Kick Up Your Heels 
Jeff McCord with Frankie Miller
(Page 3 of 3)
FM: Yes, and they’ve just released a new one called Line Up the Louisiana Hayride, which I was a member of the Hayride and they just brought that out, I don’t know, three weeks ago or so. And these were taken off the old Louisiana Hayride tapes from ’59 and ’60, the old tapes that they’d kept, you know, they kept ‘em, brushed ‘em up. He put out I think it was 15 songs on that…Tracy Pitcock is the owner, I don’t know if you know Tracy or not, but he’s the owner of Heart of Texas Record Company. And he went to Shreveport and dug through these tapes ‘til he found the songs that he wanted to put out of mine. ‘Cause I was on the Hayride when Presley was there.
JM: That’s great. I love that there’s this resurgence in your music, because it’s wonderful music and people should be able to hear it, and I’m grateful to Bear Family that they’ve collected all this stuff and put it out. And Heart of Texas Records as well. At the end of your sessions with Starday, you kind of quit the business for a while, did you not?
FM: Yeah, I left. I left Nashville, I moved back to Texas.
JM: What prompted that?
FM: I was tired, very, very tired and sick of the road. Being gone away from my family. Had two daughters and a wife and I just, I had all I could take of it. I told ‘em, “I’m going back home.” And I came back, and I didn’t do anything in the music business for 25, 30 years.
JM: And during this time did you miss the music business, did you think about going back to it?
FM: No I really didn’t. I was out of it, and when I retired, some of the guys, they’d been … I recorded a session after I retired for Stop Records, a guy named Pete Drake there in Nashville. He wanted me to do a session, Tommy Hill was working for him at the time, and they brought me back up there and I done a session, they released one record. The other one they didn’t ever release, it was in the can, but they have it in this, an earlier CDs of the Bear Family deal. So I wasn’t out of all it altogether, pretty well out of it, but I didn’t play anywhere anymore.
JM: So, is Tommy Hill the guy who got you back in to performing again?
FM: Tommy did a lot to help me, he was always a lifetime friend of mine ‘til he passed away, Tommy was. Guy here in Fort Worth named Jim Eaves, has a band here. He met me and wanted me to come out and sing some with him, so I started doing that—pretty soon I was back singing again, back to business.
JM: Didn’t realize how you’d missed it, I guess?
FM: Yeah, I really did, I’m really having a lot of fun now.
JM: That’s great. Now, I know you’ve shown up on records from Floyd Tillman and Cornell Hurd recently as well, so, how much are you performing these days? I know you’re what, 78 years old now, is that correct?
FM: 77! But I perform every week. The weeks that I’m out of town—I’m here and there, you know—but when I’m in town, I work every Saturday at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop out in the historic stockyards in Fort Worth, with Jimmie Eaves band. We work at the record shop itself. Fact I just got back from Nashville, Monday morning. I’d been up there since last Wednesday, I done the, what you call Ernest Tubb Midnight Jamboree. I hosted that last Saturday, there in Nashville.
JM: So hearing these old recordings again, what was your reaction to them? Do you think they hold up pretty well?
FM: Oh, man, they, those things that Bear Family put out, they sound better than a 45 does, better than the old 45’s used to. ‘Course the playback that you use now are a lot better too, the machines that you play ‘em back on. But they’ve done, really a bang-up job putting these things out, in this box set, they really did, they made ‘em sound good. It surprised me, it really surprised me the sound that these things have, from that long ago, you know.
JM: It did me as well. And a lot of the music I had not heard before, which also surprised me, because a lot of reissue labels, you know, they’ll end up reissuing stuff that’s rather obscure for a reason. But I think this music has a lot of appeal, and I’m surprised that so much of it is not better know than it is. Why do you think you’re not as well-known as your contemporaries?
FM: Well … ‘cause I left Nashville, I got out of the business for about 25, 30 years. I left when I still had a recording contract and everything. Man, people would have killed for a recording contract. But I come back home and just got out of it. If I had just stayed in Nashville … see I got out before the big boom hit in country music, which was in, I guess the late ‘60s and the ‘70s. All during the ‘70s country music was really booming in Nashville, and I got out before that era, you know. If I’d just stayed in there I probably … I think with what I do, I think I could of rode it out and been a lot bigger artist than I was. I’ve been told that over and over and over and over.
JM: Any regrets on getting out of the business?
FM: No, I really don’t have any.
JM: Describe to me what the road was like then, I think a lot of people don’t realize how hard it was.
FM: Well, for one thing, that was before buses. We traveled in cars. And a lot of times we pulled a trailer, we had instruments, and sometimes we was in station wagons with the instruments in there, and the bookends were sometimes four, five hundred miles apart. You’d do a show in say one town, and the next town was 400 miles from there. And you had to get there to do a matinee at two o’clock the next day. So you didn’t get much rest, and it was really a grueling thing. I went all the way through Canada before, with Jones and that bunch, you know.
JM: And this was before the days of interstate highways and things like that.
FM: That’s true, you went right through everything. Now, you know, with the buses and all … I see George every once and a while, I go out and we’ll sit on the bus and talk for a while. But these guys, now with the buses and all, Willie too, I’ve been on his buses—you know it’s the way to go, it’s really great if they can do that. But back then, they’ve paid their dues, they went through it. They really did.
JM: That’s the truth. Well, what are your plans, do you plan to record a new record any time soon? What’s next on the horizon?
FM: Yeah, I’m working on some stuff that I’m going to do for Heart of Texas Records. Another CD. Right now I don’t need anything out, I’ve got enough out right now, but probably in 6 months or so, we’ll probably go in and cut another CD for Pitcock’s Heart of Texas Records.
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