Frank (often misspelled “Franks”) arrived in Odessa in 1956, and he continued to be a staple of the local music scene for the reminder of the 20th century. Born Frederick William Frank in Baton Rouge, La., in 1931, Freddie was one year old when his father, an oil field machinist, moved the family to Kilgore, Texas, in Gregg County. Here the youth grew up surrounded by the derricks and pipelines of the giant East Texas oil field that sprawled across Gregg, Rusk, Smith, Upshur, and Wood counties.

Adroit on both fiddle and guitar, Frank began his professional music career at the age of 17. In the early 1950s, Freddie occupied the fiddle chair in the house band at the Reo Palm Isle in Longview; he waxed singles for Abbott Records in 1952 and Starday Records in 1953; and he hooked up with Jack Rhodes, a songwriter, producer, motel owner, and bootlegger in Mineola. Rhodes, who is credited with such standards as “Satisfied Mind” and “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” utilized Freddie’s songwriting and arranging talents. As Frank recounted to Texas music historian Andrew Brown, “I’d write the tunes for ’em. Make ’em meter out, and doctor ’em up.” Gene Vincent and the Bluecaps recorded two of their collaborations—“Five Days, Five Days” and “Red Blue Jeans and a Ponytail.” Intent on furthering his own career, Freddie in 1956 decided to head west to Odessa, Texas. The timing couldn’t have been better.

Odessa, the county seat of Ector County, was already the oil field equipment service and supply center for the area and home base to a workforce of drillers, welders, roughnecks, and the like. Recognized as “the world’s largest inland petrochemical complex,” Odessa had a population would grow from 29,495 in 1950 to 80,338 in 1960. With the boom in full swing, area nightclubs, honky-tonks, and roadhouses did a steady business with live music as part of the mix. Frank quickly took advantage of the situation: “You couldn’t make any money there [in East Texas]. We were playing in those damn clubs for seven and eight dollars a night. And then, we come out here and we’re making $150 a week. That was pretty good money for a musician. It’s always been easy to find work and make a living out here.”

And make a living he did. Freddie became a familiar presence at such Odessa night spots as the Silver Saddle, Melody Club, The Stardust, and Ace of Clubs. He played fiddle with Tommy Allsup and the Southernaires and Bill Myrick and the Rainbow Riders, toured briefly with the Miller Brothers Band, and worked with Hoyle Nix and his West Texas Cowboys. He even owned his own club, the Hawaiian Club, and started a record label with the area-catchy moniker Permian Records. In addition to releasing three singles on Permian Records, Frank also recorded with Billy Thompson and the Melody Cowboys and Bill Massey and the Lone Star Cowboys. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Freddie Frank and the Volunteers held down a weekly residency at the Cow Palace Supper Club; in the 1980s, he played fiddle in Ben Nix’s band in Big Spring.

On occasion, Frank left the music business for other jobs: “I roughnecked… I’ve strung telephone lines, pipelines… tried my hand at everything, but wound up coming back to playing the fiddle.” In fact, the idea for “This Old Rig” came to him while he was employed as the jailer for the police department in Farmington, N.M. Freddie recorded “This Old Rig” in 1957 at the Ben Hall Studio in Big Spring for release on Permian Records. As he told Andrew Brown, “[The song] was a parody on [Stuart Hamblen’s] ‘This Ole House.’”

Stuart Hamblen had roots in West Texas, too, but he made his name in Southern California in the 1930s as singer, songwriter, recording artist, radio personality, and B-Western actor. In 1954 while on a hunting outing in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Hamblen found the body of an aging prospector who had died in a ramshackle cabin. The scene prompted Hamblen to pen “This Ole House,” a million selling Number 1 hit for Rosemary Clooney the same year. The toe-tapping melody creates a gospel revival mood with the lyrics drawing comparisons between the ‘ole’ house and the human body, emphasizing life’s temporal nature with just rewards awaiting in heaven.

Frank retained the melody and word play of the Hamblen original, substituting imagery straight out of oil patch culture, as his roughneck chronicler lists a litany of troubles besetting the drilling operation. First, the rig is populated with “a bunch of weevils, and they don’t know what to do.” In this case, a weevil, or boll weevil, is oil field lingo for a new, unseasoned employee. To complicate matters, the driller is aging and accident prone: “His drillin’ days are over, ain’t gonna run the rig no more/He done made up his time when the [crown] blocks went through the floor.” If that weren’t enough evidence of ineptitude and inexperience, well, the “location’s full of junk iron, and the hole’s off ten degrees.” Although the locale isn’t identified, it could well be Canada or Alaska, because the hands, who “are all from Texas,” have to endure temperatures of “forty-nine below.” In addition, the narrator’s car is “a total loss” from driving to and from the drilling site on rutted roads. The chorus sums up the general sense of frustration:

Ain’t a-gonna need this rig no longer, ain’t a-gonna need this rig no more

Ain’t got time to paint the drawworks, ain’t got time to wash the floor

Ain’t got time to oil them motors, or to fix the spinning chain

Ain’t a-gonna need this rig no longer, I’m a-gettin’ ready to make a change

Rather than consoling himself with thoughts of a better life in the hereafter, the roughneck finds his comfort in dreams of the Lone Star State. Still, he hasn’t lost the perpetual optimism that is such an essential ingredient of oil field exploration. Consequently, it’s not time to pull up stakes quite yet but rather to resolve, “I’m a-goin’ back to Texas soon as I make one more hole.”

“This Old Rig” received airplay on area radio stations. Freddie dispatched the record around the world: “We sent ’em to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Alaska, Australia… anywhere there was an oil patch. We made quite a bit off it, but it all dribbled in and dribbled out. We sold those things for eight years.” Al Dean of Freer, Texas, and “Cotton Eyed Joe” fame also recorded a version. Appropriately enough, a copy of the Frank 45 rpm disc now resides in the archives at the Petroleum Museum in Midland.

In 1960, Frank turned to the Slim Willet song bag for a two-sided follow-up: “Haywire Jones” backed with “Tool Pusher on a Rotary Rig” (Permian PO-1004). “Tool Pusher on a Rotary Rig” is a re-titled version of the 1950 Willet regional favorite, “I’m a Tool Pusher from Snyder.” “Haywire Jones,” the story of a wildcatter with designs on striking it rich even if has to “drill clear through to China,” first appeared on Slim’s Texas Oil Patch Songs album. Unlike “This Old Rig,” the Willet coupling failed to attract much attention.