Troubador, Hollywood, circa l974 Photo © Ken Whitford

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An Autobiography by Panama Red

Nashville. March 10 or 11, 2002
There's probably nothing harder to do than to write a bio on
yourself. There's lots of stuff happens in a life that you'd really
rather hadn't, but there it is. So you try to pick out the
salient parts, and avoid the parts that are too revealing
of your shortcomings, and hope for the best. You also end
up using the word "I" a lot.

I was born in Nestlow, West Virginia, on April 15, l945.
Nestlow was a crossroads between East Lynn and Branchland.
Or, to put it in a broader sense, between Huntington and
Charleston. There were really only four or five houses
there, two of which belonged to my grandmother, Hulda
Finley. She also owned a little store between the two
houses, where everyone from the surrounding area came and
bought groceries. She was a pillar of the community...she
midwifed most of the kids who were born around there, and
she served on the school board. We had a small farm.
Everyone called her Miz Finley.

My family came into the area now known as West Virginia
early on, arriving in the early 1700's from Scotland
passing through Virginia and later North Carolina. For a
long time we were land rich, but we had large families and
the resultant inherited divisions diminished the once-large
holdings. It doesn't matter: the land really belonged to
the Indians, who got pushed out. One of my forefathers,
John Finley, a trader, showed Daniel Boone the route
through the Cumberland Gap into the area. And Cumberland
for a long time was a common first name for the men in my
family.

Lots of folks who were around those parts were necessarily
related, though I'm not talking here of the stereotypical
hillbilly inbreeding. My great great grandmother was the
sister of Jesse and Frank James's mother, which I guess
makes me a distant - sixth - cousin. There is also some
Cherokee blood mixed in there, and, through my father,
Leonard Chaney, a great deal of Melungeon, Anatolian bump
and all.

I had an early exposure to hill country music, because in
those days, even though the rest of the country had moved
into the twentieth century, being back in the hills and
hollows, it was difficult to get electricity, and therefore
overtones of urban culture, in. So we did the best we
could and many of the songs my mother sang to us when we'd
be lying in bed at night waiting for sleep were the same songs
our ancestors had brought over from Scotland, Pretty Polly
and House Carpenter kind of stuff. And we spoke with what
I later learned was pretty much an Elizabethan accent,
because we were isolated, cut off, from the influx of later
immigrants into the United States. My mother had a
battery-powered radio which we only used on Saturday nights
to listen to the Grand Ole Opry. When I was five, we
finally got electricity.

My grandmother died, and we moved to the big city,
Huntington, an industrial town on the Ohio River, when I
was six and in the second grade. I became immediately
aware of my accent shorcomings and learned to say 'here'
instead of 'hyer' and 'ear' instead of 'year', 'iDEa'
instead of 'EYEdee', and so on. I learned to pass.

My third and fourth grade teacher at Guyandotte Elementary
was the same lady, Miss Mary Ellen Boyd, a spinster until
she died. She taught me the joys of reading and of words,
and the die was cast. My oldest brother, my half-brother
really, Delmas Davidson, got me started playing guitar and
kept me at it throughout my life until he died a few years
ago. He was the kindest person, at least to me, that I
have ever known.

I went through the public school system in Huntington until
I was in the twelfth grade, when my mother moved to St.
Petersburg, Florida. I graduated from Northeast High
School there, and I played in garage bands there just as I
had in Huntington. I joined the Army in October 1962 at
seventeen, and after basic training at Fort Jackson, SC, I
attended the US Army Information School at Fort Slocum, NY,
an intense journalism course on David's Island, just off
New Rochelle, and about twenty miles outside New York City.

I shipped out to Korea, to Taegu, the first foreign place I
had ever been. My first assignment was as a writer on the
command newsletter, but within a few months I became a
stringer for Pacific Stars and Stripes in Tokyo. I began
to learn Korean. After this first tour I returned to the
States, to the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg,
NC, then gearing up for Vietnam. I was there six months,
when I was reassigned back to Korea because of my language
skills. I went to work for a Korean-language magazine
published by the United Nations Command, called Friends of
Freedom. It was quite patently a propaganda tool, but I
gained a lot of experience and knowledge writing feature
stories for it, mostly about industrial growth in South
Korea. I was discharged in September l965, one month after
the Associated Press began referring to the happenings in
Southeast Asia as The VietNam War. I was twenty. I was
lucky.

I had, because of reading On The Road and the Dharma Bums,
always wanted to be a beatnik, or something, anyway, and
live an artistic life. In Korea I had also developed a
taste for various kinds of dope, mostly hashish and opium,
which the old abogees in every little village always seemed
to keep around as medicine. Being discharged in Oakland, I
went to San Francisco where I had Army buddies, and soon
fell into the lifestyle there. There were some people who
had Panamanian pot to sell, and some who wanted to buy, and
I knew them both, and with the red hair and all, the Panama
Red handle came into being. My ex-Army buddy Ed Biagini
started calling me that, and, until it became necessary for
me to flee, so I was known on the street.

I went back to St Petersburg, and got my first songwriting
job. After a while I moved to the Lower East Side, and
managed a coffeehouse on Tenth across from Tompkins Square
Park, just down the street from the Peace Eye Bookstore.
It was called the Cafe I.

Back in St Petersburg, I fell in with an entrepreneur and
ended up a partner in a headshop in Clearwater. I had been
playing all this time at the Beaux Arts Gallery in Pinellas
Park, and soon became a founding member of a band called
Bethlehem Asylum. We moved to Miami in late sixty-nine,
and over the next couple of years recorded two albums for
Ampex at the Capricorn studios in Macon and at Criteria.
We hung together for about three years, but time marches
on...the surviving members of that band, Buddy Helm and
Charlie Dechant, I still count as brothers. The mystery
man in that group, Robert Christian Gandhi, has long
disappeared, and Jim Neiman, the bass player/singer, has
passed on.

I first came to Nashville to stay for any length of time in
1972. I became Billy Joe Shaver's guitar player, and we
wrote a couple of songs together, one of which, Bottom
Dollar, has at this time been recorded upwards of forty
times. It has become a standard country song, but
standards don't pay; hits pay, but not standards...

I was standing on a street corner one day, gazing up at
Billy Swan's apartment house when I hear a voice over my
right shoulder saying, "Do you think I ought to call myself
Rich Friedman, Kinky Friedman or Big Dick Friedman?" It
was, of course, Kinky. Now of course he uses all three on
his answering machine at the ranch. We became friends, and
he ultimately coerced me into playing guitar on his first
album, Sold American. Later, when I joined the Jewboys, I
started using the name. When we were working on Kinky's
second album, I heard Peter Rowan's tune, Panama Red. Ah,
well, I thought, it'll pass. More untrue words have never
been spoken; the idea of Panama Red as an alias has so
grabbed the imagination of the masses that there must be a
million of us out there...but I was the first, I think,
anyway, predating the song. No matter.

I played in the Jewboys and I toured under my own flag
until 1980, when Felix Pappalardi recorded a song of mine,
somewhat watered down, called Negro, and then invited me to
work for him in Miami back at Criteria. I accepted,
because of the opportunity to learn how to produce records
from The Man himself. Felix meant a lot to me, and I
invested a lot of my career potential in working with him.
I became a 'made man', and was poised to finally make the
big time, which there was one of then, when Felix died at
the hands of his wife, Gail. There is nothing more that
should be said.

Fee's death left me high and dry, in the business and
emotionally. I dropped out of everything for the next few
years, moved to Santa Fe, became an x-ray tech, and except
for the occasional gig at the Mineshaft in Madrid, did not
play. Later we moved to San Francisco and I became
interested in playing and started playing out. After we
moved to Seattle, we were living in the parking lot of
Northern Stars Studios in our old bus, and I started
playing a lot more, got my chops such as they are, back up,
and made a little record called HomeGrown, which has turned
out to be an artistic and critical success.

I came back to Nashville in 2000, stayed a couple of
months, went to Amsterdam for over a year, and during that
time started writing the journals, which have helped me to
sort out a lot of stuff, and which have served me well in
bringing me before a public who would rather read than
listen to music, an attitude I can well understand, given
what has been out there for them to listen to.

So much for autobiographies.

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