Chapter 6
FIFTEEN YEARS LEFT
After the success of our performance, Darlene gave us a regular spot at the Indigo Lounge, and we started to hone our show into something less slapdash.
I’d heard someone ask when the country girl with the sweet voice was playing, and I didn’t want that to be my only identity.
I saw other acts pretending to be big, clowny hillbillies.
Some called it pride, but I didn’t see how jumping around, acting like a poor, ignorant idiot showed pride.
To me, being a hillbilly was a refusal to let anyone tell me who I was.
And I wanted a new look.
But it was more than that, of course. Every time we went onstage, I worried someone would recognize me and turn me in. I didn’t just need a stage costume—I needed a disguise.
Hess and I stood in our underwear in front of the floor-length mirror in Phoebe’s room, watching each other in the glass as Phoebe ran a tape measure down the lengths of us.
We’d seen each other in bathing suits plenty of times that spring, but there was something more intimate in the thin, pale nylons against our skin.
My nipples were little pricks against my bra, and I hoped Phoebe would chalk it up to the breeze running through the room.
“So. Tell me what’s in your head.”
I took out a few pictures from magazines, of Hollywood starlets with their big, smooth platinum hair.
Phoebe studied the photos, then dove into the artful garbage dump of her room and pulled out a periwinkle box.
She took off the lid and reverently lifted a large blonde wig up by its roots and held it in front of me.
It glowed like a holy artifact.
When I nodded, she gave me a snipped foot of pantyhose, and I stuffed my unruly hair into it. She carefully placed the wig on my head and pulled it left and right. Then she turned me around to face the mirror.
The effect was arresting. I have such a tiny body, and the largesse of the hair and its polished metal color—well, it was imposing. Like a weapon fresh out of the military lab. It inspired awe, and maybe a little fear. It was exactly what I was looking for.
For the makeup, I asked for the full Pauline—a woman who used to sell herself around the logging camps near the holler. She painted her makeup so thick you couldn’t see what was under it. Like a beautiful mask. That’s what I wanted.
Phoebe had her own vision for the clothes. She could spin the most unexpected whimsy; she was the one responsible for Tima’s enchanting silver suit. She’d watched her sing one night on the porch under a full moon, and a vision had come to her, of Tima dipped in moonlight.
For us, she’d taken inspiration from an afternoon we’d spent together in a wildflower meadow.
She’d constructed a butterfly wing pattern out of strips of iridescent cloth in different colors, so that each dress looked like a psychedelic quilt, the colors shifting and coming alive as they transformed across the surface of the fabric.
I trailed my fingers over the skirt, and I couldn’t believe it was made for me. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
When we walked onstage that night, it felt like we were emerging as something new. I’d morphed inside my hillbilly chrysalis, and in that moment under the spotlight, I burst through it with two feet of blonde hair and a riot of color.
I stepped up to the mic and for the first time, introduced us as the Walker Sisters. It was my idea—it added an extra layer of protection to my identity, and if people thought we were sisters, they wouldn’t wonder at our closeness.
We’d learned our lesson that first show—the audience wanted to hear songs they already knew, even if we changed them up a bit. Our specialty was taking familiar ballads and speeding them up so you could shake to them like the Monkees or the Beatles.
But that night our sound was different. Like it’d been dipped in nectar and rolled in butterfly shimmer.
Since Hess and I had started fooling around, our voices had changed—I could hear it in the harmony when we sang.
The touching and retreating, touching and retreating, the space between us charged with a palpable force.
The audience could feel it, too.
The heat.
It was late when I emerged in my cotton dress to close up for the night.
A cool, composed man in a cream suit stood out among the red-faced cowboys and sweat-slick girls.
While I emptied glasses and scrubbed the bar, he leaned against it and asked me where else we played and other probing questions.
I thought he was hitting on me, and I answered with a polite distance.
Hess and I never talked openly about what we were doing or how we felt about each other, but there was an understanding that we would be true to one another. I didn’t want anyone but her.
After I’d finished closing and was ready to strip off my apron and tell everyone to go home to their mamas, the man got down to business.
“Miss Lulabelle, my name is Randy Kane, and I work at ACM Records. I’d like to record you and your sister singing a few songs, maybe put together enough for an album. Y’all got something real special here.”
I thought he was blowing rainbows up my skirt. “Bullshit.”
He choked on his whiskey. “Excuse me, ma’am?”
“You’re serious?”
“Yes, ma’am. This is a real offer. What do you say?”
I called Hess over, and he repeated everything to her. Hess, ever the cool operator, asked him how much he was going to pay us. That hadn’t even crossed my mind. I’d have done it for free.
After a bit of negotiating, he gave us an address and a time for the next day.
We waited until he’d left the bar before screeching up at the ceiling like cats.
Hess took me by the waist and we started dancing around the room to our own tired voices singing Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.
” Darlene came out to see what the racket was, and I told her what had happened.
She smiled, but she also looked a little worried, and she told us to be careful.
“If something’s too good to be true, it probably is.”
She sounded like the people back home, and while I appreciated her, I’d left the holler’s negativity behind for a reason. I was lifting off the ground, and no one was gonna pull me back.
Late that night, Phoebe whipped us up a pair of simple creamy-green dresses. While she worked, Martha took us aside and, in a rare stretch of talking, coached us on how to conduct ourselves.
“First off, don’t walk in and start giggling.”
I was a little offended. “Martha, we ain’t idiots.
I know how to act right—” But she gave me a look, and I knew what she meant.
Hess and I had fun with each other. There was a fair amount of giggling.
It was a shame we couldn’t just live in our joy, that we had to flatten ourselves to be taken seriously. But that was the reality.
“You’re there for a job. You are an expert in singing, and they need to respect that. You got it?”
We both nodded. Sharing wisdom was an act of love for Martha.
In the hallway outside my bedroom, I passed Tima, who stuck her pinky out. I hooked mine in hers, and we met eyes as we kissed our fists. We didn’t have to say the words.
Whatever it takes.
The next day, Hess and I showed up at the studio polished and serious faced in our dresses like mint ice cream.
Randy led us down a hallway lined with rooms of singers performing into microphones, the sound muffled, each square like a scene from a silent movie.
A red-nosed old man still belting from the heart, a dimpled boy singing from beneath a cowboy hat one size too large, a young woman shaking with nerves in her braids and gingham shirt.
We finally arrived at our room, where a small band of men sat looking bored.
Hess and I explained we played our own guitars, but Randy assured us it was better to have real musicians for the recording.
Our playing would do just fine at shows, but this had to be on a different level.
I wasn’t some big-time guitarist, but I thought Hess was pretty good.
I felt the emotion of the music more when I could feel it vibrating through my hands, releasing the creature that stayed pent up inside me.
But I didn’t say a word. I was too nervous that any objection would change his mind, and he’d ask us to leave.
Without any instruction, he told us to get on with it and start singing, and that’s what we did.
But soon he had to stop and show us how to sing for a recording, as if it was predictable that women wouldn’t know such things.
There was a lot of starting and stopping, adjusting and readjusting.
When we did sing, it was hard to get to that place where I felt lifted.
He treated us more like hotel maids than artists reaching toward the sublime.
Just as I was finally getting into the groove, I looked up, and there was famous country singer Clayton Redd standing in the booth, watching me sing. It was like seeing Jesus in the supermarket. I couldn’t believe it was really him.
I glanced over at Hess, and her eyes widened in acknowledgment. I tried my very hardest for the rest of the track, wanting to impress him. When I finished the song, I searched for him in the booth to gauge his reaction, but he was gone.
After we’d been at it for an hour, Randy said Hess needed a bit of vocal coaching, and he sent her to a room down the hall. He told the band to take a break and get some lunch, and he and I stayed in the booth to work on the arrangements.
I thought, perhaps he did respect my instincts, even if I lacked experience and formal training. I was excited to learn from him and be a part of the process.