His plain-spoken songs were recorded by Elvis Presley, Kenny Rogers and many others. The duo of Johnny Cash and June Carter made his “Jackson” a huge country hit.
By Bill Friskics-Warren Bill Friskics-Warren writes about country music for The Times from Nashville. The New York Times Published Sept. 21, 2024 Updated Sept. 30, 2024
Billy Edd Wheeler, an Appalachian folk singer who wrote vividly about rural life and culture in songs like “Jackson,” a barn-burning duet that was a hit in 1967 for June Carter and Johnny Cash as well as for Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, died on Monday at his home in Swannanoa, N.C., east of Asheville. He was 91.
His death was announced on social media by his daughter, Lucy Wheeler.
Plain-spoken and colloquial, Mr. Wheeler’s songs have been recorded by some 200 artists, among them Neil Young, Hank Snow, Elvis Presley, and Florence & the Machine. “Jackson” — a series of spirited exchanges between a quarrelsome husband and wife — opens with one of the most evocative couplets in popular music: “We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout/We’ve been talkin’ about Jackson, ever since the fire went out.”
From there the husband boasts about the carousing he plans to do in Jackson, as his wife scoffs at his hollow braggadocio. “Go on down to Jackson,” she goads him on, emboldened by the song’s neo-rockabilly backbeat. “Go ahead and wreck your health/Go play your hand, you big-talkin’ man, make a big fool of yourself.”
Written with the producer and lyricist Jerry Leiber, with whom Mr. Wheeler had apprenticed as a songwriter at the Brill Building in New York, “Jackson” was a Top 10 country hit for Ms. Carter and Mr. Cash and a Top 20 pop hit for Ms. Sinatra and Mr. Hazlewood. The Carter-Cash version won a Grammy Award in 1968 for best country-and-western performance by a duo, trio or group.
Mr. Wheeler’s original pass at the song, though, was anything but auspicious. In fact, when Mr. Leiber first heard it, he advised Mr. Wheeler to jettison most of what he had written and to use the line “We got married in a fever” in the song’s opening and closing choruses.
“For that editorial contribution, Jerry took 25 percent of the writer’s share of the song and was listed as co-writer,” Mr. Wheeler recalled in his memoir, “Hotter Than a Pepper Sprout” (2018).
“At first,” he added, “I thought that should have been his contribution as the publisher. But, in retrospect, I realize his input made the song work. So he deserved it.”
Maybe more typical of Mr. Wheeler’s writing than “Jackson” were his empathetic ballads about the vicissitudes of life in hardscrabble Appalachia.
In “Coal Tattoo,” a song popularized by the bluegrass singer Hazel Dickens, he wrote trenchantly about the exploitation of miners. “High Flying Bird,” another ode to longing and loss, was first recorded by the folk singer Judy Henske — and later by the disparate likes of Richie Havens and Jefferson Airplane. “Coward of the County,” a No. 1 country hit for Kenny Rogers in 1979 (it also reached No. 3 on the pop charts), dramatized what it means to live by the courage of one’s convictions.
“The Coming of the Roads,” achingly rendered on a 1965 recording by Judy Collins, mourned the ruin brought on by encroaching commercial development in Mr. Wheeler’s beloved Appalachia.
Humor played a role in Mr. Wheeler’s songwriting as well, especially on recordings he made under his own name like “Ode to the Little Brown Shack Out Back.” A droll testimonial to the family privy, the record was his only Top 40 country hit, reaching No. 3 (No. 50 pop) in 1965.
Mr. Wheeler released some two dozen albums in a recording career that spanned six decades.
Typically backed by spare guitar- or banjo-driven arrangements, he sang in a declamatory style reminiscent of that of the Kingston Trio, who had a Top 10 pop hit with Mr. Wheeler’s “Reverend Mr. Black” in 1963.
Billy Edward Wheeler was born on Dec. 9, 1932, in Whitesville, W.Va., the only son of Dutch Perdue and Mary Isabelle Wheeler. He was raised by his mother (who was known as Sister), his father having abandoned the family before Billy was old enough to remember him. (His mother remarried when he was 4 or 5.)
He started spelling his middle name “Edd” in junior high school. “I don’t know how it happened,” he wrote in his memoir. “But I got accustomed to telling people, ‘There’s two d’s in Edd.’”
Billy was given his first guitar and started writing songs while in junior high school. He also worked as a paperboy, and as a laborer for a local coal company, to help support the family, which by that time included his younger half brother, Robert.
After high school, Mr. Wheeler graduated from Warren Wilson Junior College in 1953 and Berea College in Kentucky in 1955. He later served as a student pilot in the Navy and, in 1961, enrolled in the Yale School of Drama, where, at the encouragement of the writer Thornton Wilder, whom he met at a staging of Mr. Wilder’s play “Our Town” at Berea, he studied playwriting. A year later he moved to Manhattan to pursue music full time.
Mr. Wheeler wrote numerous plays and musicals, along with a folk opera commissioned by the National Geographic Society called “Song of the Cumberland Gap.” He also wrote several books in addition to his memoir, including two novels and two volumes of poetry.
A man of wide-ranging artistic interests, he took up painting in college. It was an avocation, along with woodworking and sculpting, that he would pursue for decades.
Besides his half brother and his daughter, Mr. Wheeler is survived by his wife of 61 years, Mary Mitchell (Bannerman) Wheeler, and his son, Travis.
Despite his deep ties to Appalachian culture, Mr. Wheeler welcomed the perspective that his time away from the Southern mountains afforded him.
“I had to leave Appalachia to see it better,” he wrote in his memoir. “Somehow the myriad paths I chose, usually by chance, landed me in New York, where I found that New Yorkers are no different from Appalachian mountaineers. Their slang is just different.
“I know Appalachians who didn’t graduate from high school who are brighter and more inventive than many city dwellers I’ve met. Fortunately, in the music business, publishers and producers don’t care if you speak with a twang or didn’t go to school.”