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Poised

Eddie Noack has agreed to record for K-Ark Records, and his new single, “Psycho,” a Leon Payne song, is getting great reviews …
— Record World magazine, July 13, 1968

1948 yearbook photo (US School Yearbooks online database; Ancestry.com)

Eddie Noack was born in Houston, Texas in 1930. An only child, his parents soon split, and he was raised mostly by his mother. She later remarried, but those Depression-era, us-against-the-world years forged a potent bond between mother and son. In his teens, Eddie’s passions were writing and music. He wrote for his high school newspaper and, inspired by Ernest Tubb and others, learned guitar and began to play and sing. Merging interests must have seemed simple arithmetic, and by graduation he had decided to be a professional songwriter and performer. An anonymous wag placed a cartoon of a guitar-playing hillbilly beside his senior yearbook photo.

Gold Star recording artist (1949; unsourced promotional photo, Gold Star Records)

He threw himself into the booming local country scene and was soon successfully gigging. From the start, his journalistic/literary bent set him apart from other artists. He used his earnings to finance a college English degree and had a scholar’s sense of country music as a historically rich art-form. It became his life’s ambition to contribute to its canon. In 1948 he recorded original tunes for a fledgling Gold Star Records – early home-base to country, blues, and Cajun legends George Jones, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Harry Choates. After that his ascent was dizzying.

Noack’s songs began to chart locally – both in his own and cover versions – and the pros started noticing. He became a protégé of producer Pappy Daily (Jones, Roger Miller, J. P. “Big Bopper” Richardson), who signed the 23 year old to Starday Records – the most prestigious country label in the state. A two-year stint in the Army (Noack was drafted) put things on hold, but he returned an in-demand songwriter. In 1956 Hank Snow had a smash with Noack’s elegiac ballad “These Hands” (later a favorite of Johnny Cash), and he broke out of Texas and into the big time. He moved to Nashville in 1959 and signed with major label Mercury Records as a songwriter the following year. Still young at 30, he seemed poised for the career and artistic standing he’d dreamt of.

Hank Snow: “These Hands” (1956)

What happened next is hard to say, but Noack’s fall was equally, if less pleasantly, vertiginous. For unclear reasons, his songwriting faltered after “These Hands” – ironically a song about an older man looking back on a life of disappointments. He had trouble producing a commercial followup, lost momentum, and backers deserted him in search of reliable hitmakers. He quit performing and focused solely on songwriting. His compositions remained much admired and over the years were covered by bluechip artists like Jones, Cash, Willie Nelson, Bob Wills, and early hero, Ernest Tubb. But mass success eluded him.

Noack in the mid-’60s (unsourced promotional photo, K-Ark Records; Nashville Scene)

Mercury let his contract expire and he spent the rest of his career adrift on a sea of ever-changing small labels. He cut demos, hawked songs, and released occasional, badly distributed 45s. When his finances grew perilous he shifted to publishing and later teaching – depleting critical time and energy for songwriting in offices and classrooms. In 1962 he hit bottom and began recording for “song poem” labels – vanity studios that financed spotty releases by legitimate but non-headlining artists by setting to music lyrics mailed in by songwriting hopefuls. A fee would be collected and a handful of records issued. Noack worked on these in exchange for studio time to record his own songs.

It was a devastating career arc. The cheery notice in Record World makes Noack’s arrival sound triumphant. But K-Ark was a song poem label (writer Phil Milstein wryly captured the essence of these mercenary operations by noting that their proprietors considered customers “too dumb to grasp the meaning of the simple English word ‘lyric’”) and Noack would toil there for three years. Decades later, label head John Capps recalled his tenure tersely: “Eddie would just hang around … He was heavy into drinking … He was down and out …”

“Psycho”-era snapshot, Decatur, Alabama (“Psycho” CD booklet, Bear Family, 2013)

Noack was a private person and wrote no tell-all memoir for a fast (and toward the end, much-needed) buck. But accounts agree that while normally affable and dependable, he was increasingly crippled by dark moods and drink. In an interview with researcher Andrew Brown, Noack’s half-sister Pat Musslewhite described his volatile spirits as manic-depressive illness, inherited from their mother. She also said that destructive binge-drinking nearly killed him twice as a young man – before things turned sour, when his future still looked bright. Noack’s luckless marital history (three failed marriages) may further evince his tempestuous, alcoholic nature.

Dual diagnosis is the modern term for this nightmare cycle of intertwined mental illness and addiction. Treatment resources are plentiful today, but in Noack’s time sufferers were typically dismissed as moral failures, especially in conservative enclaves like the Nashville music industry. There, they were at best romanticized as rebels or pitied as repentant, Hank Williams-style hell-raisers whose back-and-forth battles with the bottle and bad living were potentially lucrative grist for the country music song mill. Noack’s introspective nature and twinkle-eyed Germanic looks fit neither mould. He never sought help and was probably ashamed of his condition. Notably, despite writing a thematically diverse body of songs – from honky-tonk larks like “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1949) to social realist ballads like “Cotton Mill” (1968) – he never wrote a drinking song of any seriousness.

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