Joyce Smith

Joyce Smith was born in Lethbridge, Alberta, on October 22, 1940. Nobody in her family played music. What set her course was a babysitter who could play guitar, sing and yodel, and by nine Joyce was singing at her first show. When she was twelve the family moved to Jasper Place, then a separate town on Edmonton’s western edge, into an unfinished house on 163rd Street where the drainage ditches ran six feet deep and getting to the Diamond Bus meant a muddy walk.

At fourteen she auditioned for the Jubilee Jamboree, the Saturday Opry-style show on 630 CHED. Performers had to win their spot back every week, so they counted as contestants and were never paid. Joyce never missed an episode. Television followed on The Noon Show and The Chuckwagon Show, and at nineteen she joined the musicians’ union and became the girl singer in the Rodgers Brothers Band, led by Hank and Frank Rodgers. For four years the band opened for the touring stars who came through the West: Ray Price, Faron Young, Wilf Carter, Hank Snow and George Jones. She had already met her idol. In 1956 Joyce and her sister caught Patsy Cline at the Edmonton Gardens, offered her a lift when her cab was late, and Cline signed an album for her with a wish of good luck in her career.

In 1961 the Rodgers Brothers opened for Webb Pierce, at a hockey rink in Killam, Alberta, by one account, or at the Edmonton Gardens by another. Partway through the night Pierce told the crowd he was taking the girl singer to Nashville, which was news to Joyce, and then called her back for another song. The first one to come to mind was ‘Jambalaya’. After the show Pierce phoned his producer, Owen Bradley, at three in the morning, and Joyce heard Bradley’s drawl down the line: “Well, Webb, if you think she’s good enough.” A week later she was on a plane, paying her own way with help from her parents.

On September 28, 1961, Joyce recorded four songs for Decca at Bradley’s studio on 16th Avenue South, with the Jordanaires and some of the best session players in town. One was ‘Leavin’ on Your Mind’, a new song by Wayne Walker and Webb Pierce. Another, ‘Little World Gone Bad’, was put aside and cut again the following summer. Decca released ‘Leavin’ on Your Mind’ in February 1962 with ‘Hiding Out’ on the other side. Back in Edmonton, Joyce was afraid to let anyone hear it because she was sure her voice sounded awful. Radio disagreed. The single sold more than 100,000 copies, enough to pay back the costly session, and it put her among the most promising new women in country music that year. She signed a management contract with Jim Denny, the former Grand Ole Opry manager whose Cedarwood publishing company, run with Pierce, held the song.

Patsy Cline heard the record in Bradley’s office and asked for the song on the spot. Bradley told her she would have to wait and see what the Canadian girl did with it. Cline finally recorded it in September 1962, and Decca issued her version in January 1963. It was the last single released in her lifetime, and it climbed to number 8 on Billboard’s country chart in the weeks after she died that March. Joyce took it as an honour: Patsy Cline was singing her song.

Nashville wanted her to move down. Joyce was twenty, the offer of work was only a maybe, and she went home. She completed her Decca contract with two more singles, ‘It Keeps Right On A-Hurtin’ Since I Left’ backed with ‘Pretty Lies’, and ‘I Don’t Want No One But You’ backed with ‘Little World Gone Bad’. Jim Denny died of cancer in 1963, and the people who took over his business had little interest in an Alberta singer.

She had another reason to stay. After a rained-out rodeo in St. Paul, Alberta, where the Rodgers Brothers were booked, she had met George Myren, a bronc rider born at Gull Lake, Saskatchewan, and raised in Viking, Alberta, who would become a Canadian champion. They married in 1962 and worked the North American rodeo circuit together, George in the arena and Joyce taking whatever singing jobs turned up along the way. In 1964 they settled in Edmonton. George took up the bass and joined her band, and they spent spells living and working in Fort Worth, Texas, where they played Panther Hall, and outside Nashville.

Records kept coming on Canadian labels. Point issued an album built around ‘Leavin’ on Your Mind’ around 1964 and Canadian Queen of Country Music in 1965, her ‘Jambalaya’ turned up on a 1963 Banff anthology, and singles followed on Apex in 1967 and Columbia in 1973. Gary Buck’s Broadland label released three singles in 1975 and 1976 and the album Wish the World a Little Love.

Her real living was made on stage. When Edmonton’s bars first opened to live music for Klondike Days in 1965, Joyce and George played the Highway Motor Inn to lineups that started an hour before the band and stretched for blocks. In 1966 they went in for a week downstairs at the old Jasper Place Hotel, later the Klondiker, and stayed on as one of the first full-time live bands in an Alberta hotel. By the 1970s the downstairs crowd had turned to bikers who wanted rock. When one of them dropped his pants in front of Joyce in the middle of a song, George kicked him without missing a beat, and the cymbals went down with him. The circuit ran from the Saxony, with a thousand people on its main floor, to Ranchman’s in Calgary, Saskatoon’s Canadian-only showroom, Fort McMurray, Thompson, and Grande Prairie at fifty below. They raised two children, with Grandma minding them on the road weeks, and came off the road when the kids were older.

In 1980 Joyce made Please Play It Softly for Royalty Records, the Edmonton label R. Harlan Smith had founded in 1974 to give Western Canadian country artists a home without begging Toronto for a contract. Harlan produced and arranged the sessions at Sundown in Edmonton, and the record reaches back to her Nashville year. She recut ‘Leavin’ on Your Mind’ and ‘My Little World Gone Bad’, both still in Cedarwood’s catalogue, and sang ‘I Fall to Pieces’, the Patsy Cline hit Owen Bradley had produced. Marijohn Wilkin, co-writer of ‘My Little World Gone Bad’, also wrote ‘One Day at a Time’ with Kris Kristofferson. The rest came from home: Bev Munro’s ‘Wasted Years’, Laura Vinson’s ‘Crazy Heart’ and Harlan’s own ‘The Same Old Me’.

Two songs were her own. Joyce had never thought of herself as a songwriter, but she wrote ‘Rodeo Wind’ and ‘He’s My Friend’ with Dennis Charney, who also took the photographs for the album and would later write about Royalty Records for Country Music News. Royalty released ‘Please Play It Softly’ with ‘One Day at a Time’ as a single in 1980, and ‘Rodeo Wind’ with ‘My Little World Gone Bad’ in 1982. Rodeo Wind became the name of the band she and George led for decades. In 2002 Royalty reissued the album on CD as The Same Old Me in its Legends Series.

The honours arrived late and all at once. Joyce was inducted into the Alberta Country Music Hall of Fame in 1991 and received the Bev Munro Award of Dedication in 2002, the Alberta Women of Country Music Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004, induction into the National Traditional Country Music Hall of Fame in the United States in 2007, and a place in the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame in 2010. She later released a sixth album, Exactly Where I Want To Be. In 2000 George founded the Association of Canadian Country Music Legends, with the Rodeo Wind Band backing Joyce, Bev Munro, fiddler Alfie Myhre, Randy Hollar and Pete Hicks in community halls across Alberta, and in 2004 he entered the Canadian Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame. The National Music Centre recorded Joyce’s oral history in 2018.

She regretted Nashville for years, she said, until her children were born. By then she had played the Grand Ole Opry, she had a Patsy Cline record of a song she cut first, and she was still married to the bronc rider from St. Paul.

-Robert Williston