Abilene Reporter-News
December 31, 1995
Backing up Slim Willet
Vaughan O'Shields says he believes Slim Willet was the lone composer of the huge 1950s crossover recording hit of "Don't Let the Stars Get In Your Eyes."
"And I should know," he added, during a phone conversation last week to correct "a couple errors" in the Sunday, Dec. 24 Arts and Entertainment Reporter-News' spread on the late Abilene DJ, country singer and songwriter, to be inducted in the Country DJ Hall of Fame in Nashville next March.
"I was with him from the beginning (the late 1940s) until he died (July 1, 1966), and he got everything he deserved from that song," O'Shields said, adding that it seems like every time somebody does something worthwhile, "somebody comes along and wants a share of the credit."
The claims that Willet took credit for the song actually written by an unnamed musician, now deceased, surfaced in recent years in two published reports by columnist Roxy Gordon in the Coleman Chronicle.
Earlier this month, Dallas resident Gordon said he had no proof of this having happened, that he and another of his sources were quoting a deceased Coleman country music figure named Dean Beard.
O'Shields also said a photo in the Reporter-News' spread of Willet with his late 1950s Weekly TV show identifying Willet's backup band as Shorter Underwood and the Brushcutters actually was of Mike Fletcher and the Hired Hands -- fiddler J.L. Jones, steel guitarist James Woods, guitarist Fletcher, Smokey Donaldson and Walter Woods, and bassist Rex Jones. Also in the photo were the Starlight Sisters (Ann, Mary and Teenie Harper), O'Shields, singer Jean Stansbury and Willet.
The Brushcutters backed up Willet on his 4-Star records. The Hired Hands were the Willet TV show's band.
The story identified O'Shields as Vaught Shields, a name he was stuck with for a short time when his record company (Imperial) dropped the "O'", either by typographical accident or by design, he said. Singer O'Shields, also a multi-talented musician, was best known for his single "Deserted Heart" during the year he was with Imperial.
"I also live in Lawn," not Tuscola, as last Sunday's article reported. "Slim always introduced me as 'Vaughn from Lawn,' " O'Shields said.
January 14, 1996
More on Slim's 'Stars' ...
Three weeks after the Reporter-News' spread on late singer-songwriter Slim Willet's induction into the Country Music [Disc Jockey] Hall of Fame, more refutations to the published rumor that Willet didn't really write the monster country-crossover hit "Don't Let the Stars Get In Your Eyes" continue to surface.
Legendary singer-songwriter Bill Mack, himself a member of the hall of fame and still heard on his WBAP Metroplex country music radio show, phoned and said he recalled when his close friend Willet brought "Stars" to him at his shown on KWFT in Wichita Falls, trying to convince him to record.
Mack said "there's no doubt in my mind" that Slim was the composer, since Mack talked at length to Willet about the unusual meter which would become a hallmark of the song, and how (and why) Willet incorporated it. As did other singers, at first, Mack passed on recording the song because of its meter, something to this day he said he regrets.
... And still more
Bonnie Moore Singleton of DeLeon, Slim Willet's cousin, sent a copy of a 1953 article on Willet from the Houston Chronicle. By Stuart Chilton, it traced the beginnings of the Willet composition "Don't Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes" to when a G.I. wrote Slim from Korea in 1951, asking him to play a song for his girlfirend on Willet's KRBC radio DJ show, "and tell her not to let the stars get in her eyes."
Inspired by the G.I.'s feelings, Willet wrote the first version in one day and sent a tape to a recording company, according to Chilton. The reply was that the song "would never sell, that it was off meter, off beat and off music."
Willet (verified by his widow, Abilenian Jimmie Moore) then spent 10 months re-working "Stars," though retaining its wrap-around meter which would become famous through the 100-plus different recordings and millions of sales of the country-crossover hit. Finally, he put it on the back side of "Hadacol Corners," a humorous Willet composition Slim wrote and recorded on 4-Star Records, about a West Texas oil town near Odessa. Even Willet, early-on, pushed the "A-side" on his DJ show, ignoring "Stars."
Willet told Chilton that he learned the breathless meter in 1937, calling it a rurales-rancho tempo he often heard in an Arizona C.C.C. Depression work camp, by "Mexican boys (who would) sing and play their guitars every night."
Singleton said the original manuscript to "Stars" is in the Library of Congress.
Willet died in Abilene in 1966 and is buried in his birthplace of Victor, near DeLeon.