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M
ERCURY
And The Rowleys
drunks either. He said to me, 'If I quit the business, you'll
leave me, won't you?' I said, 'In a heartbeat. You'll go out
that door with what you came in with,' which was noth-
ing. I got him out of debt when I married him. He owed
the world, and it took everything I had."
According to
Johnny Cash, the settlement from the Williams estate
allowed Horton to go fishing for almost a year.
"It
paid for him to go to Alaska and fish every stream from
there to Mexico,"
wrote Cash in his last stab at autobi-
ography.
"Hank would have approved, I think,"
he
added.
(
RIGHT
) Johnny Horton on stage in Tyler, Texas,
December 1953, with Jerry Rowley (fiddle) and
Dido Rowley (upright bass).