Unearthing a Legend

North Texas revels in wiping the slate and rebuilding, often burying its past, both good and bad. After exhausting the typical Top 10 list of things to do in the area, I scraped deeper, digging for little jewels of fun facts and shiny finds, weird little oddities or juicy tidbits tied to place and time. Something to bond me to the local.

I spent many afternoons indulging in five-minute field trips, finding the hidden gems no one really talks about. Knowing ZZ Top’s Dusty Hill used to work at DFW airport was a fun find, which led down a rabbit hole to tie him to a fake touring version of The Zombies in the 1970s before ZZ Top formed. I stumbled onto Campo Verde, Dimebag Darrell’s favorite restaurant, which looks like Christmas was regurgitated from floor to ceiling. No, these aren’t tourist holes, but it is interesting to see pieces of famous stories. I mapped music video sites, celebrity high schools, childhood homes, and arrest sites, and I even found Meatloaf tied to JFK. I hastily put together a tour for others to follow if they wanted something to do that wasn’t the normal attraction of food or drinks.

*****

While I nerded out on my music history project, I landed on the Big D Jamboree. The Sportatorium stage, rocked by all the greats of the time, was a regular platform for an eye-catching musician named Charline Arthur. In the 1980s, it was where the infamous Von Erich family would wrestle, but decades before that, it was where country and the developing rock genre were on fire.

There, the very fiery Charline shared the stage with the men of the time and held her own. Part of her legend was her defiance to “ladylike” societal norms. She played her guitar and sang while smoking, drinking, and *gasp* wearing pants! She ran the stage her way, even playing lying down if she were so inclined. She claimed to have shaken her hips long before Elvis had the reputation for the signature move. Ladylike? What for? She was her own woman. But there would be a price to pay for standing her ground.

All these years later, I wear pants when I want, don’t smoke but I could, and still find myself having to prove myself for not fitting the mold of a drummer. Women play drums, too, in fact, more than get seen or heard. I play louder and harder, just to get past the typical assumption that I started playing because of a guy. I just want to hit things (not people) in a beautiful, musical way, and that shouldn’t be something one has to explain. Defiance through music was a creed we seemed to share. I had to know more about the woman known as the “female Elvis.”

*****

Charline Arthur, nee Highsmith, was born in 1929 in Henrietta, Texas, to a big musical family. Barely 12, she recorded her first song, “I’ve Got the Boogie Blues,” on Bullet Records. Her sound was gritty, vibrant, and rich in tone. Even that young, her voice electrified. Multitalented, she played guitar, harmonica, piano, and banjo and even brought comedy into her shows. With so many siblings, it made sense that she learned how to be impossible to ignore.

By 15, she bought her first real guitar and sang on the radio in Paris, Texas. It wasn’t long after that she married and took the name Arthur. She didn’t stay home and take a traditional wife role. If anything, she chose to amplify her status as a performer.

In 1949, fluttering all over Texas playing her music, she landed a job at KERB radio. She also recorded music for Imperial Records, catching the attention of Col. Tom Parker. He would later become a household name himself when he managed Elvis. Col. Parker got her on the RCA Victor roster in 1953, and she recorded nearly 30 songs before moving to DFW.

Back at the Big D Jamboree at the Sportatorium in Dallas, she was the only woman headliner. She was the only woman posing with a cigarette in her mouth, and it did not go unnoticed that she shook her hips in a way that even had Elvis talking. She shared the stage with Elvis himself and other greats like Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins, but no one could outshine Charline.

They sure did try, though. RCA wanted to choose what songs she recorded and how. They were mostly ones that fit the reputation they wanted her to have. But she wanted to stay true to her bluesy, gutsy, and flashy style. They chose not to renew her contract.

Charline continued recording from her home in Dallas in later years and looked for ways to keep her music moving. Pellum’s Eldorado Records gave her an opportunity, and she took it. Although she was eventually added to the Rockabilly Hall of Fame and had boots and artifacts in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, she no longer jumped off amplifiers to the raucous noise of a crowd. The years do what they do as her career faded. She passed away in 1987 and rests in Tarrant County.

As I pored over the images of her career, the one that captivates me the most is one of her almost lying down onstage as she sings in her sparkling jumpsuit. Yes, ma’am. As it should be. I decided to go pay this fiery femme a visit and offer my respects.

*****

If you know what you’re looking for, you can find just about anything online. I set off to the cemetery to find her custom-carved guitar headstone in Lot 179, Space 2, in the Sunrise Garden.

I made sure to wear my percussion hoodie to show her women are still rocking and busting down doors, and I was strangely excited for someone heading to the cemetery. Of course, once I got there, the somber reality set in. It was completely empty except for a lone mourner in the distance, and I really had only a plot and lot number to go by to find a small headstone on the ground in this enormous place.

Unless you know where you are going in a cemetery, it is awkward. I wandered quite a while trying to figure out where Lot 179 was, much less Space 2. I didn’t see any kind of markers. So, I meandered. An employee on a cart stopped to ask me if he could help me find someone. I gave him a name, but he didn’t recognize it.

“Family?”

I have a really hard time lying, so I just said “fan.” I told him I was looking for Lot 179, Space 2, but didn’t know what it meant.

He showed me a map and directed me to 179, adding that the spaces are numbered from the fence line.

I paced the aisles but didn’t see that custom-carved guitar anywhere. It should have been right where I was standing. I stayed, thinking I must have counted wrong, and roamed the surrounding area with nothing. I turned to walk away, thinking I must have found bad intel online, when the employee caught up to me again.

“No luck,” I said. “It’s so weird because this last name, Hightower, is her family name, and there are Hightowers all over but not her. I guess I got it wrong.”

Then serendipity happened. “Wait! I think she’s here!”

I ran back and stared as he stood in the empty spot holding a shovel, pointing at the ground, the mysterious patch of grass between two evenly spaced-out headstones. A gap in the sentence. A missing page in a story.

What goes through your mind when you see a shovel and a cemetery plot? Usually nothing good. I’m adventurous but not up for a scandal. Were we about to go gravedigging?

The man poked at the grassy space, scraping a few inches down, and, sure enough, we heard the clink of metal on stone. I grabbed my camera. Whatever this was, it wanted to capture it.

My eyes welled up as the infamous hourglass shape of her guitar slowly emerged from underneath the years of dirt, weather, and wind. There she was. Charline Arthur’s name meeting sunlight again for the first time in an infinite number of days. We stood silently for a while, choking on a mixture of awe and inspiration. What a moment to breathe in.

Finally, he asked, “So, who is she?”

I told him about her rocking alongside Elvis, making jaws drop, and hips swing. I told him about her rebellious flair and her induction into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. I even played him a song: “Burn That Candle.”

It wasn’t a celebration, but it also was. It was a revival of a legend. She could finally be seen again!

The man offered a big smile and assured me he was going to take good care of her, raising her headstone a bit to level, so that no more grass would grow over her name, allowing her to take the spotlight when an audience returned.

As I walked away, I gave a special goodbye to the woman who never knew the spark she ignited in me, the glow she gave me when I saw her name hit the light, and the excitement beaming from within when I got to share her story with a kind person who cared. She’ll never know the pact I made with her that day, that one day I would share her story and this story. And that day is today. Thank you, Charline, and rest in power.

This story resonates with me because of current events and Women’s History Month. I got curious. Have promises been kept? Is her candle still burning in the light?

Like I said, if you know what you are looking for, you can find it online. I scoured just a few minutes and found an Instagram post from a fan, a new one, lying beside her exceptionally clean, custom-carved guitar-laden headstone. Promises kept. Hell, yes. Yes, ma’am. Keep burning that candle, Charline, for all of us.