This photo of Hank, backstage at the Opry, was part of a 1970s National Geographic piece about Nashville and country music.
I’ll look for the exact date and photographer’s name. It’s not in the magazine story, but Hank writes in his autobiography about Opry stage manager Vito Pellettieri bringing him an apple every Saturday night.
This picture of the suit is on an anonymous flickr page.
According to How The West Was Worn, the suit was made around 1962 and is owned by Marty Stuart.
Lefty Frizzell may have been the first to wear a Nudie rhinestone outfit, Hank Snow’s suits may have been artworks of embroidery and tailoring, but the hands-down owner of American wardrobe bling was Wladziu Valentino Liberace.
I’ve seen unsubstantiated reference that Nudie made clothes for Liberace, and would love to know which of his incredible ensembles were from the rodeo tailor. I saw this Christmas outfit at the old Liberace museum in Las Vegas. (which has since expanded, and closed)
Naturally, Liberace did several Christmas albums.
Here’s a promo for a 1981 Christmas Eve spectacular with guests Elton John, Ethel Merman, and Orson Wells.
A Christmas Poem, by Charley Sierra
Christmas is a-comin’ soon!
Pardner, ain’t ya seen?
The decorations showed up
In the stores on HalloweenThe papers just plumb fulla ads;
Some days it’s three feet thick!
That’s good-we got a woodstove,
‘N’ we’re short on kindlin’ sticks.The kids all hope that Santa
Brings ‘em ever’thing they chose;
“I want a Nintendo!”
“Please don’t bring me any clothes!”The Sally Army’s out in force,
A-tunin’ up their band;
I always drop a dollar,
‘Cause they once gave me a hand.There’s some who say we’ve lost the track,
‘N’ don’t know rhyme or reason,
That all this hooraw overlooks
The spirit of the season.They point ‘n’ say I don’t believe,
‘Cause in church ya’ll never find me;
But I don’t need no hymns, or prayers,
Or crosses to remind me.This year, I think I’ll try
What one ole cowpoke used to do;
I’ll saddle up, ‘n’ leave a note:
“Back in an hour, or two.”I’ll ride west outta Reno,
A-followin’ the river,
‘Way up into the mountains
Where the air’s so cold it shimmers.Far away from stores ‘n’ crowds,
Where the only single sound
Will be my pony’s muffled steps
Through the snow upon the ground.‘N’ when I reach the perfect spot
(I’ll know it when I’m there),
I’ll doff my hat, ‘n’ feel
The icy wind blow through my hair.I’ll find the brightest star that night,
Gaze up at it, ‘n’ say,
“Happy Birthday, Boss,”
‘N’ then I’ll softly ride away.
© 1994 Rip-Snortin’ Press
Charley Sierra was the cowboy-poet pen name of Clifton Stiple, who also wrote horror as Chuck Shaddoway. There’s not much written about him. He seems to have been ordained as a minister later in life. It’s said he was bullied as a child, ended up murdering his tormentor, and then, killed himself.
Charley-Clifton-Chuck was born in the east and lived in Reno, at the eastern end of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, home of the annual “Santa Pub Crawl” in early December.
Super Mike’s Convenience, 2 Central Ave, Halifax, December 2008.
Decoration on westernwear is one of the most common North American uses for chainstitch embroidery, also called chenille. The other place it’s traditionally used is (was) for names and logos on team shirts.
My 1930s Singer chainstitch machine came from Detroit. It belonged to a woman who worked as a seamstress in her home, which was in a post-war suburb surrounded by car plants. I also bought some of her patterns, packed in boxes that originally held 1960s golf-type shirts with knit collars.
So it seemed fitting when someone asked me to do some mostly Detroit-related lettering on shirts. It took some figuring out and a lot of practice.
I marked the letters with chalk and wax and used rayon machine embroidery thread. I have heard that designs used to be put on the fabric with “invisible” ink, and machine operators worked in black light with hoods over their heads. The single-line names were done free-hand. Here’s some vintage examples:
This picture of a name done (probably freehand) in heavier cotton thread is from an embroiderer’s sampler written about on this blog
In North America, manual chainstitching is obsolete and skilled operators rare. I just found this video by a Brooklyn company who do monograms using a Cornely machine and what appears to be black light:
I’ve seen a few websites that offer to do larger logos and names. People in India and Africa still use manual machines, often old ones bought in North America. Generally, though, any new, off-the-rack garment with chainstitching will have been done using a computerized and automated multi-head machine like this one from Made-in-China.com.
Here’s an ad for an automated machine that makes a chenille logo:
Nudie Cohn December 15, 1902 – May 9, 1984
A year-long exhibit about Nudie recently opened at the Country Music Hall of Fame. A walk through the museum is already a tribute to Nudie, and this installation provides more detailed information about the most famous rodeo tailor with further examples of his work, like Merle Travis’ embroidered guitar shirt and tie, and Freddie Hart’s shirt with heart-shaped yoke and matching pants from the early 1950s.
Freddie Hart in one of his many Nudie outfits.
It’s not part of the show, but one of my favorite Nudies is Little Jimmy Dickens’s bird suit.
Another is Merle Travis’s oak leaf suit.
Here’s Nudie in his store with Merle Haggard.
This is the Nudie shirt I acquired at great peril….more on that shortly.
Last summer, I made a replica of the Nudie outfit Hank Williams was wearing the night he died for the Kansas City run of the play Nobody’s Lonesome For Me, at the request of American Heartland Theatre costume designer Paul Hough.
Actor Matthew Brumlow as Hank Williams Sr.
The actual outfit is on display at the Hank Williams Museum in Montgomery Alabama.
I saw this Hank Williams “riding outfit” in the extensive “Williams Family Legacy” exhibit at the Hall of Fame.
Hank Williams sure had a lot of clothes.
The gabardine that Nudie used for outfits like these isn’t easy to come by these days. Even in Manhattan, as director Craig Fols and I scoured the stores (in a heat wave), fortunate to find what we wanted with the very nice Sammy at Elegant Woolen and Silk, 174 Orchard Street on the rapidly-gentrifying Lower East Side.
Like Lankershim Boulevard in Hollywood used to be home to several western tailors, Orchard Street once had a busy fabric trade (catering particularly to tailors) that is now down to a few stores including Sammy, who had the selection and service I liked best.
Jaime Castaneda, who worked for Nudie, still makes incredible show pieces from an unassuming storefront at 5753 Lankershim.
Nudie’s operation at 5015 Lankershim was a more visible landmark till it closed in 1994, ten years after his death.
Manuel Cuevas, who worked for Nudie along with Castaneda, is the only other tailor actively making impeccable westernwear in the Nudie tradition.
Manuel suits in his Nashville shop
Jaime was the shirt and pant maker at Nudie’s, and when Manuel opened his own studio, he worked as his head tailor for sixteen years.
The Nudie Hall of Fame show title comes from a song first recorded by Golden West favorite, Rockabilly Queen Wanda Jackson, sounding pure country in 1956.
Want to travel Willie Nelson style? The tour bus he used from 1986 to 1999 will be on the Collector Car Productions auction block on Saturday, October 22.
The bus is an Eagle, manufactured in Texas, and customized in Forida. Here’s the official lot listing.
Update: the bus went for $47,850.
And, turns out CCP auctions owner Terry Lobzun is a westernwear and classic country fan who sold a Nudie-mobile (not before taking it for a drive) a few years back!
Willie covers Coldplay’s “The Scientist”.
Johnny Kelly made the animated short about sustainable agriculture, a cause Willie has championed for many years.
I generally avoid blockbuster shows, and wasn’t planning to be one of the over 660,000 people who squeezed their way through the wildly popular McQueen “retrospective” Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I visited New York a couple weeks ago.
But someone gave me their friend’s member’s card, so I was able to skip the line first thing in the morning. Perhaps because of this kind of abuse, the Met cruelly revoked all member queue-jumping privileges during the frenzied last days of the show.
A lot of admiring, gushing, worshipping ink has been spilled on Savage Beauty. Since this is supposed to be a westernwear blog, it’s not really the place for an exposition of my problems with it. And after a rough plane ride, a few 8% Duvels and the Wanda Jackson show the night before, in addition to my existing blockbuster bias, I wasn’t feeling very well at all at 8:30am, trudging through miles of freezing air-conditioned halls of masterworks, all closed off to acommodate the lineup.
This bumster skirt was in the first array of garments, from the now-famous “Highland Rape” collection. I didn’t get a look at everything; I wasn’t up to navigating the crowds, and I’m not that tall. I noticed the tailoring was nice on the early things. I wonder if he did some of it himself. I don’t know how much of the sewing he ever did. Maybe it says in the huge show catalogue. (I didn’t buy it)
I stuck to the middle of the crammed galleries and went through, scanning the dresses and installations, hearing other viewers’ commentaries, stopping briefly by a few of the less crowded displays, like the heavily embroidered Asian-inspired capes and dresses from one of his last couture collections, and one of the many incredibly constructed feather dresses. I was disappointed by the almost complete lack of attention to my favorite of all his collections, Fall-Winter 2009.
I’ve written my admiration for this collection in other posts. I think it was a definitive statement on his negative feelings toward the fashion industry, a statement which Savage Beauty chose to ignore.
I headed for the exit, past the three-deep crowd surrounding a little projection of The Kate Moss Hologram, throngs praying at the altar of The Oyster Dress, and the jostling rows ogling The Armadillo Shoes.
The show presented McQueen as a revolutionary individual who realized a powerfully creative vision. Beyond his earthly achievements, however, surely this elevation into sainthood feeds nicely into the marketing of the clothing that continues to bear his name in the aftermath of his suicide.
In contrast, McQueen’s one-time rival and fellow Commander of the British Empire John Galliano, revered for years for his work at Christian Dior, has temporarily exited the fashion world and will not be up for sainthood anytime soon. In fact, he’ll be up before a judge on charges related to public anti-semetic diatribes.
Instead of lionizing his individual genius, upon his dismissal from Dior, emphasis was put on the teamwork that goes into the clothing, under the guidance of the designer. At the end of the show that took place just after Galliano was fired, when the designer takes their customary bow (and Galliano usually paraded his own outfit down the runway too) Dior instead brought out their staff of petite-mains, the legendary Paris seamstresses.
Dior chief executive Sidney Toledano said, “A lot of schools produce designers, but the technical people—this is what we have to protect…They’re sustaining the house.”
I always have good luck at Mercer St. Books, just south of Bleeker in Manhattan.
When I talk about used book shopping in New York, people say oh, have you been to The Strand? I haven’t! At Mercer St I generally go about ten feet to the LPs and music section before I have more than I can carry back with me, so why do I need 18 miles of books at The Strand ?
Last time, I got all I could carry in one volume, twenty pounds or so of Tony Russell’s exhaustive early country discography.
The LP section is compact, with a little country section where this time I got The Best of Ferlin Husky. Ferlin wasn’t big into westernwear, but check out that wool jacket on the back cover.
In the music section, I found these two great books:
O’Neal and Goodwin’s The Sons of the Pioneers is the sort of book only true fans can produce, full of interviews, documents, and photos. Many of the pictures, like this one, are from the The Pioneers’ numerous films.
clockwise from top: Bob Nolan, Karl Farr, Lloyd Perryman, Tim Spencer, Hugh Farr, Pat Brady
With the exception of Roy Rogers, The Sons of the Pioneers wore westernwear that was somewhat subdued compared to later standards set in the early fifties by Nashville singers like Lefty Frizzell.
After becoming a Nudie customer, Lefty favoured fancy fringe and rhinestones. In I Love You A Thousand Ways: The Lefty Frizzell Story, his brother David says, “Nudie made Lefty a white suit with “L” and “F” in blue rhinestones, and that was the first time rhinestones were used on a country star’s clothing.”
I wasn’t sure about that, so I checked the Nudie book. Here’s Nudie’s wife Bobbie with Lefty in the suit.
Nudie is quoted on Lefty being “the first” in Holly George-Warren and Michelle Freedman’s How The West Was Worn.
“I got to thinking Lefty would sure look terrific in rhinestones…I decided to surprise him by making up a shirt with some sparklers….but when I showed the suit to Lefty, you would have thought I was asking him to go on stage in a g-string…..He said he was afraid to look like a sissy”
Lefty quickly got over his sissy hangup and Nudie made him outfits that were increasingly ornate. There are many pictures in I Love You A Thousand Ways of Lefty in fancy fringe shirts I hadn’t seen before, and this, his first stage outfit David says was made in Dallas, Texas.
I was very pleased with my finds and the price is always reasonable. In addition, I got to hear the true solution to the weekend’s hot topic, the debt crisis and looming credit downgrade from Wayne, Mercer St proprietor.
And the answer is: closing libraries will not save four trillion dollars. Nor will it affect the used book trade. I say, free wireless for all will save libraries from becoming the computer access providers they are turning into.
handcrafted western shirts and jackets, with some history about the original makers of western clothing and the people who wore it
