From KUTX:
This Week in Texas Music History is brought to you by Brane Audio.
On May 17, 1922, a young Leon Payne enrolled at the Texas School for the Blind in Austin, an institution that emphasized music education and counts among its alumni orquesta bandleader Balde Gonzales and famed whistler Fred Lowery.
Upon Payne’s graduation in 1935, the Alba, Texas, native embarked on a career as a singer and songwriter, working with Western swing icon Bob Wills in 1938 and first recording his own songs in 1941. He would go on to pen hits for Elvis Presley, George Jones, Ernest Tubb and Johnny Cash.
In 1948 Payne wrote and recorded the song “Lost Highway,” which would become one of Hank Williams’ signature tunes and, much later, the namesake of a 1997 David Lynch film. It may be the best Hank song that Hank never wrote, an aching lament of rolling stones and ramblin’ around.
In 1957, Payne wrote and recorded a curious ode titled “Lumberjack,” a cover of which became the first single released by a Texas radio DJ who had been hanging around the Pacific Northwest named Willie Nelson.
In 1965, George Jones recorded the Payne songs “Take Me” and “Things Have Gone to Pieces.” In 1968, singer Eddie Noack would take up one of Payne’s oddest compositions, the honky-tonk horror track “Psycho,” inspired by the film of the same name. Payne’s catalog is a rich and curious one, with indelible compositions often performed by unforgettable artists.
Payne passed away in 1969, but he was honored posthumously with a 1971 LP that collected George Jones’s recordings of his songs. Jones returned to Payne’s tune “Take Me” in the 1974 Les Blank film “A Poem is a Naked Person,” offering a stunning solo rendition and a fitting memorial for one of Texas’s most distinctive country songsmiths.
Sources:
Eldon Stephen Branda in Laurie E. Jasinski, Gary Hartman, Casey Monahan, and Ann T. Smith, eds. The Handbook of Texas Music. Second Edition. Denton, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 2012.
Michael Corcoran. Ghost Notes: Pioneering Spirits of Texas Music. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2020
