Roy & Candy’s Music prepares to close its doors

Final note: Roy & Candy’s Music prepares to close its doors for last time

by: KAREN SHADE World Scene Writer
8/26/2007

The sign outside reading that everything must go by Aug. 31 says it all.

Along with the guitar, amps and drum kits, a music tradition that has extended far beyond guitar lessons and discounts on picks must go, too.

When Roy & Candy’s Music closes next week, so goes the average music fan’s door to Tulsa’s rich heritage in Western swing.

Unless you’re already acquainted with Tulsa’s Western swing scene and its players, few are the thoroughfares to access the tales about gigs played at what was Tulsa’s endless string of bars and music clubs where those inspired by the Wills brothers ruled.

For 37 years, Roy Ferguson has stood behind the counter of Roy & Candy’s Music with his family, waiting for your questions — about working with Johnnie Lee Wills, about his own band, about the musicians he’s had the pleasure to work with. That time is over.

Customers still come in just to talk about the musical past.

“We have them every day. I’ve really been surprised,” Ferguson said. “Since people found out we’re going out of business, I don’t know how many people’s been by or called me to tell me I can’t go. They’re happy for me . . . They say, ‘It’s not going to be the same when you close.’ ”

“It makes you sad.”

It’s been a long time since Ferguson worked a cotton field. Growing up in Gore, he would go home after work and turn on the radio to hear Johnnie Lee Wills broadcasts airing on the old KVOO radio station.

When he was about 12, Ferguson bought his fi rst guitar, pe rhaps influenced by Grandma Pinky, whose hair would drag the ground if it weren’t gathered up into a bun when she played old breakdowns on fi ddle. Grandma Pinky’s breakdowns are lost now. There was no way to record them.

The neck on Ferguson’s first guitar bowed quickly, but by the time he entered Gore High School he was playing a Gibson Les Paul bought in Muskogee.

A teacher remarked to him, “Most guys would rather have a car, and you go and buy a guitar.”

“But I love to play music,” he said.

And music’s been good to him.

Ferguson started out doing shows at school in a no-name band with four or five guys who found gigs at little honky tonks in places called Braggs, Porum and pocket towns tucked in the hills around the Illinois and Arkansas river country in and around Sequoyah County.

After high school graduation, he went into the Navy for four years, but came back to resume his habit of listening to his favorite performers on the radio.

In 1960, Ferguson moved to Tulsa to work with Johnnie Lee Wills, brother of the renowned legend Bob Wills. Although it was Bob who launched the legendary Western swing broadcasts from the stage of Cain’s Ballroom, it was Johnnie Lee who kept those broadcasts going for decades after his brother left for California.

As part of Johnnie Lee Wills and All the Boys, Ferguson fondly remembers working at Seminole’s CircleWCorral.

“It was packed. In fact, a lot of ballrooms that opened up around Oklahoma came from the CircleWdown there . . . Sometimes they’d have to lock to door at 8 o’clock because it’d be sold out,” he said.

During that time, he also got to work with Bob Wills.

Working with the Wills brothers had its dangers.

“You’d better have your eye on watching them all the time,” he said, “because when they pointed that bow at you, you better play something, and you never knew what part of the song you were going to play on.”

“He could be mean with a bow,” Ferguson said of Bob Wills. “. . . But as a rule, he was always a lot of fun to be with.”

The Willses never failed to surprise Ferguson, stirring up a standing ovation out of rather lackluster show (by Ferguson’s standards) by winding down with a soul-stirring “mama song,” bringing tears to everyone’s eyes.

In those years, Ferguson also met his future wife, Candy Noe, a singer and musician whose presence changed the band’s name to Johnnie Lee Wills and All the Boys and the Person.

Eventually, Ferguson got into the music store business with a job at Shields Piano & Music Co., traveling around the region selling musical instruments.

But he also set up his own band, Roy Ferguson and the Royales, opening for big-name performers traveling through the area, acts such as rockabilly legend Carl Perkins and country music superstars such as Ronnie Milsap and Merle Haggard.

The Royales backed the likes of Willie Nelson, Webb Pierce, Claude Gray and others, too, when they made paths through town.

Ferguson spins stories about all of those big-name entertainers, often at the “Spit ’n’ Whittle Club,” a corner of the store where musicians and pals sit around to talk about the good old days.

“Sometimes it’s hard to get much work done because you have so many of them.”

When Roy & Candy’s first opened, it was located on Memorial Drive, but later moved to its present location near 61st Street and U.S. 169.

At 71, Ferguson has seen his share of customers who drop by for last minute supplies for a concert — Motley Crue, Kiss, Garth Brooks and Tex Ritter to name but a few.

As he prepares to close out the last of his stock and looks forward to more time for fishing, Ferguson admitted he’s sad.

Roy & Candy’s isn’t closing because of a shortage of customers.

“It’s just time.” Ferguson’s son, Roy Jr., who runs the store with his dad, is eager to move on to other pursuits, and Ferguson said he has a big lawn to look after.

Beyond the occasional jam session and tribute concert, you’re most likely to find Roy and Candy Ferguson (both inducted in Oklahoma’s Western Swing Hall of Fame) performing in the little Baptist church outside of Gore in a community called Notchietown, where their family attends.

“Until I die, music will be part of me,” he said. “I’ll miss all the friends.”

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Karen Shade 581-8334
karen.shade@tulsaworld.com