NUDIE SUITS IN NASHVILLE “All I wanted to do was play drums,” said The Legendary Jon Corneal, pioneer of country rock drumming. He started as a little boy from Auburndale who hated playing the baritone his parents rented him for ten dollars a year.
His days in the Dynamics were numbered when Gram Parsons scouted him at the Auburndale municipality building. “That’s where we were rehearsing that afternoon,” Corneal said. “He liked Gerald [“Jesse” Chambers] and my playing, and he needed to replace a bass player and a drummer, so he got our numbers.”
When he was four, Corneal’s ‘momma’ took him to watch the Winter Haven High School Marching Band. He told her then that he wanted to play the ‘dwums.’ (This was before he’d taken three years of speech therapy.) “I ruined a lot of furniture with knives or forks beating on it,” he said. Corneal told his parents that if they’d permit him to play drums, they could save their ten dollars a year because he’d buy his own. The Corneals relented, perhaps more to save their furniture and silverware than the money. Jon’s father owned a lumberyard, and the family lived in a spacious brick Tudor-style home on Lake Juliana, built in 1925. “It’s as nice as any Snively house,” he said. Corneal had his own garage apartment when he was twelve.
Gram called up Chambers and Corneal, and they met up and “started running some tunes together.” In 1962, Chambers and Corneal officially became Legends with Jim Stafford on lead guitar and Gram Parsons on keyboards, guitar, and vocals. One appeal Gram had for Corneal was his ability to secure paid bookings for the band like that horse show banquet, where the Legends played in the ballroom of the Haven Hotel. That year between the banquet, Christmas parties, and New Year’s Eve gigs, the boys made more than a little scratch. “Growing up in Auburndale, the coaches hated musicians. If you were a musician, you were so less than – way, way down low on the totem,” he said. When they returned to school following the holidays, the coach started giving him grief. Corneal laughed as he told the story. “I said, ‘Hey coach! How much money did you make last week?’ He wouldn’t tell me. I said, ‘Well, if you didn’t make $300, I made more than you did.’ And he never called me a sissy again.”
When the decision was made to drop his baritone and pick up drum sticks, Corneal had to return to the beginner band. His band director, Mr. Miller, would take Jon from Auburndale Junior High to Auburndale Primary School in his 1956 Chevrolet. He started all over with drums, but within a month or two, Corneal had caught up and returned to the intermediate band at the junior high. Though he learned how to read music, Corneal didn’t put too much stock in it. He mentioned a line by The Country Gentleman, Chet Atkins, who once said when asked if he read music, “I do, but not enough to hurt my playing.”
Corneal appeared on WFLA channel 8’s, Hi-Time with the Dynamics and later with the Legends, winning Hi-Time’s Band of the Year.
Jon set up a drum kit to practice in his apartment above the garage of the Corneal home. When he wasn’t working for his father at the lumberyard, a young Jon Corneal played that drum kit with zeal, practicing until 10 pm on school nights, prompting his mother to beat on the garage ceiling with a shovel and yell, ‘You got school tomorrow, you need to quit!’
In early July 1964, fresh out of high school, a 17-year-old Jon Corneal and Eloise guitarist Jim Stafford put Polk County in the rear view, pulling a 13-foot Scotty camper. A few days later, they pulled into an RV park, spot E15, Corneal still remembers, in Nashville, Tennessee. The two would eventually split company to pursue their individual entertainment aspirations. One of Corneal’s Nashville neighbors, bass player for Flatt and Scruggs and The Foggy Mountain Boys, Jake Tullock, lent him the money to join a musician’s union that August.
Later, when Corneal played with the Legends, they’d occasionally practice in that garage apartment. “We’d either rehearse at my place or in Gram’s room,” he said. Before joining the Legends with Gram and the gang, Corneal was in a band called the Dynamics alongside Carl and Gerald Chambers. The Dynamics, like most garage bands of the era, would add and change members, including Bobby Braddock, Aaron Hancock, Buddie Canova, Randy Green, and Billy Joe Chambers. The band would travel to play at different Central Florida teen centers. “My momma would let me borrow her Oldsmobile. […] You could put all the drums and all our gear in the Olds because they were big cars, so that was real handy.” Corneal remembered taking his mother’s Olds to a show in Kissimmee where each boy earned $10. “We were happy to get it, boy. We were making that money,” he chuckled. “Those were the days.”
Most of the country acts of the time didn’t care for Corneal’s brand of drumming. He referred to himself as a ‘fancy solo drummer’ in addition to the group work he played. “When I played with the Legends, I’d do a ten-minute drum solo, and they’d all leave the bandstand,” he said. The newly-graduated teenager was often surrounded by artists twice his age in the Music City. “They’d turn to me and say, ‘Keep it country boy, keep it country! Stick and a brush!’ You never told a rock and roll drummer not to play with two sticks,” he said. “I decided if that’s all I could do, I’d learn how to keep time that was better than a metronome. I learned where the pocket is, for sure.”
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