A little back history: Thanks to the internet, and to the published writings of
Michael Streissguth, Colin Escott and others, today’s Reeves fans can become ex-
perts literally overnight, and the Macy’s story is common knowledge. Way back in
the early sixties it not only wasn’t so, but was scarcely known at all. The first
virtually anyone in the UK knew of the Macy’s was when the UK’s ‘Sunday Ex-
press’ of January 21, 1967 carried a headline
“New Jim Reeves Disc found.”
Oldham
record dealer James Dobbs discovered a copy of Macy’s 132 amongst a dusty batch
of 78s he’d imported from the States. He immediately had fans offering him £5 for
a tape copy, but his dream was for RCA to purchase and reissue the disc, paying
him a royalty, reckoning it could make him £50,000.
The March 1967 issue no.7 of the Jim Reeves Fan Club magazine, as well as
reporting the find, carried a superb feature by Chris ‘Cutch’ Comber titled
“A dis-
course on the early recorded works of the late Jim Reeves.”
The article, over 3
issues, covered Reeves recording career up to his RCA signing in 1955. Comber in
1961 was the first country music authority in the UK to acknowledge that Reeves
had recorded before Abbott. Charles Newman of ‘Country News and Views,’ in an
article after Reeves death, had written that,
“Reeves made some records for a drug
store label
.
”
Chris contested this terminology, saying in his reply that he felt Reeves
had made a commercial disc for a small Texas label operative between 1945-55, his
choice of possible labels being Bluebonnet, Macy, Time or Blue Ribbon. Thanks to
a tape recording George Tye received in late 1965 from a DJ friend, Dean Turner of
Fort Worth, which included
My Heart’s Like A Welcome Mat
and which Turner said
had been recorded before
Mexican Joe,
Comber was able to begin to solve the
Macy’s mystery. His friend Katherine Smith from Texas thought she had seen two
Macy’s by Reeves, and she is the only one, prior to James Dobbs finding Macy’s
132 who actually used ‘Macy’s’ in the plural.
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