ Maje.” Our transcribed interview became lost in head-office limbo as the Star-Telegram’s proverbial powers that be pondered whether to allow a platform for one of the city’s more outspoken eccentrics.
Editor Jack Tinsley finally came clean: “We’re just not certain that we want to open that can of worms. If you make Major Bill look like a hero, then he’ll be pestering us for more... If you take a more critical tone, ... then he’ll be bad-mouthing us from sunup to sundown... [N]ot really a political force, [but] still he knows where some of the bodies are buried...” By the time a blander narrative had been green-lighted, the delays and fresher developments had left the text in need of updating. I let the pitch slide into nothingness. Not until the 1990s would the newspaper give Major Bill Smith a fuller brush with biographical justice, in a valedictory tone.
As an information officer during the 1950s at Carswell Air Force Base, Smith also wrote songs in hopes of recording deals. A breakthrough came with Sonny James’ 1956 hit, “Twenty Feet of Muddy Water.” Smith left the military in 1959, but he used the honorific of Major Bill in all his later dealings. He achieved several local-radio hits, then scored nationally with those million-seller medalists “Hey! Baby,” “Hey, Paula,” and “Last Kiss.”
As the runaway hits dwindled, Smith’s LeCam label continued with regional releases and occasional national contenders, each pronounced “a cotton-pickin’ smash hit!” These included a batch from Lubbock-born vocalist Delbert McClinton — the ablest such talent Texas had yielded since the Depression Era heyday of Milton Brown.
By 1980, I had joined the Star-Telegram as a base of newsroom operations. Major Bill persisted with the record-cutting projects — some 3,000 platters over a 30-year stretch — and an evangelical attachment to Union Gospel Mission. “Us important people,” he would say, “have got us a natural-born moral duty to ... lend a hand to the scum of the earth.”
Onward into the 1980s-1990s, Smith developed a strange new platform: He announced that Elvis Presley remained among the living, incognito (and never mind the 1977 death notices), and had declared his survival to Major Bill Smith, alone among humanity. This manifesto included new faux-Presley recordings, some featuring a persuasive impersonator billed as “the King,” as well as appearances by Major Bill on such daytime-television gossip programs as “The Montel Williams Show.”
Smith insisted that I was missing out on the Pulitzer-bait story of the century. He dropped in frequently on the newsroom, unannounced, to the extent that the Telegram’s security guard, Edna Turner, introduced a “Maje Alert!” message to the intercom system. Finally, I said: “Okay, then, Bill, how’s about an interview with your returned ‘King’? I’ve interviewed him a time or two, so he ought to remember me.”
Smith barked back: “Nope! The King says, first, you gotta believe... But how’s about you sign a paper up front, swearin’ that you trust in his presence, and then I’ll see whatall I can put together.”
“‘Trust in his presence’—?” I returned. “Whom are we talkin’ about, here, Bill?”
“We’re talkin’ ’bout the King, that’s who, boy, and you watch yo’ mouth, lest there be hellfire to pay!”
The telephone barrage persisted, now augmented with Smith’s news that he had fallen terminally ill. I attempted a sympathetic reply, and he snapped back with: “Just shut up and listen when I try to tell you somethin’! Okay?”
I sensed a terrible aloneness, there, but Smith’s abrasive crust was impenetrable. The rants now consisted of urgent developments in the clandestine comeback of Elvis Presley, grisly clinical details of Smith’s “struggle to the bitter end against the Grim Reaper,” and this recurring plea: “Reckon when you’re gonna wise up and publish the ol’ Maje’s life story before it’s too late?”
Too late.
