Crooked River City: The Musical Life of Nashville's William Pursell

1. A CALIFORNIA CHILDHOOD

In 1968 Arthur Pursell sent his son some home movies. After watching them with his family, Bill Pursell reflected on the experience in a letter to his father (January 7, 1968):

In the first part of the film, which starts at the Pursell house on H Street, there is an almost dream-like feeling in watching these very dear people pass in front of the camera…. Eldon, Aunt Pearl, Grandma and Grandpa, made me think of the poem you wrote, Dad, called Reverie. The thought of people from the past coming out on a stage in your mind’s eye, smiling at you and then leaving.

And then, there was me. A rather self-conscious child, with large protruding boyish ears, and baggy pants, especially down by the shoes. Not too serious, still somewhat of an enigma, even to himself. A kind of crackley, big toothed grin, that said: I’m awfully glad to be here, but where am I? I can see parts of my present self there in this boy on the film. There is a difference, naturally, in the physique, and even in features and shape of the head, but it’s me alright.

William Whitney Pursell was born on June 9, 1926, in an Oakland hospital. He was adopted as an infant by Arthur and Delia Pursell and was raised in the small California town of Tulare as an adored only son. Many of his obsessions later in life—trains, Russian orchestral music, and rural mountain culture—can be traced back to his rich and varied California childhood. A brief tour of Pursell’s early years gives us a picture, not only of how he grew up and the reasons for his likes and dislikes, but also of small-town California in the 1930s and 1940s, and a way of life in America that has long been romanticized (or the opposite) in films and novels.

Tulare in the 1930s was the California depicted in John Steinbeck’s epic American novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939).¹ Pursell’s Tulare childhood is colored by memories of sitting behind his mother at the Red Cross depot, watching her hand out food and clothing to migrant workers who had come to California seeking work picking crops. He also remembers them coming to his back door to ask for food: I imagine the word got out around the Brotherhood that there was this nice lady on King Street, at the house with the front porch covered with vines with the rocking chair, that you could depend on for a hand-out.²

Young William Pursell

Pursell also remembers the steam train coming through town, summers at the local public pool, nights sleeping on the floor at his father’s hand-built observatory, and weeks spent hiking and camping in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. This is not a childhood that one would suspect would lead to a successful career as a professional musician. Pursell’s father did not force him to spend hours practicing the piano (though the boy and his mother did have some conversations about his reluctance to practice), nor did he grow up in a major city, surrounded by a lively cultural scene. But in addition to a fairly normal, easygoing childhood spent mostly outdoors and with friends, Pursell benefited from his father’s love of music and parents who sought out the best teachers for him that they could find. When little Billy began playing tunes by ear on the piano at age three, his parents knew they had something special, and encouraged their son throughout the years to take his music more seriously, without ever forcing it on him or trying to make him into a concertizing prodigy.

Classical music did shape his early years, however. One of Pursell’s earliest memories is the pattern on the living room carpet, where he crawled around as a toddler while listening to his father’s records of the Russian orchestral greats. He especially remembers Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite and Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances, which have, thanks to their distinctive rhythms, forever become joined to memories of his cat and the neighborhood fire siren.

Eleven-year-old Bill Pursell and his mother Delia

Pursell’s adoptive parents were exceptional in their own ways. His father, Arthur Pursell, was a grammar school principal (seventh and eighth grade), and his mother was a nurse for the Red Cross. Delia Peterson Pursell, Bill’s mother, had moved to San Francisco from Minnesota with her Swedish-Norwegian family, after a prairie fire destroyed their farm. She was a resilient woman who knew how to persevere through hardship. Her father committed suicide when she was a young teenager, and she had to go to work to help support her family. Later, one of her brothers would commit suicide, and two of her other brothers would eventually spend the last years of their lives in a mental institution.³

Delia earned a nursing certificate from the Merritt Hospital School of Nursing in Oakland, and when the United States entered World War I in 1917 she volunteered as an army nurse and served at an army hospital in Fort Logan, Colorado. She would later work at the hospital in Berkeley, California, where Arthur Pursell, having returned from military duty in France, arrived with a case of the measles. Delia’s fair hair, laugh, and sunny disposition captured Arthur’s attention.⁴ They were married on June 8, 1921, and soon moved to Arthur’s hometown of Tulare. On May 18, 1922, Delia gave birth to Robert Lewis Pursell, but Arthur wrote: To our dismay he did not survive the period of delivery. Four years later, Arthur and Delia adopted Bill from the Native Sons and Daughters orphanage in San Francisco and brought him home to be raised in Tulare, a small town of about fifteen thousand in the San Joaquin Valley.

The peaceful idyll of small-town California was disturbed by the extreme poverty brought on by the Depression and the migration of farm workers from Arkansas and Oklahoma to California. Pursell’s encounters with poverty during his childhood were not limited to sitting behind his mother at the Red Cross depot; he also learned about what it means to be poor in the schoolyard. Pursell’s family never had much money, but they did have plenty to eat. Pursell remembers one particular family at his school:

The Pyrtle kids went to school with us, and at lunchtime, when Mrs. Schafer used to blow the whistle, they would go out and stand underneath the trees until she blew the whistle to come back in for class. We finally figured out they didn’t have any lunch. So what we did was that we would bring extra food in our lunchbox. We were just kids, second grade, and we would do that to make sure they got fed. Kids will do that.

Pursell lived and saw these things through the eyes of a young child, and his family played a role different from what is usually depicted in the classic stories of American literature, which are most often told from the point of view of the poor. His father and mother were both employed, and he was secure at home, even if money was tight at times. Hobos were knocking at his back door while he was composing little marches on the piano or listening to the Polovtsian Dances on his father’s record player.

One of the advantages of being raised in a small town was the freedom Pursell enjoyed as a child and later as a teenager. Pursell says that he did not get serious about the piano until he was about twelve years old. He had two uncles who were coaches, track and football, and he received balls and bats and other sports equipment from them for Christmas and birthday gifts. Pursell also liked trains as a boy, and just running around the neighborhood with his friends. In his own words, I goofed away my life. Pursell says that his love for sports and play did keep him away from the piano at times.

Pursell’s fondest childhood memories are from summer. He remembers summers spent at the Blue Moon pool: Mom used to give me a buck in dimes for Tootsie Rolls, and she had to do her work as a Red Cross nurse. So she would leave me alone down there all summer. And I would do nothing but swim. Forget practicing, I was out there swimming. I used to have a way of treading water with my feet, so it would look like I was standing up in the pool. I’d say, ‘Come on in, it’s shallow!’ and I’d be there, and they’d sink down. I was a good swimmer.

Pursell also spent a great deal of his summers in the nearby Sierra Nevada Mountains. His father’s family was scattered throughout the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas, but they had deep roots in the mountains that Arthur Pursell so loved. Some of Pursell’s aunts and uncles who lived up there were quite eccentric. This large and unique family deserves some description, as they played an important part in helping raise Bill. His childhood adventures in the Sierra Nevada gave him a strong sense of place and of family roots. He describes their home as high in the foothills, almost to the mountains, and the brush up there grows very close to the earth. It’s a very interesting place.

One of his cousins, Lizzie McGee, lived in Orosi. Pursell remembers:

It was wild country; when you’d go up there at night, you’d hear the pumas, the wildcats. On Easter, they would have an Easter sunrise service up there, and all these people from around Dunlap would come, and they’d all go up on this hill, about five o’clock, six o’clock in the morning, Cousin Lizzie would say, and the imported musicians would come. Actually, they were just three trumpet players from the Valley. They’d go up and start playing these hymns at the top of the mountain, and all of these people would go up, and they’d have their sermon. Then they’d break open their picnic baskets and have their picnic up there, on Easter sunrise. And that was a real sunrise service.

Arthur’s cousin Lizzie lived near a close family friend, Sally Evans. Pursell remembers visiting Sally regularly as a child, probably so that his father could check on her well-being. Again, as with the hobos and migrant workers in Tulare, there is no prejudice or judgment in Pursell’s memories of Sally, merely a twinkle in his eye, and a sense of amazement at this unique individual. Her story is best read in his own voice.

In my memory, I think from the time I was old enough, two or three, I remember Dad and Mom and I would drive up in that area, and we’d always stop at a certain spot along the mountain road. There would be a picket fence. And we’d go up there, but we wouldn’t go beyond that fence, and Dad would call, Sally. And at the very end, in this little lean-to hut would emerge this little old woman, with a pioneer bonnet on and long dresses, and her legs wrapped with gunny sacks to keep her from the cold. As she walked towards us, you noticed that she had this sort of leathery skin, like she’d been out a lot. But she had the clearest blue eyes, and she’d say, Hello, Art, to my Dad, and Sally, how you doin’? I’m fine, Art, except that the beast has been bothering me. Later on I found out that the beast was what she called the catamount, which lived in the trees, and at night she’d bang pots and pans to get rid of it.

Sally Evans had been a close friend of the Pursell family since the turn of the century and had even rocked Arthur as a baby. She was a schoolteacher who had a bad love affair and was so bitter about her rejection that she suddenly decided to move to the mountains and become a hermitess.

She built her own little shack, on the other side of the mountain, and that’s where she lived during the First World War. Now, she said, and she claimed that the Indians told her, that the Kaiser Wilhelm had buried gold at the bottom of the creek, at the bottom of this mountain. And she went down and dug a big hole and tried to find it.

She had run a lunch stand for the wagon-drivers but then became afraid that they too were after the Kaiser’s gold or her property, and she removed herself deeper into the mountains. Cousin Sally came to a mysterious end. Pursell’s cousin Lizzie and her husband looked up one day and saw smoke, and when they arrived at Sally’s cabin, it was burned to the ground. They never did find her body. And one year later, their own house burned. Only the chimney was left standing, and Pursell remembers camping out under it as a child.

The young William Pursell likely did not notice the contrast between his country cousins and his educated, more cosmopolitan parents. Children accept life as it comes, and these jaunts into the hills to see his aunts and uncles were a regular event for him. But I wonder how his father saw it, and how his country relatives saw it: Arthur, a World War I veteran and grammar school principal, and Delia, a trained nurse, bringing their boy up to the hills for a visit. Were there late-night talks about the boy’s education, his obvious intelligence and musical abilities? Did the country cousins understand how different Bill’s life would be? Although Arthur and Delia did not cultivate Bill for a high-powered life like some parents might have (imagine a Leopold Mozart or a Frederick Wieck for a father), they clearly valued education and would later ensure that Bill’s potential would be developed. They had left the mountains, and even small-town Tulare seemed like an opportunity. This is not to say that the country Pursells were ignorant or unintelligent. They were curious people, artistic and creative, but they had chosen to remain in the mountains. Arthur had moved on.

A mutual love of the stars brought the two worlds together on at least one occasion. Bill recalls:

Lizzie wanted to learn something about astronomy. So Dad made her a six-inch Newtonian reflector telescope. He ground the mirror himself, and then he put the prism at the top. Lizzie would sit there with her green eyeshade on when she was quite old, and she would look out the window at the constellations. She’d say, Art, I saw all of these wonderful stars last night. When she died, they published a poem she wrote, God’s Garden of Stars. She was really something.

Later in life, when Pursell was living in Nashville, Tennessee, and played on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry for the first time, his California family finally believed that he had arrived. Scholarships to the most prestigious music school in the country, the Peabody Conservatory and the Eastman School of Music, did not impress them, nor did his numerous classical compositions. It was when he got up on that famous stage with country music star Eddy Arnold that his family sat up and took note. After all, they had listened for years to the Saturday night broadcasts of the Grand Old Opry from their homes in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and for them, the Opry was more real than any orchestra performance or classical piano