Singer’s Premonition Comes True On A Texas Highway

In the middle of the night on Nov. 5, 1960, Johnny “Battle of New Orleans” Horton’s premonition of dying at the hands of drunk came true on a dark highway in Central Texas.

In the middle of the night on Nov. 5, 1960, Johnny “Battle of New Orleans” Horton’s premonition of dying at the hands of drunk came true on a dark highway in Central Texas.

John Gale Horton grew up on the move with a family of migrant farm workers shuttling back and forth between the East Texas county of Cherokee, which they called home, and the produce fields of California, where he was born in 1925.  

But the lettuce-picking gypsies did stay in one place long enough for their Johnny to finish high school at tiny Gallatin just up the road from Rusk. Then he did something that most young people in his circumstances only dreamed about — he went off to college.

According to Horton’s biographers, who disagree on various details of his life, he attended Lon Morris Junior College in Jacksonville to study for the ministry, to play basketball or both. Although one claim that he received two dozen scholarship offers is most likely an exaggeration, there can be no doubt that he was a gifted athlete. Other stops on his campus tour were Baylor and Seattle University, and he may have been a member of both schools’ basketball teams.

Deciding college was not for him, Horton wandered the West working odd jobs in California before winding up in Alaska in 1949. When he was not catching fish, a lifelong love, he was writing songs. Although he learned the guitar from his mother at age 11, this was the first time that he took a serious interest in music.

Returning to his roots in 1950, Horton got up the nerve to enter a talent contest in Longview held by a radio deejay named Jim Reeves. First prize gave him the necessary confidence to try his luck as a guitar-plucking singer at small venues around East Texas.

The promising newcomer soon caught the eye of Fabor Robison, a manager and promoter with a mixed reputation. But Horton needed the guidance of someone with inside knowledge of the music world, and the smooth-talker seemed to fill the bill.

When Robison landed a recording contract with Corman Records, Horton felt he had made the right choice. When the small label went out business before he cut a single record, he wondered whether it was bad luck or his manager’s bad judgment.

To placate the unhappy performer, Robison formed his own company for the sole purpose of putting Horton’s voice on vinyl. Then he convinced his client to reinvent himself as “The Singing Fisherman” and arranged appearances on radio and television in the Los Angeles area.

By 1952 Horton had come back from California and become a regular on the popular Shreveport-based radio program “The Louisiana Hayride.” In short order, his first wife left him and Robison dumped him to take charge of Jim Reeves’ blossoming career.

Horton filled the void with a new friend and mentor, the legendary Hank Williams who rejoined “The Hayride” after being kicked off the “Grand Ole Opry” for his drinking. After Williams’ death in the backseat of a Cadillac on New Year’s Eve 1952, his widow married his hero-worshipping protégé.

In spite of the exposure “The Hayride” provided, Horton’s recording career was dead in the water. All that changed in 1955, when he signed with Tillman Franks. By the end of the year, he was under contract to Columbia Records and on his way to stardom with the classic “Honky Tonk Man.”

Horton quickly proved he was no one-hit wonder. In less than a year, he followed “Honky Tonk Man” with “I’m a One-Woman Man,” “I’m Coming Home” and “The Woman I Need” which climbed to number seven, 11 and nine on the country-music chart.

Then the hits stopped coming. The drought did not break until the fall of 1958, when “All Grown Up” put Horton back in the Top Ten. But the best was yet to come.

With rock-’n-roll squeezing out traditional country on the radio, Horton took a chance on story-telling. The risky move paid off big-time with “When It’s Springtime in Alaska,” which not only reached number-one on the country chart but “crossed over” into the popular music ratings.

But it was “The Battle of New Orleans,” which in 1959 sold a million copies in seven weeks, that cemented Horton’s unique stature as the first country artist to bust the pop charts. “Johnny Reb” and “Sink the Bismarck” were also historical ballads and also dual Top Ten hits.

“North to Alaska” was released in early November 1960, but Horton would not be around to see it sell a million records too. In recent months, he had become obsessed with the haunting certainty that a drunk would end his life and in the early hours of Nov. 5 that bad dream came true on highway 79 near the town of Milano.

The car driven by Johnny Horton was hit head-on by a pick-up with an intoxicated college student at the wheel. Horton and his two badly injured passengers were rushed to the hospital in nearby Cameron, but the singing sensation was dead on arrival. And, as usual, the drunk driver walked away with nothing worse than a few bumps and bruises.

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