You’d think that someone who starred on the late-’60s TV shows of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, played the female lead in country music’s first opera, turned down the slot on The Porter Wagoner Show that eventually went to Dolly Parton, and had BR5-49 back her on record would be more than a footnote in the history of country music. And yet, except for a discussion in Mary Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann’s Finding Her Voice and brief entries in a handful of discographies and reference books, Kay Adams is largely known only to record collectors and archivists.
After an active career spanning more than a decade, Adams dropped out of sight during the late ’70s when she sustained severe injuries in a near-fatal auto accident outside Anchorage, Alaska. Although she eventually recovered, permanent damage to her diaphragm made singing so painful that, except for rare appearances, she had little choice but to retire from performing.
Earlier this year, however, Adams resurfaced on Rig Rock Deluxe (Upstart), a collection of truck-driving songs assembled by Jeremy Tepper and Jake Guralnick that also boasts the talents of Buck Owens, Don Walser, Red Simpson, and Junior Brown, among others. Adams’ inclusion on the compilation is certainly fitting: On her 1966 concept album Wheels and Tears, the singer adapted country music’s truck-driving subgenre to express a uniquely female perspective. Adams’ recorded legacy is hardly as prodigious as that of her Bakersfield counterparts Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, and Rose Maddox, but perhaps “Mama Was a Rock (Daddy Was a Rolling Stone),” her Rig Rock collaboration with BR5-49, will refocus attention on her contributions to the influential sound of the town that became known as “Nashville West.”
Born Princetta Kay Adams in Knox City, Texas, Adams was raised in nearby Vernon—the “Watermelon Capitol of the World”—where her father worked in the oil fields. On weekends, Adams’ father played fiddle with his band, the Texas Drifters, at square dances, watermelon cuttins, and family sing-alongs. Not surprisingly, the singer’s most vivid childhood memories are of music. “My family tells the story of how my dad played music all the time,” remembers Adams, “and how, as a baby, I danced so hard that I shook all the bolts out of the baby bed and it fell onto the floor.”
Adams began singing almost as soon as she could talk. “I was raised on a big ranch,” she explains. “I used to go down into the salt flat and pretend that I was singin’ on the Grand Ole Opry. I’d draw a big stage on the ground and a dressing room with stairs. I’d put on all these beautiful gowns in my imagination and climb the stairs and sing and dance for hours. I laugh about it now because I wonder if people saw me sometimes and wondered what I was doin’.”
It wasn’t long before Adams started attracting a formal audience. She made her public debut at the age of 10 singing on the Big D Jamboree, the West Texas equivalent of the Louisiana Hayride. Her first professional break came four years later, when she ventured up to Wichita Falls to appear on The Bill Mack Show, a country music variety hour that enjoyed considerable regional popularity during the 1950s.
Adams married several years later. Shortly thereafter, her husband’s job took the couple west to Bakersfield, a move that initially devastated Adams. “I cried all the way,” she remembers. “I led a very sheltered life. I didn’t do anything but sing, so I had no idea that back toward California there was any country music. I thought it was only in Texas and on the Grand Ole Opry. And here I was movin’ to Bakersfield. I didn’t even know that Buck Owens lived out there. I knew of him because his songs were so hot at the time, but I didn’t know where he lived. I cried all the way to California ’cause I thought there wouldn’t be any country music out there.”
Doors nonetheless opened for Adams once she and her husband arrived in central California, the first when she landed a spot as a regular on Dave Stogner’s Country Corner, a local country music television show. Not long after, Dusty Rhodes, a steel guitar player and close friend of Buck Owens, approached the singer about becoming her manager.
“At the time I didn’t really know much about the business end of anything,” Adams admits. “Right away, Dusty took me down to L.A. to meet [producer] Cliffie Stone. Cliffie went over to Tower Records and told them about me and they signed me to a contract. And that’s how it started rollin’.”
And roll it did—success came quickly for Adams. “Honky-Tonk Heartache,” her first single for Tower, a subsidiary of Capitol, went top 10 in late 1964; in the spring of ’65, she won the Country Music Academy Award for “Most Promising Female Vocalist.” (“Most Promising Male Vocalist” honors went to Merle Haggard.) Adams charted a total of five top 10 singles for Tower between 1964 and 1968, among them the first recorded version of Buck Owens’ “Roll Out the Red Carpet” and the hit that became her signature song, “Little Pink Mack.”
“I love that song,” says Adams, a full 30 years after the record first hit the charts. “It made my career.” And yet of all her trucking songs, only “Little Pink Mack” finds Adams assuming the role of a female trucker. Others, like “Six Days Awaiting,” a rewrite of Dave Dudley’s “Six Days on the Road,” express the isolation, anticipation, and worry of a woman stuck at home while her husband is out chasing the white line in his 18-wheeler.
“I turned a lot of those songs around,” says Adams of the material on Wheels and Tears, her debut LP. “They talked to me about doing a concept album about truck drivin’ songs. Well, both my brothers were truck drivers, so I thought that was really neat. Truck drivers are good, hardworking people. I felt like I could do something for them. So I went in and we pulled out some songs, and I turned a lot of them around for girls.”
Adams recorded three solo albums for Tower—Wheels and Tears (1966), Alcohol and Tears (1967), and Make Mine Country (1968)—as well as a duet album with Dick Curless, A Devil Like Me Needs an Angel Like You, also for Tower (1966). She later moved to Capitol and during the ’70s recorded for Granite, Ovation, and Firstline Records. But Adams’ long out-of-print Tower sides remain her crowning achievement; they’re the epitome of the legendary Bakersfield Sound, a mix of hard country music and Western swing. Her rich, expressive vocals—a stylistic combination of her idols, Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline—are ideally suited to the driving rhythms, barroom piano, crying steel, and stinging electric guitar that accompany her on record.
More than the creation of a bunch of talented studio musicians—among them Ralph Mooney and James Burton—Adams’ West Coast honky-tonk adapted well to live performance. As she attests, the artists who recorded for Capitol and Tower logged plenty of time on the road. “Buck Owens put a touring package together,” she explains. “He had a complete show. Red Simpson was one of the acts, and Wynn Stewart traveled with us,” she adds. “There was also Dick Curless, Freddie Hart, Merle Haggard, Tommy Collins, and Ferlin Husky. I’m probably leaving people out, because there were a lot of people with that show.”
Adams is grateful for the boost that touring with this incredible cast of stars gave her singing career; it allowed her, among other things, the chance to perform on the storied stages of Carnegie Hall and the Ryman Auditorium. “Nobody made a lot of money in those days,” she notes. “But without Buck Owens taking me with his show—he was No. 1 at the time—no one would have ever known who I was. It would’ve taken me years to play to the types of audiences he played to—large audiences. I could not have bought the kind of publicity that I got traveling with his show.”
Traveling with Owens—and, later, Merle Haggard—also enabled Adams to participate in the making of some of country music’s richest history. “It was really great to be backstage and see such great songs being written,” she says. “I was sleepin’ in one of the bunks one time when Merle was pacin’ up and down the aisle and writing a song. I could hear him talking to himself and everything—he was writing ‘The Bottle Let Me Down.’ ” Another time, Freddie Hart asked Adams for help with the song that eventually became “Easy Lovin’.”
“Those were really wonderful times,” recalls Adams. “To be that close to people who were writing and creating—Buck, Merle, Tommy [Collins], Red [Simpson], Dick Curless—I was sittin’ right in the middle of a ton of Picassos. It was great.”
More than 20 years have passed since Adams’ heady days with those Bakersfield legends. Today, she and her husband, Buck Moore—who wrote the Randy Travis hit “The Box”—help run a small publishing company located along Music Row. Adams says she has no plans to return to recording or performing, even though she did have a ball making “Mama Was a Rock (Daddy Was a Rolling Stone)” with BR5-49. “[They] got as close to playing the old-style stuff that I did as anybody’s ever done,” Adams beams. “I’m just in love with them. I think they’re just fabulous.”
Hopefully, people will think the same of Adams’ Rig Rock collaboration with the darlings of Lower Broadway—perhaps enough to prompt a label like Razor & Tie, AVI, or even Capitol to consider reissuing the body of work that she recorded for Tower. An important but largely forgotten exponent of the classic Bakersfield Sound, Adams deserves that much and then some.
