Jim Beck (right), shown with famed music producer Don Law, recorded and promoted future Country Music Hall of Famers when they were young, hungry and anonymous, including Lefty Frizzell, Ray Price, Jim Reeves, Hank Thompson and Marty Robbins. (Courtesy David Dennard)

LISTEN: Columbia’s Country Caravan, featuring Lefty Frizzell (1951) But for one man’s death — a “horrific accident as absurd as it was tragic,” wrote country-music historian Daniel Cooper — Dallas could have become, and some say would have become, Nashville. The man was Jim Beck, a wizard who produced and promoted many famous songs by many famous people in the 1950s. The best known among countless hits: Lefty Frizzell’s “If You’ve Got the Money I’ve Got the Time.” Beck and his downtown studio were like a watering hole bringing the music business to Dallas — the labels, the talent, the dough. Then, he died after inhaling toxic fumes while cleaning studio equipment in 1956, and the epicenter of country music shifted entirely to Nashville. To Music City. Or, so they say. Maybe it’s truth; possibly, it’s a myth or both or neither. Or maybe it’s just an old wound that still aches. Next week, the country music establishment — the Academy of Country Music — will bring its annual awards ceremony to North Texas for the very first time after five decades spent first in Los Angeles, then Las Vegas. It’s the Super Bowl of yee-haw, and what better place to hold it than in the stadium guarded by Sky Mirror? The temporary relocation of events starting Friday, April 17, is all about 50th anniversary spectacle, nothing to do with tradition. Somehow, Dallas’ role in the evolution of country is relegated to a few fading notches on a timeline. Some of the biggest names in country music made some of their best music here throughout the 20th century. Today, you’d barely know it. You can barely hear the faded echoes. There’s that moment in June 1937, when, legend has it, Bob Wills, the man who made Western swing famous, bumped into “King of the Delta Blues Singers” Robert Johnson between their first recording sessions at 508 Park Ave. downtown. In the 1930s and ’40s, Roy Newman & His Boys, Jim Boyd and his brother Bill Boyd’s Cowboy Ramblers and the Shelton Brothers had their own radio shows on WRR and WFAA. In August 1941, Ernest Tubb recorded “I’m Walking the Floor Over You” in a downtown studio. Six years later, the Big “D” Jamboree formally tipped its cowboy hat at the Sportatorium and barn-danced across KRLD and then the country’s airwaves, hosting Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and a young comer named Elvis among dozens of rising stars. 1950 also happened to be the year Beck first recorded a 22-year-old from Corsicana named William Orville Frizzell, who tore out of the chute with a single that went to No. 1 on its way to immortality: “If You’ve Got the Money I’ve Got the Time” and its flip side “I Love You a Thousand Ways.” Both were recorded at Jim Beck’s second studio, at 1101 Ross Ave. downtown. That address is now a parking lot at the Griffin Avenue intersection, across from 7-Eleven. There’s nothing to indicate what happened there 65 years ago.

The Jim Beck recording studio is visible next door to the Forest Theater in this 1956 photo from the collection of the Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division of the Dallas Public Library.

“[Jim Beck had] the studio that produced the most distinctive sound of all, the one that produced the most influential recordings, and the one that came within a hairbreadth of changing the whole direction of the music’s development.” Charles Wolfe, country music scholar That’s to be expected, perhaps. The death of 39-year-old Jim Beck in the late spring of 1956 was noted in three brief sentences buried inside the May 12 Billboard. “DALLAS — Jim Beck, well-known recording technician and owner of the recording studios here bearing his name, died early Thursday (May 3) at Baylor Hospital from the effects of inhaling hydrachloride fumes. He was rushed to the hospital earlier in the week after collapsing while he and an assistant, Jimmy Rollins, were cleaning recording equipment at Beck’s studio. Fumes from the cleaning compound caused Beck’s lung to collapse and inducted other ailments that caused his death.” The brevity of that farewell omitted the whole truth about Beck’s death, which was far from sudden or easy. It also didn’t mention that at the time of his death, Beck was easily the most important record-maker in Dallas — maybe ever. He recorded and promoted future Country Music Hall of Famers when they were just young, hungry, anonymous scrappers — Frizzell, Ray Price, Jim Reeves, Hank Thompson, Marty Robbins. Legend has it Fats Domino, Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison also cut sides at one of his Dallas studios. “If Beck had not died when he did, the recording industry would have been big in Dallas, because Beck was an innovator,” the hit-making Tall Texan, Billy Walker, told historian Michael Streissguth shortly before Walker was killed in a 2006 car crash. No less an authority than the Country Music Hall of Fame insists Beck’s death was the footnote heard ’round the industry. “But for a tragic accident,” Charles Wolfe wrote in the Country Music Hall of Fame’s The Encyclopedia of Country Music, Jim Beck “might well have changed the course of country music.” Wolfe wrote elsewhere that Beck had “the studio that produced the most distinctive sound of all, the one that produced the most influential recordings, and the one that came within a hairbreadth of changing the whole direction of the music’s development.” Others disagree, insisting Beck was no match for the might of Music City, which, even in the early 1950s, knew there was big money to be made in hillbillies and honky-tonks. Nashville already had the Grand Ole Opry, record labels and studios filled with immortal producers and players (Owen Bradley, Chet Atkins) crafting that slick Nashville sound.


“Fort Worth is where the West begins, and Dallas is where the East peters out,” says David Dennard, the Highland Park-raised rocker who first liberated the long-thought-non-existent Big “D” Jamboree recordings from the Library of Congress basement 15 years ago. “The city fathers wanted to support the opera and ballet, all the stuff that was snooty and upper-crusty, but they didn’t have any regard for lowbrow music. They thought it was trashy and didn’t see the opportunity to make Dallas a destination for country music. It’s as simple as that.” Country music historian Kevin Coffey, meanwhile, says: “I think the Beck thing is a myth.” Not even Beck’s family can say. Then, most of his kin barely knew him. He worked nights, coming as they were going. They saw one another over breakfast, when he was eating dinner. “Whether his death changed things or not, I don’t know,” says James Beck, Jim’s 46-year-old grandson. The question has gnawed at the family, never mind country-music historians, for decades. “Dallas was a center for that honky-tonk variance of country — a little rougher than the Nashville sound, a little more up-tempo,” says James, who, like his brother Tyler and cousin Ashley, has studied his grandfather’s legacy. “That honky-tonk sound led more to rockabilly, and the Nashville sound was a little more white-bread, a little cleaner.” Beck’s studio was “what was happening in those days,” Walker told Michael Streissguth of 1950s Dallas. Walker, who toured with a young Elvis Presley in the early ’50s and recorded songs by a then-unknown Willie Nelson in the early ’60s, was among those drawn to Beck’s joint on Ross. If nothing else, Walker said, it gave guys like him, Frizzell and Price a place to hang out when they couldn’t afford to go anywhere else.