It is a good point to bring up that instrumental records in those days were recorded for the general public to enjoy, not just fellow musicians. The reason for this was there used to actually be a market for instrumental records. Dentist office music? You bet! As well as backround music at your dinner party or whatever else.

Since only steel players buy steel records today, we get stuck buying records with terrible drum machines and synth strings. At least Jimmy Day's "Steel and Strings" had Buddy Harmon and Bob Moore and not "jazz drum preset #4"

My favorite Byrd records are still the country jazz flavored "Hi-Fi Guitar", "Steel Guitar Favorites" and "Admirable Byrd". I love "Jazz From The Hills", but to me that's just as much Jerry Byrd as it is Chet Atkins, Homer Haynes, Jethro Burns, and Dale Potter.

Andy Volk,

If you think Jerry can't swing, listen close to his solo on "Sweet Georgia Brown" from Jazz From The Hills. The rest of the band is unforgivably square, but Jerry burns it down!

CS

[This message was edited by Chris Scruggs on 05 June 2006 at 10:37 PM.]

The "From The Hills" guys are coming out of the Django "Hot Club" style and the Murph cut is out of the 40s big band thing.

For Educational Purposes Only

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Slants of the Week
Hawaiian Steel Stuff
The Casteels

Sounds swingy to me.

Jethro Burns is really in your face on his solo.

But what impresses me most on the cut is Chet Atkins. He really gets a lot of steel guitar sounds out of his whammy bar. What the hell happened to Chet Atkins? His stuff from the 1950's was so amazing. He got pretty white after that.

I'd pay a lot of money to hear this band live.

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Gerald Ross
'Northwest Ann Arbor, Michigan's King Of The Hawaiian Steel Guitar'

CEO, CIO, CFO - UkeTone Records
Gerald's Fingerstyle Guitar Website
Board of Directors Hawaiian Steel Guitar Association

[This message was edited by Gerald Ross on 06 June 2006 at 09:04 AM.]

Agree, Gerald ...Chet's early electric records and Floyd Cramer's piano licks both showed a lot of steel guitar influences.

Re JB again, his very subtle use of the volume pedal (reverse-wired to get louder on the upstroke) is a key component of his sound. Except when he wanted a violin sound, he always kept the pick attack audible.

[This message was edited by Andy Volk on 06 June 2006 at 11:14 AM.]

Gerald R. Atkins always said that his best playing was around that period. He was coming right out of the Django meets Merle Travis meets Les Paul meets George Barnes etc. bag and he had no record company geeks telling him what to do. He got fired on a regular basis for playing all that stuff with the hillbilly radio bands he worked with so that did not slow him down. What did stop him from all that cool playing was becoming savvy in the record biz under Steve Shoales from RCA. Chet seemed to begin to think like a record producer and not like a wannabe jazz guitarist in a country boys clothes. He finally ended up as VP for RCA and heading up the Nashville studio in charge of 30 or 40 artists careers and just sucking the adventure out of his playing. He attributes his illness on the stress of that job, but also said that he finally came to appreciate the accomplishments he had with so many artists as their producer. He dedicated his life to playing the guitar and you can really see what a fine player he was by how well he played on those early recordings. That period in the late 50s early 60s where he produced all those artists and still had an RCA recording contract that required him to sometimes put out 3 or 4 records a year caused the content of some of his recording to be very commercial.

George Barnes: When Sunny Gets Blue

[This message was edited by Andy Volk on 06 June 2006 at 05:19 PM.]

I see your point.

Leon, Noel, Herb, Speedy and Joaquin are definitely "swing" players, they largely play with the voicing of a horn section (though not considered a "swing" player, Don Helms used this aproach, too), while Byrd (of this era) focused on slanting up and down the high three strings and avoided playing too much "on the fret".

I suppose part of it can be atrributed to a difference in A6 and C6 playing (Helms and Murph don't fit this generalization). In my opinion, Byrd swings, but it's the difference between playing "hot" and "cool". I surely don't think Byrd was "stiff" (especially in this period), but coming from Ohio and living in Nashville there was no need for him to be a "horn' player. Roy Wiggins didn't really "swing", but such is regional music.

I mean no disrespect to Noel Boggs or any other A6 players, but Noel Boggs' early work with Bob Wills (Tiffany era) usually sounds a bit "same" to me. You know, that sound of playing alot on the one fret? His post Wills work is great, but his early approach is just a little repetitive. I guess that's why I left A6 for C6/A7...

As he himself said, he never played live dances night after night with the expectation that he would experiment and learn to hold the attention of the crowd with his solos as Bob Wills' steelers had to learn to do. If they had a bad night, heck, there was always the next date plus they had a number of players to help spur them on. You'd better take a damn good solo if you have to follow Junior Barnard!

Your point about Boggs is also well taken. He tended to play first position licks based out of the straight bar in the early years though he was a master at glissing in and out of those chords in a way that really dug into the time. Leon McAuliffe was very stiff in his early recordings and only developed a looser feel later, after the war IMHO. Herb Remington's early background in Hawaiian music also tempered some of the swing feel in his playing but the big band horn section was definitely his muse. Joaquin was in a class by himself. Benny Goodman, Django, and George Shearing's block chord piano were his key influences but you can't discount his early exposure to Sol Ho'opi'i and the other Hawaiian players. You can really hear it in the slower tunes.