A Phantom on Tape: The Sad Life and Songs of Jimmy Donley

Most photographs I've seen of Jimmy Donley look like he's being stretched from the inside. He seems to have more teeth in his mouth than one should ever, crammed into a wide and rugged jaw, framed under eyes that somehow want to either pop out of their sockets or become swallowed in his head. He looks uncomfortable, is what I'm saying, to be captured in his body on film, or even more so, to be anywhere at all, though there is also something in that capture that suggests a tide rolled unrelenting, as if of the way he lived his life there could have never been a choice. 

So the story goes, the first time Jimmy Donley tried to kill himself with exhaust fumes, his car ran out of gas midway through. He'd tried to kill himself in other ways before and these had also failed. On his second attempt in the car he must have made sure to fill his car's tank to the brim. His mother had died one year and five days earlier, after which he is said to have spent days on days beside her grave, drinking and playing songs. In the death-car, he is said to have spread out on the seat beside him a copy of his mother's obituary, a photo of his last wife, Lillie Mae, and a Bible open to Psalm 23. These details were included in the lyrics of his last song, "I'm To Blame." He clutched a paper with the phone number of Ernie Chaffin, a boyhood friend. The smoke came in and filled his flesh through the same holes and fleshy passages he'd put to work to sing his songs. Perhaps the radio was on as he went under. Perhaps he droned along with some tune he'd written and sold in silence to someone else to spread among the world in their own name, as it was Donley's common practice, in constant need of money to burn, to sell his work for cash up front in lieu of royalties or even credit.

All of Donley's music, particularly in the light of how he lived outside it, bears the mark of having carried something black inside its polish. Though his voice sounds confident and easy, there is something trapped in the tenor of the recordings, a carefully arranged throb that lines the ageless, spacious pop sense that would lead him to sell songs to the likes of Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis. It becomes tricky: The longer I listen to the man's voice, masked with its vinyl hiss and brass and twanging roll, the more I find the tone of it knocked with some strange posture, like if the songs could come out through the speaker and fill the room with smoke, they would. The titles alone from some of the singles he wrote between 1958 and 1966, though not all openly credited to him, seem a list of missives from someone in truthful need of help: "I Gotta Go," "Born To Be A Loser," "What Must I Do," "I Can't Love You," "My Forbidden Love."

"For me the whole world seems empty," Donley sings in "Please Mr. Sandman,"(1) a song that basically begs in oddly exuberant if wounded crooning for sleep to come and take him away from his ever-present misery. On their face, his compositions are rich and compact, timeless like diners and high school dances in a way that makes their content that much more damaged when examined, particularly in the sprawling wreck of Donley's life. The recordings seem to contain more than they should in the way of air around the voice milked from the singer and farmed to fill jukeboxes across the land. Here is a man who couldn't control what was inside him, who destroyed himself in the presence of it, and yet who sounds so classic and foundational even in his furtive grief that we might have never known beyond his songs' classic-sounding swampy warmth. His music, then, exists as a relic of a phantom, some burnt spirit displaced into a performative flesh that could only contain him for so long.

I look at Donley's face and wonder what it would have been like to be in the room with him listening to his music played often through other people's bodies. In a photo of Donley standing with Fats Domino, Domino holds a 45 that I assume must contain a song of Donley's he's recorded in his own name. Donley has his arm around Domino, who had been his idol. He holds an A-OK sign with his free hand. The look on his face, though, is a mixture of ecstasy and discomfort. He half-bites his bottom lip. His hair's a mess, his stubble raw. Domino is looking at the camera, but Donley is staring dead on into Domino's head, his eyes intense and seemingly pinned to something warbling inside him, a dark distortion not found on his records, but all through and through his skin.

Donley's fives wives and the well of violence known to have come from him upon them as he left them one by one suggest the music was not only an outlet, but evidence of something in him he could not get out even through creation. Substance abuse magnified the feeling of having never lived up to what his father wanted him to be into a chemical-fueled mania, prone to rages. He grazed his first wife Edna's head while shooting at her, and once beat her near to death after finding a picture of the actor Lash LaRue among her stuff. He stabbed his third wife, Mona, in the ribs. He threatened Lillie Mae with Russian Roulette practice. During a performance on Highway 49, he bit the ear off a heckler. He drunk-crashed his car into the front lobby of a hotel, later thinking he killed people when running over the potted plants.

By the time he married Lillie Mae, having spent so long taking cash for his songs instead of contracts, he was still often so broke they lived together in his car or crashing with friends. His destitution in the face of fame had turned him even more reckless, vile, and paranoid. He had been in and out of jail, at one point even spending three weeks in the Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield after charges of attempted manslaughter. The world seemed to love his music but he couldn't hold himself inside it. It must have felt as if there were nowhere he could go, not even there inside his body, not even in his songs. Near the end of his career, he allegedly got a gun and demanded the termination of his contract with Decca Records in a thick rage, going from there to release a string of songs that never charted, a kind of last etch on the burning streak of self that held him up long as it could, and then blew out by his own hands.(2) Even his dying wish to have his friend and fellow songwriter Eddie "Cozy" Corley and his band The Blue Gardenias perform in his memory at the funeral was rejected, as the artists were black; his wrecked want for direction carried on beyond the grave. His songs would continue to be released in his name and under others, a legacy malformed, but on the air.

Donley's story seems somehow vitally American, even more so than other artists of his ilk: living buried up to the neck, selling music that hides its furor under layers and yet is plainly something else when read head on; having to sell that music to barely float above the level of a living while feeding others better in your wake; unable to break out of a personal misery that seems both nameless and pervasive, and thereby spinning that off into all of your surroundings, too. The spare number of images of Donley online amidst all the other information reflects his burial again, a weird mania caught in a body that seemed to move faster than its surroundings while trying so hard to fare among them, to stay above water even briefly, full of something not long to be contained. In a way this makes Donley well beyond his time, and so ongoing, a vessel forced to consecrate his being in a form that hid its sharpest parts. That conflation is somehow beautiful, a pretty lilt binding some true hell, and hidden in its own skin.

I look at Donley's face again. I find a picture of him looking head on into the camera. He seems to want to burst straight out. The picture will continue to contain him in this image. His secret songs and where he's in them will play and play again.

1 "Please Mr. Sandman" was released under the name Kenny James, with writing credit given to Huey P. Meaux, the owner of Tear Drop Records, though Donley is known as the unlisted author of the song.

2 Later, Donley ended up coming back to write more songs without credit, including ones for Fats Domino.