Junior Jr.

It only takes one decent record collection and some open-minded parents to get a kid thrilled about the glory of music and songwriting. Start them out young, and the possibilities are infinite. 

Junior Jr.’s story, juvenile punk rock band turns alt. country Native American artistic well-spring, is enough for a feature-length documentary, but Americana Unsung is going to focus on the family saga behind Junior Jr.’s founding member. 

The family tree had tangled roots and branches spreading wide enough to involve African and Spanish ancestry. Born in 1910 onto the Seminole Reservation in Wewoka, Oklahoma, James Crenshaw Sr. was literally the seventh son of a seventh son. Both of his parents died young from alcoholism and fatigue. Several of his brothers and sisters also died before their time. Crenshaw family lore held that their immediate predecessors, originally from Florida, had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, and that this was where the family name came from.

The Wewoka community fairly shunned the next generation of Crenshaws. Though initially something of a local hero, James Jr. became persona non grata as a result of a colorful variety of unscrupulous behaviors. Confusingly nicknamed “Senior” after he led the Wewoka Tigers to a district championship in 1950 as quarterback during his senior year, he skimmed hundreds of dollars from the Buffalo Nickel Casino in Wewoka, not to mention schtupping the boss’s wife. “Senior” got married and sired three children in short order, including yet another James Crenshaw in 1955. As if things in the nickname department weren’t bad enough, the family dubbed James Crenshaw III, “Senior Jr.”.

After a stint in County for grand larceny, “Senior” spent the remainder of his life working as a clerk at a downtown gas station, drinking, smoking, and slowly dying, which he finally managed in 1960. James III’s mother lasted another decade. The last words she spoke to her eldest were, “’Senior Jr.’, promise me you will leave the ‘Rez’.” He simply nodded his head as his mother lay dying. 

On the eve America’s Bicentennial, James III kept the promise to his mother and left his surviving family behind. Moving to Los Angeles, he quickly found work as a mechanic. Luck and timing netted him a few roles as Chicano-looking background actor in Hollywood. It was on the set of the first post-Freddie Prinze suicide episode of NBC’s Chico and the Man where he met his future wife, the Puerto Rican actress and musician Francesca Mia Amado Gonzalez. The two of them fell madly in love with each other and, almost simultaneously, out of love with LA. A chance catering gig brought them to Oklahoma where the now-married lovebirds pooled all their credit and savings together to put the down payment on a house in Tulsa. Before long, they had a notion to start their own family. Francesca became pregnant right as “Senior Jr.” finished his mechanic’s licensing requirements. He opened up his own business, and began to establish his reputation as a hard-working and honest family man.

In 1978, shortly after James Crenshaw IV (nicknamed “Junior Jr.” for reasons no-one could quite explain) was born in at the St. Francis Hospital in Tulsa, old Sun Studios comrades and co-dependent troublemakers Johnny Cash and “Cowboy” Jack Clements decided to take a road trip together. The two hadn’t really hung out for years and were keen to relive, for a short time at least, long-gone days of unencumbered freedom. They hatched a plan to drive one of Cash’s Jeeps to visit Woody Guthrie’s birthplace in Okemah, Oklahoma. Cash had been more or less sober for some time at this point, but his friend “Cowboy” had other plans and brought a tray of high-powered pot brownies and a baggie of magic mushrooms along for the journey.

Everything was going just fine, and the two made their Okemah pilgrimage as planned. On their way back, the pair decided to hop off Interstate 40 and head for Tulsa, where, as fate would have it, they encountered a broken fuel pump situation. A passing trucker* picked them up on the side of the interstate, and dropped them off at Crenshaw’s Garage, the all-around auto mechanic and service center run by none other than James Crenshaw III. 

That just happened to be the day when Francesca Crenshaw needed to take her beautician’s certification exam, so sweet baby James and his crib were dropped off at dad’s office for the day. Soon enough, “Junior Jr.”‘s face and onesie were smudged with grease and grime as mechanics came to fuss over the boy.

There was a lot of business to tend to that day, including sending the tow-truck out with “Cowboy” Jack and the driver to go back and fetch the car. The Man in Black himself hung out and played the Silvertone acoustic guitar that hung on the waiting room wall at Crenshaw’s, and he also ended up changing James’s diaper during a more hectic part of the afternoon. There was a lot of laughter that day and memories of the story remained strong. During the layover, while waiting to get their fuel pump fixed, Johnny and Jack checked into a local Ramada Inn, but ended up having dinner with the Crenshaw Family. Photographs were taken of the meal; and framed copies adorned the kitchen wall of “Junior Jr.”‘s family home.

Before long, “Junior Jr.” began to study the records of his father’s collection, which included plenty of Cash, Kristofferson, Elvis, Link Wray,  Jesse Ed Davis, Loretta Lynn, Gram Parsons, and The Clash. 

That same baby whose diaper was changed by Johnny Cash grew up to be quite a drummer, and guitar player, and not too shabby engineering a four-track cassette machine either. Before all his latter glory as a producer of a few score of classic Tulsa Americana albums, he started a short-lived punk band, Junior Jr., releasing two 7″ inch singles on the band’s own Top Knot Records. The first single was a thoroughly strange and disturbing deconstruction of his one-time babysitter’s “I Walk The Line”, sung from the point of view of General George Custer as he and his army were being slaughtered at Little Big Horn.

I keep a close watch on this gold of mine.

I keep the red folks underneath my eye.

I keep the tight noose on necks that bind.

Because I’m white, I’m going to die. 

The track, with a running total of one minute and 52 seconds, implodes in a fury of destruction at the end with chants of “Fanny can you hear me now?” This alluded to both Custer’s golden locks nickname and to a widely-reported, though likely apocryphal, story which held that two elderly Cheyenne women crammed their sewing awls into the ears of old “Iron Butt”‘s corpse on the battlefield, so that he might “hear better in the afterlife.”

On the flip was a thrash-style cover of “Cowboy” Jack Clement’s song “We Must Believe In Magic,” a deep cut from his 1978 Lp All I Want To Do In Life. 

This garnered Junior Jr. enough indie credit and interest to receive an invite to support Green Day and Panzy Division on a few Midwestern dates in 1994. When the offer to tour in the big leagues came in, the unfortunate fact was there was no real band to speak of: “Youngblood”, as he was known in Tulsa’s punk community, had recorded all the parts himself on a Tascam 4-track. But with the help of Green Day and a loose national punk rock grapevine, he found an all Native-American hardcore band that was able to join him for the tour. Green Day’s drummer, Tre Cool, offered to sign on as a legal guardian for the latest James Crenshaw, who was only 17 at the time. 

This newly minted band only recorded one more 7″ before calling it quits. With both sides being recorded in a furious 45-minute session at Columbus, Ohio’s Mu-si-col Studio before a late-November support slot that night at Newport Music Hall, the sophomore single featured a couple of politically-charged, if puerile, tunes: “Christopher Columbus (Come Blow Us)” and a 52-second blast-off chant called “Andrew Jackson (Chew My Bag Son)”. The b-side offered up a grungy 3-minute dirge, “You’re Welcome Day,” which was the band’s topical First Nations take on Thanksgiving.

Junior Jr., the band, was enjoying a reasonable amount of success for a hardcore operation and was being offered development deals by no less than three different major labels. The word on the streets was that they had already sold out by even considering the corporate route. Punk doctrinaires in Phoenix and San Diego chanted, “Sell out, sell out, sell out!” when the band took the stage–and not because there were no tickets left for sale. A two-day session was booked at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles where the band recorded 17 songs under the watchful eye of Reprise Records’ A&R guru Jake Schmenk. No evidence remains of these sessions as Crenshaw, in a fit of pique after reading on a message board that Junior Jr. was a “manufactured boy band created to fill the company coffers à la Green Day”, stole in to Sunset after midnight and razor-bladed the two-inch tapes.   

As happens with many an earnest punk rock band throughout history, Junior Jr. listened to bad advice and believed the press and fans rather than listen to their own musical hearts. Of course, you could also say that they simply grew up and evolved as musicians. Along with his bandmates, “Youngblood” founded a recording studio named The Rez. The Rez soon became one of the destinations for alt.country musicians all over the country and each of its founders high-profile community activists in Tulsa. Crenshaw himself recorded dozens of bands and singer-songwriters before disappearing into the Alaskan wilderness to homestead and raise his own family. 

There’s no word if his eldest son, James Crenshaw V, has been nicknamed “Junior Jr. Jr.”

If found in good shape, his old band’s 7-inch records are valued at $270 per copy according to RecordCollectorMag.com 

*The driver, Dan “Mushmouth” McClenahan, dined out on this story for years afterwards, an autographed Live At San Quentin 8-Track provided conclusive evidence for many a rapt audience.