JON CORNEAL

NUDIE SUITS NUDIE SUITS IN NASHVILLE 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.

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.

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.”

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!’

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.” 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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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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Jon Corneal 2022 Photo by Amy Sexson

In 1965, Corneal got the part of a drummer in the Nashville musical film, Music City U.S.A. (1966). According to Corneal, he got fellow Auburndale native and Dynamics bandmate Bobby Braddock a part playing piano for the movie. Corneal said, “He told the makeup lady to just do the back of his ears because they had him playing an upright piano, and he wasn’t facing the camera. I thought that was funny.”

It was through Music City U.S.A. that Corneal met country music duo the Wilburn Brothers and legendary singer-songwriter and future Country Music Hall of Fame inductee Loretta Lynn, who were featured stars in the film. The former would go on to offer Corneal a job, and he spent the whole of 1966 as the drummer for the Wilburn Brothers. The band was in high demand, packing out the most prominent music halls, theaters, and auditoriums throughout Texas and the southeast. “Back then, they’d still turn 2,000 [people] away,” Corneal said. The Wilburn Brothers played with Loretta Lynn plenty around this time as she was signed with their agency, the Wil-Helm Agency. “Back then, she had her own band, so we backed her up on a lot of shows.” Describing her with a drawn-out emphasis as ‘cooooun-try,’ he added, “She was a darlin’ – she was the sweetest thing.” That year, Corneal played on Lynn’s Christmas album, Country Christmas.

So, there he was, on the road playing with some of the best country musicians of the time. “But I was frustrated,” he said. “When I’d come home, I’d borrow a guitar and start writing songs, working on my singing more and more.”

In 1966, Corneal saved up the $100 per week salary he was making with the Wilburn Brothers to book other musicians and record five of the songs he had written at Bradley’s Barn in Nashville. That was his seminal country rock session.

His country rock roots and connection to former bandmate Gram Parsons would soon bring him to the glitz and grit of Los Angeles. Every so often, Corneal, a true-blue Florida boy, would head south to the Sunshine State to drive the old dirt roads. “I used to come home to smell the orange blossoms,” he said. During one 1967 trip home, Gram was also in town from California, where he’d been pursuing music post-Harvard. He asked Corneal to come over so he could play him some new music he’d discovered.

On a Robert’s reel-to-reel recorder, Gram played Jon a compilation tape he’d made with the country croonings of Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, and Loretta Lynn.

It was surprising to Jon that Gram had ‘discovered’ this sound. “I’d been playing it for a couple of years already and making records and playing on people’s recordings […] making a living playing music,” Corneal said. The spring prior, Corneal said Gram had given him a hard time about the country music he was playing. “He had this attitude about me playing country. People in rock and roll didn’t like country, thought it was less than.” Gram would reproachfully ask Corneal, ‘What are you doing playing that country?’

“That’s where the work was, and that’s why I took it,” Corneal confessed. “I went up there [to Nashville] hoping I could get with the Everly Brothers or Roy Orbison.”

On the same trip home, Gram asked Jon to join the International Submarine Band in California with the agreement that Jon could sing and play some of his songs. “They flew me out first class, so I got steak and lobster and champagne twice – out of Tampa and out of New Orleans. I was feeling no pain when I got there,” Corneal said, smiling.

Los Angeles would prove a big shock for this southern Bibleraised Boy Scout. One morning Gram invited Jon over to actor Peter Fonda’s house for a swim. Sure, he’d go, he said. “As it turned out, I was the only one that had a bathing suit. […] I’d never seen anything like it.” Asked if he’d slipped off his skivvies to join in on the skinning dipping, Jon said in his unhurried southern drawl, “No, ma’am, I didn’t take it off.”

As it would turn out, Gram’s promise to give Corneal some time out front remained unfulfilled. A fight over this prompted Corneal to part ways with the International Submarine Band – that ship had sunk, and Corneal was stranded. LA proved a hard place to adapt for Corneal, who described the city as ‘a different world.’ “There was a few years of struggle there.”

Corneal would go on to record percussion for the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo album, with his name listed alongside drummer Kevin Kelley in the album credits.

Less than two years after playing with the International Submarine Band, Corneal would answer Gram’s call again, this time to play with his band following the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers. After arriving in California, Corneal would hop from Gram’s couch to ‘Burrito Manor.’ The first Flying Burrito Brothers album, The Gilded Palace of Sin, features Corneal’s percussion on five songs. He left the band shortly after recording the album and returned to Nashville. He still has the Nudie suit to show for his time with the Flying Burrito Brothers. “We went to Nudie’s and got measured. I told him I wanted a red suit with an Edwardian collar, with palm trees and all kinds of rhinestones, gold alligators, and on the back was a riverboat,” he said.

These rodeo and rhinestone Nudie suits were designed by Nudie Cohn, founder of Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors in North Hollywood. Elvis, Gram, Dolly, Porter, Buck, Cher, Sly – Nudie suits have been the flashy regalia of country-western and pop culture royalty, then and since.

Corneal must have felt like the picture of snaz, rhinestones reflecting in infinite directions. “That’s the magic of those things.

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“I used to come home to smell the orange blossoms.”

Jon Corneal at the Grand Ole Opry Photo courtesy of Jon Corneal Debbie and Jon Corneal Photo courtesy of Jon Corneal

When you walk out on stage wearing those things, you’re like more than human. There’s something extra going on there. It’s so showbiz-y, it ain’t even funny.”

Earlier this year, in February, Corneal’s friend and Derry Down Project champion Gene Owen accompanied him to Nashville to deliver the garments to the Country Music Hall of Fame to be included in a future exhibit at the museum. The official loan document lists: “Nudie costume jacket with submarine imagery plus nudie jacket with riverboat imagery and accompanying pants worn by Jon Corneal.” The Nudie jacket with submarine imagery was Gram’s from the International Submarine Band, worn during a cameo in The Trip (1967) starring Peter Fonda. Gram gave it to Corneal in 1972 when the percussionist drove to LA to fill in during rehearsals for Gram’s band, the Fallen Angels.

“We don’t often in our lives get treated special,” Corneal said of his time delivering his Nudie suit and sitting for an interview at the Country Music Hall of Fame. “But they treated us special.” In addition to the loan of garments, Corneal is contingent on making appearances at the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Following his work with the Flying Burrito Brothers, Corneal played on Warren Zevon’s Wanted Dead or Alive album and then with ex-Byrd Gene Clark in the band Dillard & Clark on their second LP, Through the Morning, Through the Night. He went on to tour and record with the Glaser Brothers and eventually broke out on his own in 1973, releasing Jon Corneal & the Orange Blossom Special in 1974. He has performed around Florida in his group Limousine Cowboys and for some 30 years with his wife in their act, the Jon & Debbie Corneal Show.

“I dreamed about being a star and having my own bus and playing all these places on my own instead of working behind the star,” Corneal said. “I’ve had all kinds of people standing in front of me, doing their thing, and I’m just back in the back playing the drums, wishing I could be upfront singing.” Now, every Friday at ‘high noon’ at Hillcrest Coffee in Lakeland, The Legendary Jon Corneal and His Compadres play a live two-hour set in which Jon sits front and center. They live stream with people tuning in from all over the world to see a world-class band, headed up by Corneal on drums and rhythm guitar, improvise a set of classics and original music. “I always tell people, his recordings, yeah, they’re pretty damn good, but you’ve got to come see him,” Gene Owen said.

Jon’s Compadres are a floating cast with a nucleus of regular players. “We have patrons that have been faithfully contributing and supportive. It kind of amazes me,” Corneal said. He may have been a ‘road dog’ as a young man, but Corneal is glad to have a home base in Hillcrest Coffee. “Having a place to play once a week and not having to travel is pretty neat.”

The country rock drummer recorded his most recent album, High Country, in 2019. The record is a mix of American classics and Corneal’s original music. The first song on that album, “Used To Do,” was a rendition of one of Corneal’s 1965 formative country rock recordings. On the album’s inside cover, Jon thanks many people, including pal Gene Owen, Compadre Buster Cousins, wife Debbie, “Brian Goding, and all my friends and family at Hillcrest Coffee,” and “my Lord and Savior who has given me the way.” In addition to his Friday concerts with the Compadres, Corneal hosts a weekly Bible study at the Lakeland coffee shop.

A former Legend, now legendary, Jon Corneal continues to make music. At 75, his drumming is still meticulously in-time – ‘better than a metronome.’ When he catches a show at the Derry Down, he’ll graciously regale Gram fans with stories about the cosmic icon, also inviting them to see him play sometime. Between his appearances at the Derry Down, Hillcrest Coffee, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and the ubiquity of social media, the pioneer of country rock drumming said, “Finally, people are starting to figure out my contribution.”