Jimmy Work

Jimmy Work isn't a name that most country music fans are familiar with, even though as a songwriter he was responsible for "Tennessee Border," "Making Believe," and "That's What Makes the Jukebox Play." Like a handful of performers, he worked happily at music for many years but felt privileged simply to have had the opportunity to record and perform, and gladly kept his day job as a millwright. Jimmy Work was born in Akron, OH, in 1924. Two years later, his parents moved to a farm in Dukedom, TN. He began playing guitar when he was seven years old after he picked up a guitar his father had originally bought for his mother. His two biggest influences at that point in his life, and for many years after, were Gene Autry and Roy Acuff, and one can safely include Jimmie Rodgers on the list as well. He was in a band in high school, and was a good enough fiddle player to win contests on that instrument as well. He began writing songs before he was in his teens, and was encouraged by reactions to his music. By 1945, he was playing country music in Pontiac, a suburb of Detroit, MI; and while things started slowly for Work, playing country music in a northern industrial area, they got better in the years immediately as Southerners, white as well as black, moved there to take defense plant jobs and stayed on afterward as part of the automobile and related industries. Players like Jimmy Work were a welcome reminder of home for many of these newly transplanted country listeners. By the mid-'40s, Work had a big enough audience from his local radio appearances to justify the publication of a songbook, as he later cut his first two singles for a tiny label called Trophy. Those first two singles, featuring Work on acoustic guitar and a single electric guitar backup, were highly...