The Smiles That Blossom From Vern Dailey Have Roots In Pain
For as long as most of his friends can remember, Vern Dailey has been “the legendary Vern Dailey.”
It makes you wonder: How long does a legend get to be a legend? Vern has been one for decades now.
Most of Vern’s legendary activities probably don’t show up when you Google him. Still, you get a lot of highlights when you key in this 80-year-old’s name.
Vern was a star on local Dallas TV. While not as well known as Jerry Haynes, Mr. Peppermint of “The Mr. Peppermint Show,” Vern was likely the main reason kids tuned in for almost 35 years. Nothing against the human half of the team, but what made the show were the puppets, and what made Muffin the bear and the others come to life was puppeteer Vern Dailey.
Some of us, maybe most of us, didn’t grow up watching Dallas TV in the 70s. Yet, we still know Vern as the legend. It’s not because he does a cartoon page each month for County Line magazine or that he writes funny poems for Senior Voice magazine, though he does. The legend I know is a short, bespectacled, frowning curmudgeon who sits on the back row at monthly Dallas Songwriter Assoc. (DSA) meetings, cracking wise and kicking butt as a songwriter. That’s why, for the 4th time in the last 12 years, Vern is the DSA Songwriter of the Year.
Vern drives in once a month from Wills Point for the DSA meetings at the Center for Community Cooperation in Deep Ellum. Toward the end of each meeting, the group critiques and scores recorded songs that members and guests submit, normally on CD, but in Vern’s case, normally on cassette tape.
The level of talent in these critiques is always astounding. It’s amazing how many good songwriters live around here. Yet, for the most part on these Tuesday nights, their songs are like bowling pins in an alley, standing straight and proud until the Vern Dailey song bowls them over, scattering them everywhere.
Vern is not a singer. He’s not even a musician. He’s a lyricist. He typically records his songs in Garland, humming a melody and coaching singers and musicians at the studio on how to deliver them.
Vern writes hard country. You can always dance to his tunes. When you hear one, you’re probably going to smile, and if you’re not careful, you’re also going to think while listening to “Weeds in the Sandbox (Rust on the Swings),” “You’re Finally Going Out of My Mind,” “Havin’ a Blast (Getting’ Over the Past),” “Futile Attraction,” “Part-time Lovers, Full-time Fools,” “You Broke It, You Fix It” and many others.
Although Vern can write from any perspective—male, female, young, old—there are qualities to his songs that mark them. They ought to play on a beer joint jukebox. They have humor and pathos, and somewhere in the song, there’s going to be that turn of phrase that you wish you’d written. His songs are consistently good. He’s a songwriter’s songwriter.
Vern says he never knows when a song will come. “A phrase will come to me; someone says something and I hear a song title. I’m a nut for playing on words, you know. I’ll be out mowing the lawn and suddenly get an idea, and if I don’t stop, I lose it.”
Vern’s got a notebook or two full of song titles waiting for songs, and that’s how a song usually starts with Vern; he gets a song title, or a rhyme.
Most of Vern’s songs have been recorded at McClain’s Recording in Garland. “You know, I usually have a tune in mind from the meter. I’m humming it,” Vern said. “Or, sometimes I’ll pick up a co-writer, and they’ll make changes, and of course they always make it better.
“I like to write songs for women more than I like to write them for guys, for some reason, but I’ve always had a romantic side to me. You know I’ve been married and widowed twice. I’ve never hurt for women,” he said.
Vern says he became a songwriter, a puppeteer, a cartoonist, a poet and who knows what else to help escape a tough childhood. He said he had to work hard as a boy. “No matter how hard you worked, or how much work you did, you still never did it good enough. You know, my dad was married three times, and when he died not one of his wives or kids came to his funeral. “ He shakes his head and rubs his eyes. “Those were not the good old days, but anyway, I’m writing songs, and I’ll keep writing them until I’m 100, or I get a hit.”
Vern is one of the stalwarts of the Dallas Songwriters Association, which was formed in the early 1980s from the Texas Music Association. It has almost 200 members who are published or unpublished, recorded or not. All music styles and age groups are welcome. The DSA has song swaps twice a month for which members meet at a restaurant and coffee shop to play and sing their songs-in-progress for feedback from fellow songwriters, plus a monthly meeting and a monthly open mic. Find out more about the DSA at HYPERLINK "http://www.dallassongwriters.org" www.dallassongwriters.org.
Anyone can come to any DSA function, but if you want to hear a Vern Dailey song, you need to come to 2nd Tuesday Regular Meeting, every second Tuesday of the year except for the one in August. That’s when the legendary Vern Dailey takes a break.
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