FreddB wrote:
According to Willie, when he "previewed" Hello Walls for the gang at Tootsie's, everyone mocked it except Faron.
Willie offered to sell it to him for grocery money; Faron refused to buy it, and loaned him the money to be paid when he got the first royalty check. That was somewhere around $10-12,000. Faron could have just bought the song outright, and been that much wealthier.
We have to give Willie big hand for bringing a western swing sensibility to Nashville ... at a time when the brain-trust was trading fiddles for string sections.