Miss Toni Fisher – "The Big Hurt" (1959)

Now it begins, now that you've gone

Needles and pins, twilight till dawn

Watching that clock till you return

2 or 3 lines is ending the year on a serendipitous note.

While I was researching the song featured in the previous 2 or 3 lines – “Friends,” by Feather – I saw a photo of the 45 of that song, which credited J. R. Shanklin as the producer.

I Googled Shanklin and discovered that his father – Wayne Shanklin, Sr. – was born in 1916 in Joplin, Missouri, which is where I was born.

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Fewer than 40 people from Joplin have Wikipedia pages.  (I’m not one of them.  There’s still hope, I suppose, but I need to get busy.)

Several of them – NASCAR driver Jamie McMurray, golfer Hale Irwin, NFL lineman Grant Wistrom, soccer midfielder Jack Jewsbury, and baseball players Darrell Porter and Tito Landrum – were professional athletes.  (Wistrom grew up in Webb City, MO, and Irwin’s family lived in nearby Baxter Springs, KS, but both were born in Joplin hospitals.)

A couple of major television stars – Bob Cummings (who had his own network sitcom, The Bob Cummings Show, in the late 1950s) and Dennis Weaver (who starred in Gunsmoke and McCloud) – also hailed from Joplin.

Other notable Joplin natives include poet and Harlem Renaissance figure Langston Hughes, romance novelist Norma Lee Clark (who was Woody Allen’s personal assistant for over 30 years), model railroader extraordinaire John Whitby Allen, and silent-film actress Pauline Starke – not to mention Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead of Blondie comic strip fame.

The next three 2 or 3 lines posts will feature three other notable people that I never knew were Joplin natives.  

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It turns out that “Friends” producer J. R. Shanklin was actually Wayne Shanklin, Jr. – the records he produced usually credited him as “Jr.” or “J. R.”

Wayne Jr. was one of five children born to Wayne Sr. and his first wife, who divorced after eight years of marriage.

Wayne Sr. quickly remarried and had four more children by his second wife.

Later he married his longtime secretary.  They had one child.

Wayne Sr. released an album and several singles in the 1950s, none of which sold very well.  (His first single was titled “Up to My Pockets in Tomahawks.”  Hard to believe that it wasn’t a hit.)

He had better luck as a songwriter.  His most famous song was “The Big Hurt,” which was a #3 hit for Miss Toni Fisher in 1959.  

Some sources claim that Shanklin and Toni Fisher were married at some point, but there seems to be no official record of that marriage.  (Her daughter did marry one of Shanklin’s sons.)

“The Big Hurt” is considered by most to be the first record to use a phasing sound effect called “flanging.”  You can click here to learn more about flanging, or you can just click here to listen to the song.

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: