proached him backstage at the Opry one night, probably early ‘60s when dad was em- ployed with Webb Pierce. Marty told him if he wasn’t doing so well on his own did he want to come to work with him. And dad looked at him and said, “When do I start?” And he worked with him almost 23 years.
At what age did you and Dennis start playing? I started playing guitar myself when I was about 13 years old. I’d just turned 13. And I’d fashioned a little something with my dad’s old guitar strings, plywood, an L-bracket and some finishing nails and just flailed on it
year after and he played them for about a year or so then he switched over to guitar, too. And after that we both started writing and playing parties, you know school parties, and stuff. Nothing real professional until we got out of high school.
Give us a bit of a time line. Did the Winters Bros Band come first, or did you play first behind your Dad. I never really played behind my dad until much later. Now, I’d play with my dad at home and he’d teach me stuff. We wrote a lit- tle bit together which is where my first cut, “Do Me A Favor,” came from. “Do Me A Favor” was my first song that Marty Robbins recorded. “Do Me A Favor” will be on my new CD that we’re working on, but more about that later. Speaking of firsts - my first car was
a gift from Mel Tillis. It was a 1955 Ford which I commenced to drive the wheels off of. Then my dad bought me a Rambler, which I wasn’t real crazy about, but it was transportation. It served as our first band vehicle. Dennis was playing drums, a close friend of ours was playing bass on an electric guitar that we had rigged into a bass and we made an amp out of an
The original Winters Brothers Band.
kinda like a banjo. There wasn’t any way to really tune it and my neighbor up the street, Mr. Roger Price, felt sorry for me. He found a guitar at a flea market or yard sale and he bought it and gave it to me. And the way I got new strings was when dad changed his and I got his old ones. Dad taught me my first six chords on the guitar and after that he looked at me and told me I was on my own. He put me in touch and kept me around other ac- complished musicians who showed me more. Dennis started on drums. Probably about a
old tape recorder that had speakers. We were a high school combo called The
Open Ditch.
Talk a bit about the WBB, the original players, how you got a record deal, working with Taz. Was it recorded at Capricorn? The whole shootin' match. When we moved out to Franklin, we lived across the road from Marty on his property. There was this old shack that Dennis and I turned into a band room. That’s when Jack Pruett, son of Jack and Jeannie Pruett, played bass and an old high school friend, Bruce
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