All four songs cut at the Macy’s session were co-written by Reeves and his
boyhood friend and musician from the DeBerry scene, Al ‘Rusty’ Courtney, who
was three years older than him and had been discharged in 1946 after serving dur-
ing WW2 with an engineering construction battalion. He performed with Reeves at
KGRI as one third of a trio alongside station manager Frank Ledbetter, aka ‘Cole
Knight,’ and Reeves, aka ‘Sonny Day.’ The trio performed the songs of the day
while engineer John Bolin busily recorded them. Several recordings from 1948
survive. The first songs Reeves and Courtney wrote together were
How Many Tears
From Now?
and
Once Upon A Time
, which were copyrighted in 1947 under
Courtney’s real name of Alberta Albatros Courtney.
‘Rusty’ Courtney was one of those wild and tragic country music characters
who courted trouble all his life. Like Reeves, he had high aspirations as a musician
and singer and was an excellent songwriter - far better, in fact, than Reeves, who
recorded nine of his compositions. Later, in 1962, Reeves helped his friend, then
serving a prison sentence in Angola State Prison in Louisiana, by purchasing 21
songs from him for the princely sum of $500. Several of the songs were written
while Courtney was incarcerated. ‘Rusty’ Courtney died the way he lived, aged 52
on February 2
nd
1972. Returning home to DeBerry late at night on Highway 149
after a trip to Longview, his car ran off the road, colliding with a parked bulldozer.
He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Reeves’ four Macy’s recordings were all slow-to-mid-tempo efforts and, even
to the staunchest Reeves fans, neither his vocals nor the instrumental backings can
be described as anything but rather bland. Reeves sang in a lower key than he
would on most of his Abbott recordings, similar in style, but not in poise or matu-
rity, to his later classics on RCA. Macy’s 115, released around the start of 1950,
coupled
My Heart’s Like A Welcome Mat
with
Teardrops Of Regret
. The 2
nd
single,
Macy’s 132, released in mid-summer, featured
Chicken Hearted
b/w
I’ve Never
Been So Blue
. None of the four were ever going to set the woods on fire and sales
were mediocre.
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