JIM STAFFORD

“SPIDERS “SPIDERS AND SNAKES” AND SNAKES” & JIM & JIM STAFFORD STAFFORD “If you don’t know it – practice, practice, practice. That’s what I did when I was a kid. All the other boys would be out practicing football, but I practiced the guitar, and I’m glad I did because it paid off… I can kick this guitar 60 yards,” Jim Stafford said to a roar of laughter from the audience during an appearance on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. In another performance, jokes are peppered between flinger-blurring licks of “Malaguena” and “Flight of the Bumblebee” with giggles and applause in no short supply. A renaissance man, if ever there was one, Stafford is a maestro of hair-raising guitar picking and side-splitting comedy routines. A self-taught multi-instrumentalist, he plays fiddle, piano, banjo, organ, and harmonica. However, Stafford’s main instrument remains his trusty guitar. “I was really serious about the guitar,” Stafford said, “and I still am.” His musical career began at his home in Eloise. He can still remember his neighbor and friend Wayne Simmons getting a beautiful red guitar from his brother, who’d brought it back from Germany. The two would play together – Stafford on his dad’s guitar. Wayne Simmons would go on to write the song “Gibson Girl” on the Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed album, Sneakin’ Around. He may have joked around about practicing, but it was something he did religiously. Stafford kept a guitar on hand at Quality Cleaners, the family dry cleaning business, in Eloise, where he worked for his dad. He learned to read music from Jim Carlton’s father, Ben, at their family music store, Carlton Music Center. “I wanted to learn how to read music, and Ben Carlton was a studio musician, a quality musician who came to Florida with a band,” he said. Stafford’s intuition on the guitar and drive to practice earned the admiration of his peers. Even guitar teacher Ben Carlton was in awe of the young musician. Jim Carlton remembered that his dad didn’t particularly have the time or want to teach, but he made an exception for Stafford. “He saw that Jim Stafford was such a talented kid he couldn’t help himself,” Jim Carlton said. “In fact, he didn’t even charge money for the first several lessons.” Stafford was in a few garage bands with other young Polk County musicians of the ‘60s, including several iterations of the Legends. Kids like Gram Parsons and Jim Carlton looked up to Stafford. “He was our avuncular older brother,” said Carlton. In Calling Me Home author Bob Kealing refers to these Polk County musicians whom Gram “befriended and benefited from” as “a constellation of singers, songwriters, and entertainers on the rise.” The self-effacing Stafford was but one of the stars in that mellifluous constellation of charisma and knack. He reflected on his garage band days, “Sometimes we’d be playing

(1974)

“That’s a simple song, but I worked on it for quite a while because I knew there was something catchy about it.”

with a couple of guys from Auburndale, a couple of guys from Winter Haven. There were some good people over there.” He tipped his hat to the talent of Bobby Braddock as well as Carl Chambers, calling his song “Close Enough to Perfect,” “one of the best country songs I’ve ever heard.”

In high school, Stafford and his buddies would often rehearse in his living room, and on Friday and Saturday nights, they’d load into someone’s car or Gram’s VW bus to play a Central Florida teen center. Back then, Stafford said, “I could play guitar alright, and a couple of the guys in the band would sing. It wasn’t the kind of band that we got together often and worked up complex arrangements or any of that kind of stuff. […] It was almost like kids pretending to be a band.”

Playing in bands was fun for Stafford, but he was more interested in being an entertainer than a rockstar. He often went to Christy’s Sundown Restaurant in Winter Haven to watch piano bar comics. “They’re fellas who sit at a piano, and they talk to the audience and sing songs and tell jokes,” he said. One of his favorites was Tampa-based comedian Pat Henry.

A young Jim Stafford would pick up the piano comics’ souvenir albums and listen to them again and again. “I learned quite a bit about how to talk to an audience, how to tell a joke, how to play a song they might like, how to get them to sing along – all of the things I could possibly learn about being an entertaining guitar comic. I guess that might have been what I was,” he said.

Stafford said he worked much harder afterward on becoming a single act. “I was always trying to write songs and jokes.” He thought if he could entertain, tell a few jokes, and play his guitar well, he might be able to make a living playing bars and restaurants and lounges. “That’s when I put my guitar in the back of my dad’s cleaning truck and drove out to the Dundee Holiday Inn and got a job playing with my guitar. I really never looked back after that,” he said.

Time spent performing at bars and hotel lounges sharpened Stafford’s comedic and musical abilities. “The perfect thing for me was to find places where I could work just about every night of the week so I could try my material.” Stafford would record his performances and listen back to his delivery to make adjustments.“My guitar playing was pretty good, and I worked on funny songs because I wasn’t much of a singer, so I thought I’d just do these little talking songs.” In 1974, Stafford would release a song he wrote called “Swamp Witch” on his self-titled album, co-produced by another Winter Haven native, Kent ‘Lobo’ LaVoie. The single would spend one week on the U.S. top 40 charts, peaking at No. 39. Stafford followed this ‘moderate’ chart success with his version of David Bellamy’s, “Spiders and Snakes,” which he re-wrote in the bedroom of his childhood home in Inwood. The song was a hit.

“That’s a simple song, but I worked on it for quite a while because I knew there was something catchy about it,” he said. That song, which he would perform in 1976 alongside Dolly Parton on her nationally syndicated television show, went on to chart at No. 3 and sell 2.5 million copies. Stafford credits “Spiders and Snakes” for launching him onto stages across Reno and Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe, opening for musical icons from Bruce Springsteen and the Earl Scruggs Revue to Ike and Tina Turner.

“Looking back on it, it was thrilling because I started off in these little lounges, trying to write songs and do funny things and play the guitar as good as I could,” he said. “I kept at it and kept at it and got good enough to attract the attention of record people. Next thing I know, I had some records that did very well and moved out to LA.”

The “Spiders and Snakes” songsmith’s talents weren’t relegated to music and comedy. “Whenever there was some aspect of entertainment that I could get my hands on or figure out how to do myself, I would do it,” he said. Stafford had quite a few film roles over the years, including Any Which Way You Can (1980) starring Clint Eastwood (for which he wrote the song “Cow Patti’’), cult horror-comedy Blood Suckers from Outer Space (1984), Kid Colter (1984), Gordy (1994), and guest appearances in television series The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. Stafford made 26 appearances on The Tonight Show and hosted the ABC summer variety series The Jim Stafford Show as well as Those Amazing Animals with co-hosts Burgess Meredith and Priscilla Presley.

In 1990 Stafford opened The Jim Stafford Theatre in Branson, Missouri, where he brought in other first-rate musical acts and serenaded, wise-cracked, and played some of his greatest hits like “My Girl Bill” and “Wildwood Weed” to crowds for decades. He continues to do live performances, shining on audiences across the Sunshine State.

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