John Tolleson

In the Fayetteville home of John and Gail Tolleson, a Rowe AMI R-90 jukebox stands in the dining room. Tolleson guesses it to be around 35 or 40 years old, and it holds 100 45 rpm records and six CDs. He has carefully chosen the music that's available for selection -- an avid collector, he has more than 18,000 singles to choose from -- and the artists and genres are wide ranging but classic: Frank Sinatra. Chuck Berry. Mario Lanza. Conway Twitty.

And John Tolleson. Pressed by Dallas' Cal-Cas label in 1964, Tolleson's 45 has Jimmy Driftwood's "Tennessee Stud" on the A side and Fats Waller's "Black and Blue" on the flip side. Upon a request from a visitor, Tolleson selects number 177. There's a pause, a shuffling from inside the machine and then the song begins. Tolleson's voice is a joyous tenor. His energetic piano accompaniment is a thing of wonder. It's impossible not to tap your toe to the infectious beat, though it really calls for all-out dancing.

This 1964 record is Tolleson's souvenir from the road not taken.

The pull of rock 'n' roll

Born in tiny Board Camp in 1937, Tolleson was 8 when his family purchased a small gas station that would become Tolleson Service Station, located on U.S. 71 in Greenwood. When his mother started him on piano lessons at the age of 5, she discovered he had quite a musical talent.

"I grew up playing classical music, serious music, although I played old-time jazz songs," he recalls. "I always loved that kind of music."

In 1954, at the age of 17, Tolleson began studying music education at the University of Arkansas, where he was the first-chair trombonist in the Marching Razorback Band. His intention at that time was to become a band director. But, somewhere along the line, he found a different calling: band member and, later, band founder. He started out as a trombone player in the Bob Donathan Orchestra, a popular dance ensemble that played standards at society functions. He watched the advent of the rock 'n' roll era from this unique perch -- employed to play the standards but feeling the pull of this strange, new music that was causing such divisiveness between generations.

"Bob Donathan was a good friend of mine, a very good saxophone player," says Tolleson. "We played all of the standards of the era. [Rock 'n' roll] was getting more and more popular, so I began to sing what they referred to as a 'novelty song' now and then with the band. It was just supposed to be occasionally, but people started asking for it more and more. I really liked it. All the other guys in the band hated it."

Tolleson's love for rock 'n' roll grew, much to the consternation of his bandmates -- as well as his parents, who grew concerned when their son moved away from the standards and toward this new "fad."

"In 1957, people from Texas A&M came to all of the schools in the Southwest Conference, and they had this talent show," Tolleson remembers. "Then they selected someone from that [local] show to go to Texas A&M and participate in a much bigger talent show. A friend encouraged me to get some guys together and enter. And we won."

The contest organizers sent Tolleson and his friends to College Station, Texas, to perform in front of a huge crowd -- for two years in a row. Tolleson was hooked. "From then on, I guess you could say we had a band," he says.

Tolleson returned to Fayetteville and almost immediately became a popular area act performing as "John Tolleson and His Bunch." Fayetteville music promoter Dayton Stratton hired Tolleson to play at the Shamrock Club.

"For many students, weekends included either a Friday or Saturday night at the Shamrock Club, where we danced to rock 'n' roll with John," recalls Tolleson's friend, former Arkansas Supreme Court Justice David Newbern. "At the piano, John came across as a master of the medium. He differed from many of the rock acts in that his was always 'smiling' music -- nothing surly, suggestive or threatening about it. He had great backup musicians in the band who took dynamic breaks as John played and sang the hits of the day. For many, including me, those nights at the Shamrock were the most unforgettable fun of our college years."

In time, Tolleson and his band were playing at colleges and venues throughout Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas. One night, Tolleson's good friend and fellow UA student Ronnie Hawkins made a suggestion.

"He said, 'We're thinking of going to Canada this summer to play,' and he said, 'Harold Jenkins has been playing up there, and he's been doing really well,'" Tolleson remembers. "Well, Harold Jenkins eventually changed his name to Conway Twitty. He was a friend of mine and a friend of Ronnie's, because we were all interested in the same kind of great music. So we followed Conway Twitty into this club in Canada in 1958."

"I've been jealous of him my whole life," says Hawkins, who still lives in Canada and went on to become a music legend as the leader of the Hawks, the breeding ground for other seminal rock stars like Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm. "He's a triple threat -- he plays the piano great, he sings great, and he writes music."

Love over music

Tolleson's star continued to rise. He has a framed ticket over his jukebox for a Texas-OU Party that featured Chuck Berry -- and John Tolleson. In between their own sets, Tolleson and his band served as Berry's backup band. In 1959, he auditioned for Sun Records' Ernie Barton in Memphis. Barton offered him a recording session on the spot. Around the same time, Twitty offered Tolleson a position playing piano in his band.

Out of sheer pragmatism, cautious reservation, and a dash of familial obligation, Tolleson turned them all down. Despite the fact that he was making a good living playing music and supporting himself while paying his own college tuition, Tolleson's parents still didn't see playing this kind of music as a viable career.

"My parents would have been highly disappointed if I had quit school and gone off to be in somebody's band," he says. "And you never know with these kind of things. It's tough. Most people that go into that field -- if they've made a lot of money, it's been my experience that a lot of them have lost it all. Some of them are dead, some of them are in poor health. ... There's a lot to be said about the pressures that a lot of people put on you to get a regular job.

"I guess I just didn't have that burning desire to give it all I've got."

"I think he could have been up here with the big boys," says Hawkins. "He was a super talented musician, is what he was. Like Jerry Lee Lewis. Boy, I was jealous of him." Then he laughs, saying, "Thank goodness he went back to America and got married."

Hawkins was right: Another factor that had Tolleson viewing his musical success as a temporary occupation was that he had fallen in love. In 1959, Tolleson met Gail Cooper, a beautiful freshman Kappa Kappa Gamma pledge. He asked her out. She said no. Gail says that the event he had invited her to -- a Sigma Nu party at which Tolleson was being honored as the outstanding senior of the year -- promised to bring too much attention upon her as his date. Tolleson was a campus superstar, especially among his fraternity brothers, for whom he had delivered Conway Twitty as the star performer at the annual Sadie Hawkins dance the same year Twitty's first No. 1 single, "It's Only Make Believe," hit the charts.

"All of us in Sigma Nu viewed him as a celebrity, and we took great pride in the fact that he was 'one of us'," says former University of Arkansas Chancellor and Tolleson's fraternity brother, John A. White. "During fraternity recruitment, we always highlighted John Tolleson."

Gail, who eventually agreed to a movie date, says, for her, the attraction to Tolleson never really had anything to do with his success as a musician or the associated limelight that might fall on someone who dated him.

"I was never particularly enthralled with the idea that he was in a band," she says. "He was quiet, and nice, and not like what I would have thought he would have been like. We would go to the park and swing ... it was just different. I fell in love with him very quickly. When I look back at that time, the biggest thing wasn't the band. It was ... I had dated boys, but I had never [fallen] in love with anybody."

The couple married in 1960, and Tolleson continued to play weekend gigs, which nicely supplemented his salary once he took a full-time job at the Baldwin Piano & Organ Co. factory in Fayetteville. Tolleson had graduated with degrees in both music education and business administration, and he had found a job that knitted together those two skills.

"At the time, the piano business was a mainstream business, a big industry, actually, and Baldwin was certainly a leader in that," Tolleson says. The first of his four daughters was born in 1962, the same year he joined Baldwin, and Tolleson soon found himself moving up the corporate ladder. As he says, "Nature just kind of took its course."

By 1965, Tolleson had walked away from the band for good. He says he quit "cold turkey" and rarely, if ever, looked back.

A third career success

In truth, he had little time to reminisce. In 1966, the family left Fayetteville to move to Baldwin's headquarters in Cincinnati, where Tolleson would become a regional sales manager. He picked up a new instrument in his job at Baldwin -- the organ -- and found a new outlet for his musical skill.

"Baldwin made organs as well as pianos," says Tolleson, "and some of the jobs I had were promotional things where you would go out and do concerts for organ clubs or music groups. The dealers would promote those and let people in their stores or wherever the concerts were. That was all part of the business. The fact that I was able to play and entertain was a benefit."

Indeed, according to Tolleson's daughters, music remained a huge part of the Tolleson household during their childhood.

"Put it this way: If anyone was going to get in trouble for drumming on the dinner table and singing, it was him and not the kids," says daughter Julie Tolleson.

"My sisters and I would dance around the room while he would pound out old rock 'n' roll on the piano or songs like 'Seventy-Six Trombones' and 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' or love songs for our mother," says daughter Jennifer Tolleson. "Every year, he would come to my school and play a concert on the gymnasium stage. The teachers would gather around and practically swoon over him as he played and sang for the kids. Later, in high school, the teachers were nuns ... and they swooned just as much. I wasn't the coolest kid, to say the least, but for that one day a year, everyone knew I had the coolest dad."

Cincinnati, Chicago, Phoenix: Tolleson and his family moved around the country as his position with Baldwin rose ever higher. When he retired after 36 years of service to the company, he was vice president of domestic sales.

"It was a good career," says Tolleson. "It was a great company. It had a great success record, excellent management, the best dealer organization in the country. It had a lot going for it."

"He has an incredible work ethic," says daughter Leslie Reeves. "But he is also incredibly humble, and one would not know until they looked at, say, the Baldwin sales reports, that he was an absolute beast at his job, earning him a territory of nearly half the country. By far, the largest territory in the country, because he could handle it -- and handle it well."

When Tolleson started thinking about retirement, he and Gail felt drawn back to Northwest Arkansas, where they still had family, and where the recent population explosion meant exciting things for the previously sleepy area. Once settled in on Mount Sequoyah -- where Gail had grown up -- retirement quickly wore on the energetic Tolleson, and he began what would be his third successful career. As a regional director of development at the University of Arkansas during the huge "Campaign for the 21st Century" fundraising effort, Tolleson would eventually help raise over a billion dollars for the school.

"He was smart enough (or lucky enough) to be able to make careers always tied to something he loved," says Julie. "One, music, and two, the University of Arkansas. And we are all at our best when we are doing what we love."

"Boy, that was just wonderful," remembers Tolleson. "To be back working for your alma mater that you already loved was neat, and the campaign was huge. To think that we could raise over a billion dollars here in Arkansas -- that was amazing. It was a great team of people, and I was fortunate to have a small role in it."

White, who was chancellor during the campaign, says there were several reasons Tolleson was custom-made for this position.

"First was his reputation," he says. "All who were connected to the University during the 1950s and 1960s knew him or about him. As I said, he was a folk hero. The second thing about John that made him so effective was his sincerity and genuine love for people. As an entertainer, he wanted to please his audience; as a development officer, he wanted to please the donor. The third thing was his integrity. When you were around him, you knew you were dealing with the genuine article. You knew you could trust him. He was more than a development officer, he was your friend."

Tolleson says that the eight years of acclaim he had with his band is slight compared to the 36 years of his life helping to steer Baldwin Piano Co. to ever higher success or the 10 years he contributed to raising a record amount of money for his beloved University. Still, when he and Gail returned to the Northwest Arkansas area after 32 years away, they were both shocked at how many people remembered Tolleson and his music. Time, it seems, had not yet dulled the sparkle of Tolleson's performances.

"I think the reason so many people remembered him is because those people have good memories of college, and it was a happy time, and carefree," says Gail. "I think, suddenly, when they saw him and heard him play again, it just brought back so many good memories for people."

"[My wife] Carolyn arranged for John to do a solo performance at the Governor's Mansion in Little Rock several years ago," says Newbern. "It drew such a huge audience, composed mostly of those who remembered the Shamrock, that we had to schedule an encore performance a year or two later."

"There was a huge number of people that came from his era," remembers then-Governor Mike Beebe. "He put on a heck of a show. Everybody was pleased. I was impressed."

Some in Fayetteville are lucky enough to hear Tolleson perform on a regular basis. A faithful Rotarian for 19 years now -- including a term as president of the chapter -- Tolleson has been known to sit down at the piano and lead the group in a sing-along at the morning meetings. For 15 years, he sang in the choir at Fayetteville's St. Paul's Episcopal Church, where he has also served in the vestry and as senior warden.

Still, says Tolleson, he doesn't for a moment regret leaving the opportunity of becoming a professional musician behind him. He points to the longevity of his successful career, his four beautiful daughters and their families, and his beloved wife, Gail, who he says has been incredibly supportive throughout their marriage.

"She is the reason I gave up the band, and I would do it again."

NAN Profiles on 03/26/2017