Payne should be among first to be honored

The first group of Austin Music Memorial honorees should include Leon Payne (1917-1969), who learned to play music as a means of supporting himself at the Texas School for the Blind.

Portrait by Paul Milosevich
NASHVILLE SONGWRITERS FOUNDATION

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Coming: Robert Shaw

Michael Corcoran occasionally suggests nominees for the Austin Music Memorial. Next up is Robert Shaw, the great barrelhouse piano player, whose Stop N' Swat grocery store on Manor Road was a hub of the East Austin community in the 1960s and '70s.

More on the Texas Music Memorial

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This town has an international reputation as a singer-songwriter hotbed, but while such Austin-associated artists as Willie Nelson, Lucinda Williams and Lyle Lovett are well-known, the man who penned the song their current Nashville record label is named after is not. Payne wrote "Lost Highway," a hit for Hank Williams in 1949 and a lyrical influence on Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone."

After the Alba-born Payne, a student at the School for the Blind at 1100 W. 45th St. from age 5, graduated as an 18-year-old in 1935, he drifted from town to town and was billed as "The Texas Blind Hitchiker." Proficient at guitar, keyboards, trombone and drums, Payne played in Bob Wills' Texas Playboys in 1938. Legend has it that after several days in Wills' tour bus, a restless Payne often asked to be let out on the highway where he would thumb his way to the next gig.

From such experiences came those unforgettable lyrics:

"I'm a rolling stone, all alone and lost/ For a life of sin, I have paid the cost/ When I pass by, all the people say/ 'Just another guy on the lost highway.' "

After playing for Jack Rhodes and his Rhythm Boys, fronted by his stepbrother (who would later write "A Satisfied Mind"), Payne formed his own band in the late 1940s. Possessing a smooth vocal croon, he had a No. 1 hit in 1949 with "I Love You Because," written for wife Myrtie, the former classmate at the School for the Blind he reconnected with and married in 1948.

But after Williams cut "Lost Highway" and "They'll Never Take her Love From Me," Payne started becoming better known as a songwriter than singer. Carl Smith hit big with Payne's "You Are the One," Jim Reeves had a No. 1 hit with "Blue Side of Lonesome" and everyone from Ernest Tubb to Al Martino made a crossover standard out of "I Love You Because." Elvis Presley recorded the tune at one of his first Sun Records sessions in 1954.

Payne wrote only a handful of hits, but the 1971 album "George Jones Sings the Great Songs of Leon Payne" is a brilliant display of the overall depth of his material.

Leon Roger Payne suffered a heart attack in 1965 that forced him to stop touring. He had a second heart attack on Sept. 11, 1969, and died at age 52. He was made a charter member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.

Payne is buried at Sunset Memorial Park in San Antonio, the city where he lived the last few years of his life. And with the upcoming Austin Music Memorial comes the opportunity to recognize Austin's first great country songwriter in the town where he fell under music's spell.