Angel On Borrowed Time: The Short, Unhappy Life Of Mel Street

On the cool morning of his forty-fifth birthday, while his friends in Nashville reveled through the fading hours of DJ Week, singer Mel Street pushed away from the family breakfast table, walked upstairs and shot himself in the head. It was Saturday, October 21, 1978. Street had endured the glare of stardom for just six years before he turned out the light for good.

Like the “clean-favored and imperially slim” Richard Cory of E.A. Robinson’s poem, Street was a man whose suicide was a mystery to the “people on the pavement,” covetous of his success and good looks. Even now, his motives remain clouded.

Street’s importance to country music does not lie in how long or how high he went on the charts. In neither respect was he remarkable. He was, most significantly, a stylist who mined every syllable of his lyrics for meaning. And he invested even his lightest songs (of which there are but few examples) with a kind of hillbilly fatalism that seems to regard pleasure of any sort as a sure prelude to pain.

In his liner notes for an early Street album, George Jones appraised Street’s contribution in this way: “ He is one of three male singer that puts soul into a song….” While Jones diplomatically abstained from mentioning who the other two soulful singers were, it is clear that Street—like Jones, himself, and Willie Nelson—was an especially effective interpreter of lyrics. He did not phrase songs to highlight the rhythms and images built in by the writers. Rather, he sounded as if he were molding phrases on the spot—as one would do in an especially intense conversation—to convey precise emotional weight and complexity. Good singers manage to be believable; Street was never less than convincing. 

King Malachi Street (his real name) was born in the countryside near Grundy, Virginia, a few miles from the southern border of West Virginia and the eastern edge of Kentucky. His mother, drawing her inspiration equally from the Bible and the White House, imaginatively conferred on Street’s brothers the names Elbert Cleveland, Harry Truman and Elijah. 

When he was 16, Street fell under the show-business tutelage of Cecil Surratt, a Bluefield, West Virginia radio personality and sometime recording artist for King Records. Surratt says he first employed Street on his radio shows at WELC and WBRW in Welch, West Virginia. But this brief phase of Street’s musical development ended when his father became ill, causing the young provider to embrace the more reliable occupations of construction worker and electrician.

On one of his trips back to Virginia in 1957 to see an uncle, Street attended a church service, during which he spotted the girl he would soon marry. “He was obviously looking for a wife,” says Mrs. Betty Street. “He was ready. After a talk with my father, they decided we would get married. I must say he really raised me.” She was 15 and Street 22 when they were married in November 1957. 

“When I met Mel,” Mrs. Street continues, “he was not singing. He was working with a construction company and traveling. What he did was climb these towers—like the high towers for radio stations—and connect the wires. He was an excellent electrician.”

Later, Street wrote a song about these experiences, “The High Line Man,” and recorded it in Charlottesville, Virginia for a custom label. Soon after the marriage, Street’s work took the newlyweds to Utica Ohio, and then on to Wooster in the same state. Urged by friends from Virginia who worked there, Street and family (which now included daughter Sherrie) moved to Niagara Falls in 1960. Street’s employer was the giant construction form of Merrit-Chapman & Scott, then assigned to the Niagara Power Project. It was at this time that Street started edging back into music, first by sitting in with club bands, and subsequently working clubs on weekends as a soloist. 

When the Power Project was completed, Street had the choice of either staying with the construction company and moving on or finding a job in town. He decided to stay in Niagara Falls. “Club work kept us alive for awhile,” Mrs. Street says. “But we needed more money, so Mel decided he would try his hand at getting a job that had nothing to do with construction. He went to this body shop in town and talked the man who owned it into taking him on. His job was to prepare cars to be painted.” 

Street would stay in body work until he became a professional performer almost ten years later. And—as with his high-line work—his new job eventually yielded the spark for a song, “Body Man.” This cocky burst of wordplay appears on the 1973 Metromedia album, Mel Street.

If Street had a model in these formative years, it was George Jones. Says Mrs. Street, “I can remember all of us sitting for hours in the living room in Niagara Falls and listening over and over to ‘Tender Tears’ and ‘Window Up Above,’ and nobody would talk. The very first time Mel ever saw George Jones was in Niagara Falls. George was doing a show in a theater there, and, naturally, we went. We walked back into an alleyway, waiting to get in, and George came driving up in this blue sports car. He had a crew cut and had on a suit. I thought Mel would die. When George stepped out of the car, Mel introduced himself….He just idolized him.” The two performers would later become close friends.

Discogs

In 1963, the Street family (which by now had added a son, Chester Malachi) moved from Niagara Falls to Bluefield, West Virginia, where Street set up his own body shop.

Street’s early mentor, Cecil Surratt, was at this time heading a local television show, “Country Jamboree,” on WHIS-TV, with fellow performers Buddy Pennington, Gordon Jennings, and Darnell Miller. Surratt invited Street to guest on the program. And from the moment he accepted, Street’s star was documentably in the ascendant.

Betty Street was in the hospital in Bluefield, having the couple’s youngest son, David Allan (born October 19, 1963), when the “Country Jamboree” opportunity opened. “I can remember the first song he ever sang,” Mrs. Street says. “He was so excited about being on the show, he rehearsed it over and over; and by the time he went up there to do it, I thought, ‘I don’t want to hear it.’ He did ‘Ring of Fire.’ They would ask him back about twice a month for about a year. He was finally so popular that they had to take him on weekly.”

Besides singing on the “Jamboree,” Street played bass in the house band, replacing Darnell Miller who migrated northward to the “World’s Original WWVA Jamboree” in Wheeling, West Virginia. Street used his connections at WHIS-TV to get Ronnie Cochran hired as a camera operator, and Cochran eventually became Street’s own bass player and harmony singer, jobs he would hold almost until the time of Street’s death. 

By Surratt’s account, the “Country Jamboree,” a two-hour Saturday night show, lasted until September 1968. During this period, as Mrs. Street recalls it, her husband was not only productive as a performer but also as a songwriter. His “Moonshine Man,” a piece obviously indebted to George Jones’s “White Lightning” hit, dates back to this time.

When the “Jamboree” had run its course, Street, Cochran and Buddy Pennington pitched the idea for another country music television show to the Youngstown, Ohio, advertising agency that handled the Hills Department Stores account. They were inspired to do this because of the big Hills outlet in Bluefield that seemed redolent of promotional dollars. The agency agreed, and “Country Showcase,” a half-hour Saturday night program, went on the air at WHIS-TV in 1968 with Street as its headliner. At first, the show was broadcast live, but by the time it ended in 1972 (after Street had had his first hit), it was being videotaped.

Emanating as it did from a southern West Virginia border town, “Country Showcase: easily reached into Kentucky—and into Grundy, Virginia, where it was avidly watched and admired by Jim and Jean Prater, owners of a television cable company and an electronics wholesale business. It also caught the attention of country music disc jockey Joe Deaton, who had occasionally interviewed local celebrity Street for radio station WNRG. These three figures would be crucial in moving Street from regional to national prominence. 

An aspiring singer and songwriter, Deaton formed Tandem Records near the end of the 1960s as a vehicle for his own talents. His partners in this venture included his wife, the Praters and a couple of local businessmen. When Deaton’s first record failed to trigger much response, he and the Praters called Street to see if he would record for Tandem. He agreed. Beside being eager to record, Street had finally written a song he thought might have some promise. It was called “Borrowed Angel.”

Looking back on the labyrinthian path over which “Borrowed Angel” traveled to become a hit, one wonders why Street and his backers didn’t simply give up on it and move on to something else. The song was cut in Nashville in October 1970 at RCA’s Studio A. According to the label copy, Bill Vandervort engineered, and Kelso Herston, Lloyd Green, Buddy Harman, Tommy Jackson, Bob Moore, “Pig” Robbins, Billy Sanford, Buddy Spicher and Pete Wade were the sidemen. Deaton produced the session.

On the first of the song’s three incarnations on Tandem, “Borrowed Angel” was the “B” side, while Deaton’s own composition, “House of Pride,” held the “A” advantage. Says Prater, “I think we won due to our ignorance of the music business. We put out ‘Borrowed Angel’ and worked it for a year and a half and shipped it three different times while we were learning what to do.”

Ignorance did not, however, dim the excitement the principals felt promoting the record. “We’d go up on top of the hill near the airport [at Grundy],” Prater says, “and monitor it on the car radio. If Mel heard it being played, he would call us.” It took a callous disc jockey in Charleston, West Virginia to transform Prater’s simple excitement into systematic determination: “I had called the station to ask if he was playing ‘Borrowed Angel’—this was the second time we had it out—and in trying to be a smart-ass to me, he taught me a lot. He said, ‘We’re not playing your record. You’re not anybody. And, besides that, you can’t buy it anywhere. No distributors or one-stops have it.’ And I said, ‘Are they supposed to?’ He really talked down too me, but it woke me up.”

Thus awakened, Prater decided to do yet a third shipping. This time, Tandem reserviced all the radio stations and, additionally, sent a box of twenty-five singles to each distributor and one-stop that sold country records. They included a no-charge invoice to sweeten the pitch, Prater says. By the end of the third round of promotion—in early 1972—the Tandem investors had sunk about $32,000 into the venture. But it worked. It caused enough stir to move Street from a small regional label to a small national one.

In the spring of 1972, Dick Heard was at the helm of Nashville’s Royal American Records, a mildly successful operation that had gained recognition primarily through Guy Drake’s 1970 novelty hit, “Welfare Cadillac.” The label had also attracted some small attention with Ray Griff and Bobby G. Rice. Impressed both by the radio action “Borrowed Angel” was getting on Tandem and the quality of Street’s voice, Heard signed the artist to Royal American.

“Borrowed Angel” hit Billboard’s country chart the week of May 27, 1972, at No. 67, while it was still on the Tandem label. By the next week, it was at No. 51, but it now carried the Royal American logo, which it wore until it peaked at No. 7 the week of August 26. (There is a tendency among the people who knew Street to recall “Borrowed Angel” as a No. 1 record: But Street never went higher in Billboard than No. 5, a rank he achieved with his second national release, “Lovin’ On Back Streets.” For the record, Street had four Top 10 hits during his lifetime and 12 Top 20s.) 

Although bigger labels and much higher concert fees lay ahead of him, Street would never have a more important record than “Borrowed Angel.” It gave him the “angel” signature he would successfully return to time and again, instantly established him as a master vocal stylist and promising writer, earned him a place on the roster of the Hubert Long Agency, one of Nashville’s most effective bookers and even netted him a career-boosting spot on the 1972 Country Radio Seminar’s “New Faces” show. (While Street was actually onstage for this showcase, May 13, his manager, Jim Prater, got a phone call announcing that Mrs. Street had just given birth to a daughter, who would be named Jennie Carol and who would be the last of the Streets’ children.)

As soon as “Borrowed Angel” sprouted chart wings, Prater, Heard, Deaton and Street began scouring Nashville for songs that could match its appeal. But getting songs of this quality wasn’t easy for a tiny label, Heard says. “I wanted Jim and Joe to produce an album on ‘Borrowed Angel.’ They had a lot of things already cut, but they weren’t as good… . And because this was Mel’s debut album, I felt it was very important to present him as a major artist.”

Continues Heard, “We went through stacks of songs, and luckily Ted [Harris of Contention Music] brought us a song called ‘Lovin’ On Back Streets.’ We all felt it was a really strong honky-tonk song—something that would do justice as a follow-up. . . . By this time, Mel was working all the time, booked very heavily. He didn’t have time to go out there and pick and get his show together and come back and write hit songs. This was not a gradual career that evolved for him. It hit him all of a sudden.”

Heard and Prater were right in their instincts about Hugh King’s “Lovin’ On Back Streets.” It was perfect for Street, but it was also the factor that drove Deaton out of the picture. “I bought his part [of Street’s contract] two or three weeks after we cut ‘Lovin’ On Back Streets,’ ” Prater says. “That was our big disagreement: he didn’t think it was a hit, and I did. And it was.” 

Prater was initially as ignorant about the niceties of booking as he had earlier been about the basics of the record business: “[Agent] Shorty Lavender called and said, ‘How much would you take to go to Florida for a week?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know—whatever you want to give us.’ We went down to Florida and played a club for a week. I think Shorty was pretty good to us and paid us what was fair, probably a couple of thousand dollars. That was our first date. After that, all the agencies started calling us. Dick Blake [then an agent for Hubert Long] was one of them. When we went to talk to him, I liked him and signed with him.”

Throughout the first two years of Street’s national success, he and the Praters kept their home bases in West Virginia and Virginia, respectively. The Streets moved to Nashville in the fall of 1973, and the Praters followed early the next year. It was no doubt at this point that Street began to feel the Procrustean pull of stardom.

Street faced another irritant, too—incessant changes in record companies. Before “Borrowed Angel” was off the charts, Dick Heard had sold his interest in Royal American and taken over management of the newly founded Metromedia Country label. When he moved to Metromedia, he brought Street and some other Royal American acts with him. Thus, Street’s second (and highest charting) single, as well as his first album, was on Metromedia Country, the third label he had been signed to within the space of one year.

Discogs

From strictly a chart point of view, 1973 was a cold sobering-up period following the headiness of the year before. This may have been—and probably was—due to Street’s increasingly heavy touring schedule and to his need to finish up his business affairs in West Virginia. But Dick Heard believes it also had to do with the quality of songs Street was cutting.

“Walk Softly On The Bridges,” a Dallas Frazier/Doodles Owen tune, was Street’s first release of the new year. It went only to No. 11. It was produced by Jimmy Peppers, as was Street’s next single, his own composition, “The Town Where You Live.” This one was even less impressive to radio, rising only to No. 38. At this point, Heard and Prater stepped back in to exert some control and direction.

“Eddie Rabbitt [a friend and occasional songwriting collaborator] and I sat down in absolute sheer desperation because we had nothing for him to cut,” Heard recounts, “and we manufactured ‘Lovin’ On Borrowed Time.’ I guess you could call it a ripoff of titles—the title was obviously a play on Mel’s success. That kept him going until we could find something else. But I swear to God, I called every publisher in town and begged for hit songs.”

“Lovin’ On Borrowed Time,” which Heard and Prater co-produced, didn’t do badly as a career bandage. It enabled Street to end 1973 with a record at No. 11. At least that made him even with what he had had at the start of the year.

(Heard rode to the lyrical rescue again in 1975 when he co-wrote, with then-unknown Earl Thomas Conley, the magnificent “Smokey Mountain Memories.” Heard coined for himself the name “Richmond Deveraux” for this song, fearing, he says, that if he used his real name other publishers would think he was locked in to in-house material.)

In 1974, there was yet another label switch for Street and associates. After a little more than a year of dabbling in country music, Metromedia’s management lost interest and agreed to sell its holdings to the GRT Corporation. Again, Heard conceded to run a fledgling label, and again he took his roster with him. Street stayed on GRT Records until 1977, at which time he signed with his first major label, Polydor.

The change to GRT did nothing to boost Street’s chart standings. In fact, 1974 brought him only two chart entries: “You Make Me Feel More Like A Man,” which went to No. 15, and “Forbidden Angel,” which peaked at No. 16.

But the road was certainly paying off financially—even as it sapped Street’s enthusiasm and turned him toward drinking. Prater says that Street was doing so well with his concerts that he paid cash for his bus. “Mel was amazed at the money you could make on the road just for singing,” Prater notes. By his recollection, Street started at around $500 a date and was up to $3,500 at the end.

Ready money also allowed Street to indulge himself in displays of rough-edged whimsy. When he and Prater were in New York City on business, the ex-body man decided to do a little shopping in some of the finer dry-goods establishments. “He went into this store,” Prater recalls, “that had these fancy shirts stuck into those little bins, and he just commenced pulling them out. Oh, he could tear a store all to pieces. And the people there must have thought, ‘Well, these two dummies are just wrecking this place, and they’ve got no money.’ We had all kinds of stuff laid out, and the people were just treating us like scum. So Mel said to them, ‘I tell you what—I’ll just flip you heads or tails. Heads, I’ll take all this stuff, and, tails, I won’t take any of it.’ He flipped the coin, and it came down heads. And he bought all of it. With cash. No credit cards. None of that stuff.”

Money also permitted Street to make a point of his principles. On one occasion, Street had agreed to rendezvous with Prater and Betty at the then-posh King of the Road Inn in Nashville. He was coming off a tour, and the others had driven down to Nashville to meet him. When Prater got to the hotel, he saw Street was having no success checking in. “They wouldn’t let him check in because he didn’t have a credit card,” Prater explains. “Well, he has this briefcase, and he just undid it and opened it back, and here were thousands and thousands of dollars in cash. He said to the clerk, ‘You’re telling me I’ve got this money and because I’ve got no credit card it’s no good?’ And, you know, they still said no. Well, I got them straight in ways that he couldn’t. But we would never stay there again.”

Even after Street closed his Bluefield body shop in late 1973 and moved to Nashville, there was no appreciable lessening of stress for the man who was used to arranging life at his own pace. Now he watched helplessly as the demands of show business wrestled control away from him.

“I don’t think Mel was cut out to live a regimented life,” Heard observes, “the way you have to live with all the pressures from the road.” “Mel loved his fans and he loved his music,” Mrs. Street says, “but he had a terrible, terrible conflict within him about his family. He hated to be gone, to leave home. He would become moody the day before he was to leave. He would become more picky about the shows and how many he would do. The bigger he got, the more he kind of pulled back. He loved his fans, but they aggravated him. When he got the bus, he hated to travel on it. He hated the hours; he hated the long, long rides. I would beg him to fly. But his thoughts were that these boys who worked with him had to get on the bus and that it was not fair for him to fly. He had this idea that he had to be there to take care of anything. If he could have gotten rid of that, it would have helped him with his career.

Complicating Street’s fatigue and resentment was his descent into excessive drinking. “For many years,” Mrs. Street asserts, “Mel didn’t even drink beer. He did not drink until he went out on the road. Period. His heavy drinking didn’t start [until the last few years]….Mel had gotten to where when he came home he wanted to have a drink….In the beginning, I found it strange. But, as I say, it was mild. By the time I got frightened by it, it had increased to where it wasn’t just a matter of Mel coming and doing all the normal things he would do—playing with the baby and going out….When I realized what was happening, I did the things most wives do. I hid it. I did not discuss it with his family or mine….It just progressively got worse until it went from evening to afternoon to early afternoon to midmorning and then to very early drinking and being unable to function.”

Recalls Jean Prater, who handled Street’s publishing, “He was really a family man. He wanted to be successful. He wanted to be out there. But it really pulled at his heartstrings being away so much. Mel kept a lot of his troubles to himself. He always had a big smile and seemed very happy outwardly. But the pressure of the business is unreal. It’s hard to believe. . . . Success is great, and everybody wants to get there. But sometimes—tragically, I think—getting there is the fun part. And I think getting there was the fun part for Mel.”

Street’s recording fortunes continued to be remarkably uneven. In spite of such memorable entries as “Smoky Mountain Memories” and “This Ain’t Just Another Lust Affair” (another Earl Thomas Conley song), Street failed to crack the Top 10 in 1975. He did go precisely to No. 10 with his best 1976 effort, “I Met a Friend of Yours Today.” But the other two releases that year, “The Devil In Your Kisses (And the Angel in Your Eyes)” and “Looking Out The Window Through The Pain,” registered a dismal No. 32 and No. 24, respectively. Worse still, his first 1977 single for GRT, “Rodeo Bum,” inched up the chart only to the No.56 slot. Such pale results, normally, would lead to an artist being dropped from a label. In Street’s case, though, the next step was up—to his first major label deal.

Discogs

He signed the Polydor in early 1977, and Jim Vienneau took over the job of producing him. Their first single collaboration was on Bob McDill and Wayland Holyfield’s mournful “Barbara Don’t Let Me Be the Last to Know.” The song seemed to turn Street’s chart fortunes around. It went to No. 19, and the next single, “Close Enough For Lonesome,” made it all the way to No. 15.

Psychologically, however, Street continued to disintegrate. “I look back on it, and I could write it out day by day to you,” says Prater, alluding to the marks of Street’s mental decline. “He wrote it out day to day in his songs. If you stack up all of his last songs as he wrote them, it takes you right down to the day. Listening to him makes you feel funny, because you see he was reaching out in the only way he knew how. He was too proud to in any other way except in his songs.”

The first single of Street’s last year—“If I Had A Cheating Heart”—climbed to No. 9 on the chart, the highest Street had been on this one index of popularity in almost six years. By this time, Street had also transferred his booking arrangement from Dick Blake to the powerful Buddy Lee organization. “Shady Rest,” Street’s last single on Polydor, didn’t do as well as its predecessor, although it reached a respectable No. 24. The record may have been a casualty of Polydor’s decision to close its Nashville operations.

Prater promptly negotiated a deal for Street with Mercury Records. Says Prater, “It was probably one of the biggest deals that had been made up to that time for a pure country singer. But the pressure that was going to be applied because of that, he didn’t want to go through.” The contract was signed in April, and Street went into the studio (still with Vienneau as producer) to start cutting his Mercury album.

For a short period during his last year, Street lived in a small apartment near his Hendersonville home, because, Mrs. Street says, “There was no way the children could see him in his condition.” The situation had gotten so clearly ominous, she continues, that Street quit drinking altogether in March. For a while, she believed that the worst was over. But it wasn’t. Before summer ended, Street was drinking heavily again.

“The decline was so swift from the first week of September until he died that it was frightening,” she says. “The week before Mel’s death—two weeks, really—were a complete and total breakdown of his mind.”

Even without searching for them, there were plenty of ironies at the end, not the least of which was the time Street chose to kill himself. October has for years been an especially festive season for people in the country music business. It’s the month the Grand Ole Opry celebrates its anniversary, the month the Country Music Association confers its top awards and, until recently, the month in which disc jockeys swarm on Music City to be fed, flattered and liquored up by the companies whose records they spin and, indirectly, sell. October allows for no gloom.

On Mel Street’s last Monday, the dizzying round of label parties and shows began. That same day, his first release for Mercury entered Billboard’s charts. It was a dolorous number—although not especially so by Street’s standards—called “Just Hangin’ On.” 

Eager to show off Street and its other acts to the crowd of disc jockeys and music industry dignitaries, Mercury had scheduled a showcase for Friday, October 20, at George Jones’s Possum Holler nightclub in downtown Nashville. It was one of the few dates the conscientious Street couldn’t bring himself to fulfill.

“He called me up and told me he didn’t want to do it,” Prater recalls, “and I said, ‘Fine, I’ll take care of it.’ And he said, ‘I know you will. You’ve always done it, and I’ve always loved you for that.’ That was the only time he ever used that word to me. Then he just hung up.”

The funeral at Cole & Garrett in Hendersonville and the graveside rites at Woodlawn Memorial Park in Nashville brought out hundreds of friends and fans. And in a touch that would have appealed to Street’s puckish side, his old friend George Jones risked being arrested (for having missed some command appearances in a local court) to come to the funeral and sing a heart-shattering version of “Amazing Grace.”

Public curiosity about Street’s suicide couldn’t overcome Mercury’s decision not to promote the last single. So “Just Hangin’ On” lost its momentum at No. 68. That Street had not lost his appeal, however, was demonstrated in 1981 when a direct-marketed album on the Lakeshore label, Mel Street’s Greatest Hits, sold, according to Prater, almost 400,000 copies.

With their reason for being together gone, the team that surrounded Street moved off toward separate pursuits. On the seventh anniversary of his death, Betty Street was working in the gift shop at Twitty City, Conway Twitty’s entertainment complex just outside Nashville. Jim Prater had put his hard-learned lessons to work for Charley Pride’s booking agency in Dallas. Joe Deaton was operating a small recording studio in Bristol, Virginia. Jean Prater, now divorced from Jim and living in Chicago, continued to administer Street’s songs. Dick Heard had turned to freelance television producing in Nashville, with his work frequently appearing on the syndicated Entertainment Tonight series. Jim Vienneau, Street’s last producer, had moved to publishing work at Acuff-Rose-Opryland. Ronnie Cochran, sidelined from the Street entourage by an eye problem, went on to establish his own recording studio in Hendersonville. Cecil Surratt, still living in Bluefield, had retired from radio but occasionally sang at church services.

And George Jones moved ahead with the load Mel Street found too heavy to bear.