John Lafayette Mullins was born on October 23, 1923 in a log cabin nestled into Layton Hollow just outside of Ridgley in Barry County, Missouri. Dad always said the town was so small that if you turned around you’d be outside the city limits. His father, Steve Mullins, passed away shortly after Johnny’s birth, and his mother, Pearl, left Johnny and his siblings in the care of her sister, Bess, and traveled to Eureka Springs, Arkansas to work in the Basin Park Hotel where she eventually met Harry Morris who swept her off her feet, married her, moved her back to Barry County and proceeded to raise Johnny and his sisters Ruth, Hester, Virginia, and his younger brother, Lester.
When he was around 8 years old, Johnny earned enough money to buy his first guitar by picking strawberries in the hot and humid summer months of southern Missouri. He started learning to play by listening to those around him, including a family of migrant strawberry pickers, and he also sent off for a mail-order guitar correspondence course. Harry made Johnny practice in the barn loft because the loud strumming and singing of an exuberant learning boy was too much for his ears. You see, Johnny had more of a challenge in learning that guitar because he only had half of an index finger on his right hand. When he was two years old, toddling around the cabin with Pearl’s wax comb, he got it too close to the fire and the wax flamed up, then melted off half of his finger! It all healed up, though, and that finger with a tip that looked like the head of a horse never stopped him from doing what he wanted, and he wanted to play guitar and write songs. While sitting on a bale of hay up in that barn loft, swatting wasps and gathering ideas, Johnny came up with his very first song entitled “Rabbit in the Briar Patch” —
“Hey, look sittin’ on yonder hill, hovered by a bush all quiet and still. Get yer finger on the trigger and your shoulder on the gun, and you’d better do it quick, ’cause the rabbit’s gonna run.”
When he played that song for Harry, it allowed Johnny to get out of the barn and start practicing on the cabin porch.
Johnny continued to write and sing songs, wooing the country girls and even winning a talent competition at the Oak Ridge/Mt. Ziney one-room school house. At the age of 17, he decided to travel farther than his previous Saturday afternoon visits to the Cassville square and see what the world looked like and what songs might come of it. He wanted to join the Army, but a hip injury during a rope-swing-at-the-creek accident in his early years made him unacceptable for military service, so instead he worked in the Kansas wheat fields, then joined the Civilian Conservation Corps working in Nebraska. He then moved on to the West Coast and worked in a lumber yard and also tried his hand (and eyes) working as an egg candler. Johnny enjoyed spending time as a radio performer at KODL-AM, based out of The Dalles, Oregon, where he became known as “The Yodeling Cowboy From The Ozarks.” He was hired to record “transcriptions” (wax recordings) and also spent a little time singing his songs in honky tonks along the coast, making his way closer to Mexico.
Dad never told me exactly what happened during those honky tonk times, but he saw enough to realize that wasn’t the life for him, so he got on a train and headed back to the peaceful hills of the Ozarks in 1951. He decided to move to Springfield to find work other than farming and to hopefully find a place to share his music. Initially, he hauled milk for Producers Creamery, and then was employed by Gold Bond Furniture at Ozark Manufacturing Co., where he met a pretty little gal from Ozark County in the upholstery department with the name of Peggy Hawkins. Johnny and Peggy were married in 1956 and Johnny started working for the Springfield public school system shortly thereafter until retiring in 1983. Mom and Dad adopted Sharon Kay Day, who was my father’s second cousin, and several years later I was born and we became sisters.
