16 VOICES OF THE COUNTRYthe phone long distance to Frank Walker in New York and told him about me, I got a wire from Frank Walker asking me if I be interested in making records for the Victor company. They first recorded you in Nashville at WSM They had no studios here then. I went up in the radio studio and did a couple of sessions. I just got my guys and got around the microphone. The engineer and I kind of worked it out. I was singing the songs; I done all of them dozens of times. That what I did. They released m. There wasn a hit in the bunch, but they made money. The Victor company realized there was something here. I got a letter from Mr. Walker telling me he was going to leave the company and he was going over and form a record company called MGM and there would be a young man taking over his duties in the Victor company by the name of Steven H. Sholes. That scared me to death. I didn know Mr. Walker much less know Steven H. Sholes and being young and green the first thing I said to myself was hat in the heck will happen to me I don know Mr. Walker much less Mr. Sholes.�I didn meet Steve, but he listened to the records they had released and I got a long distance call from him. Of course, I was very apprehensive when I got his call. I thought, hat he going to do, cancel my contract�On the contrary, he liked what he heard. He wanted to bring me into Chicago to their studio and record me. So I did. I went up to Chicago and took my musicians. I got, I believe, two hits out of that session. I got l Hold You in My Heart,�and I got hat How Much I Love You.� hat How Much I Love You�was released and just in a few weeks it was a hit. Jukeboxes meant a lot then. It was on every jukebox everywhere. He was the greatest thing that happened to me, Steve was. Because he liked me. It wasn very long after he got there that I became a good seller. He found good songs for me. After I went into Chicago a couple of times and recorded, he started bringing me into New York. I go to New York and record because there were no studios here. I go on the train, take my guys, my musicians. I wouldn take a bass player because Charlie Grean would play bass for me because he was good. Did Grean also help with arrangements In a sense. There wasn much arranging for what I was doing. I usually had learned the song before I went there. It was me singing a chorus, the steel guitar would play a chorus and me sing another chorus. It was about over then. But they were selling. One time I went up [to New York]. It was just when I had several hits, and I didn realize really how much I was selling. I was selling tremendously well. And I thought all those pop artists were selling a lot more records than I was. It turned out, I learned in later years, I was outselling all of them. It didn cost anything to make my records. They have a pop date with Como or Mindy Carson or Vaughn Monroe or somebody and have twenty-five, thirty musicians. Well, somebody got to pay for that. I go into the studio with five musicians.
