MAP
SEARCH
The building at 1101 Ross Avenue in Dallas is gone now. But in April 1950, it held a recording studio where Lefty Frizzell sang “If You’ve Got the Money (I’ve Got the Time)” for the first time, and country music was never quite the same afterward.
Jim Beck built his main studio on Ross Avenue in the early 1950s, making it one of the most important recording spaces in Texas. Beck had a gift for identifying talent and a relationship with Columbia Records producer Don Law — the combination that made his studio a pipeline from Texas honky-tonks to the national market. Artists who recorded at Beck’s studio read like a Who’s Who of Texas music: George Jones, Ray Price, Willie Nelson, Roy Orbison, Marty Robbins, Floyd Tillman. Beck had ears. He knew what he was doing.
He had found Frizzell at the Ace of Clubs in Big Spring and offered to cut free demos. Frizzell drove to Dallas, walked into the studio on Ross Avenue, and delivered. The session produced a two-sided single: “If You’ve Got the Money (I’ve Got the Time)” backed with “I Love You a Thousand Ways.”
The Record That Started Everything
Beck took the demo straight to Don Law at Columbia. Law signed Frizzell within weeks. By the fall of 1950, both sides of the single were charting simultaneously — a feat only Hank Williams had accomplished before. Frizzell was 22 years old. He had been playing honky-tonks across Texas and the South for nearly a decade. And in one Dallas studio session, it all paid off.
Jim Beck did not live to see how far his studio’s legacy would reach. He died in 1956 at age 39 from carbon tetrachloride fumes — an occupational hazard of the era’s tape-splicing chemicals. But the recordings he made at 1101 Ross Avenue still circulate. And the voice he recognized in a West Texas bar is still considered one of the most influential in the history of country music.
