Wagoner chuckles at the thought of being a twangy Vincent Price. Even today, he says, audiences sometimes applaud when the knife comes out in "The Cold Hard Facts of Life."
Sitting in his living room, he begins a spooky recitation from a song he wrote called "Divers Are Out Tonight" about a man looking out the window of his prison cell: "As I sat here looking through the window, the moon is shining like day, I can see clear across the Big Sandy River, a quarter of a mile each way."
He goes on about seeing divers in the river and watching them uncover a money box stolen from the bank. Then he begins to sing in a low voice, "So I think I'll call for the warden, maybe the guard just outside. Tell them the money that they think I stole, is being recovered tonight. Oh, but they won't believe me either, not a jury man thought I was right. When I told them I didn't steal the money, now the divers they found it tonight. Oh, but I won't receive my freedom, I can hear 'em talking below. The divers dividing the money, and I've got five long years to go."
'The business was changing'
His home is modest by celebrity standards, a brick ranch on a winding two-lane road maybe five minutes from the Grand Ole Opry House. The only tip-off to its owner is an iron gate with an intercom at the drive. Inside, Wagoner wears a brown button shirt and khaki pants as he sinks into a cloth chair.
"I stopped making records because I didn't like the way they were wanting me to record," he sighs. "When RCA dropped me from the label, I didn't really care about making records for another label because I didn't have any say in what they would release and how they would make the records and so forth."
That was 1981, after he had been with RCA almost 30 years. Except for the Grand Ole Opry and some work on the now defunct Nashville Network, his career dried up like an old corn stalk.
"All I wanted to do really is work the Opry. I kind of lost the will to ... the business was changing and I didn't want to change my style of music and stuff."
His slow comeback began in 2004 with a series of gospel records. Soon, he and Marty Stuart, a fellow Opry member with an appreciation for country's past, were plotting an album that would recreate the sound and feel of Wagoner's vintage recordings.
Stuart, 49, a former child prodigy who's worked with Cash and many others, would produce it. But as they prepared to start last summer, Wagoner suffered a near-fatal abdominal aneurysm.
"Our thinking was that if I live through the aneurysm and get well, we'll do the album as soon as I'm ready to do it. So when I first started getting well from that surgery and everything, Marty and I started talking on the telephone to each other. He said, 'As soon as you feel like singing, let me know and we'll start out working a half hour a day. And when you get tired, tell me and we'll stop right there.' "
They ended up recording the 17 tracks in just three days. Stuart went so far as to have the musicians watch tapes of "The Porter Wagoner Show" to learn the nuances of the music and the era.
He shopped the album around Nashville but got nowhere. Music Row wasn't interested in a 79-year-old singer.
"I talked to just about everybody in this town. There was always a good reason why not to do it," Stuart says. "I kind of expected that before I went downtown, but I wanted to try downtown first because it's home."
They signed with ANTI- records, an eclectic Los Angeles label best known for alt-rock acts like Tom Waits, Nick Cave and Neko Case.
Released in June, "Wagonmaster" accomplishes what they set out to do. Unlike Cash's late-career masterworks, there are no superstar guests or indie rock covers, just lots of fiddle and steel guitar backing Wagoner's grainy baritone.
The songs -- nine of which Wagoner wrote or co-wrote -- are homespun tales rich in characters and imagery. "Albert Erving" is about a lonely recluse who keeps a wooden picture of a woman he carved from his imagination. Cash's "Committed to Parkview" tells of the sad inhabitants of the institution, one of whom stares at the floor and thinks he's Hank Williams. "My Many Hurried Southern Trips" finds a bus driver observing the troubled souls aboard his bus.
Hailed as an unvarnished slice of Southern Gothic, the album brought Wagoner some of the best reviews of his career. A pair of well-received club shows in New York and Los Angeles bore them out. A new crop of fans in their '20s and 30s were discovering him.
Then came the kicker: An invitation from one of the biggest acts in the country, the White Stripes, to open their sold-out show at Madison Square Garden.
On the eve of his 80th birthday, Porter Wagoner was suddenly and improbably hip again.
A new generation
It's easy to be awed by this place. Joe Frazier beat Muhammad Ali here. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton received their nominations here. Pope John Paul visited.
None of this is lost on Wagoner, who takes the stage in blue rhinestones.
"This is one of the tremendous thrills of my career to be here tonight in Madison Square Garden. God bless you," he says.
Backed by Stuart and his band, the Fabulous Superlatives, he performs seven songs. The crowd is still arriving as he plays, but even the most pierced and tattooed of the bunch seem curious.
His voice grows stronger with the first rain of applause, and when he gets to one of his biggest hits, "Green, Green Grass of Home," a good bit of the audience is singing along.
When he's finished, he walks gingerly across the stage while the band plays a bouncy outro. A stagehand helps him off, and in a moment, he's gone.
The next morning, in the elegant Roosevelt Hotel lobby, he's still taking it all in.
"The young people I met backstage, some of them were 20 years old. They wanted to get my autograph and tell me they really liked me. If only they knew how that made me feel, like a new breath of fresh air. To have new fans now is a tremendous thing."
Tears well in his eyes and one streams down his gaunt cheek. And just then one has to wonder whether "The Thin Man from West Plains" finally has seen everything.
The return of Porter Wagoner
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