Jelle Biel
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the netherlands
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Posted 21 Jun 2018 1:15 am |
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Jimmy Day - King for a Day
https://youtu.be/cOxyahNJqEk " Lonely Street "
BY ARCHIVE (Follow Contributor)
OCTOBER 31, 1997
Jimmy Day walks into the ballroom of the Regal Riverfront Hotel with a hard-earned grace. It's Labor Day weekend 1997, and about two blocks from the statue of Stan Musial, in the sweaty heart of St. Louis, the songs of Bob Wills and Duke Ellington reach out from the stage at the 26th annual International Steel Guitar Convention. Ambling through the ballroom doors, Jimmy is immediately surrounded by fans. They come to shake his hand, ask how he's doing, express admiration, laugh about old times and just quietly stand close to him. They wait patiently because they know Jimmy will in turn give each of them his full attention. The grace that gently moves this lanky, soft-spoken country boy through the crowd is the same grace Jimmy expresses to his fans, both in person and when he puts his hands on the Blue Darlin', his pedal steel guitar. Ever look at Jimmy's hands? They look like they were carved by Michelangelo, or painted by Norman Rockwell. We have played lots and lots of shows together and when someone compliments him on his playing, lots of times I've seen him hold them up and say, "These help." --Kimmie Rhodes His are the hands of a sideman. Indeed, they are the hands of one of the musicians who defined the job of the sideman in country music, as well as one who helped set the highest standard for country musicianship. Day, who was inducted into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in 1982, has made his living sitting on the side of the stage, out of the spotlight, making so many of country music's stars sound good. But Jimmy didn't need the spotlight. Like all true legends, he provides his own illumination. Asked where that light comes from, he looked at the ballroom ceiling, raised both arms as if to say "the grace of God" and touched his chest as if to say "his soul." Then he smiled, shrugged and rolled his eyes as if to say he knew where the light came from but didn't know how it got there. For Jimmy, it's always a long walk from the Regal's ballroom doors to the stage. But the real journey began more than six decades ago, and stands as one of the richest stories in American country music. What follows is just a few pages from that story. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Shot Jackson and Jimmy's first lap steel (1934-1951) "Tuscaloosa, Alabama" rolls off the tongue like Jimmy's accent: slow, southern, and sweet like bee's honey. Day was born there in 1934; in '37 his family moved west to Louisiana. He always knew he wanted to play country music. His folks gave him a guitar but he got discouraged with it because he had trouble with the left hand work on the fretboard. The discouragement ended in 1948 when he saw Shot Jackson perform. In an interview with Steel Guitar World magazine, Jimmy recalled, "I was 14 and that's when I decided that I wanted to be a steel player. When I saw Shot, I thought that here is an instrument where I didn't have to be real fancy with my left hand in order to play it. Just hold that piece of metal and slide it up and down the neck. It looked easy and sounded real good. Once I started, I stuck with it." Day and Jackson also became lifelong friends -- a friendship that not only had a serious impact on Jimmy's career, but also would result in changes to the steel that were, in 1948, only beginning to be considered. As Jimmy's first real influence and mentor, Jackson gave him the best advice he ever received: "Shot told me, 'If you always stick close to the melody you can't go wrong. Try to play every tune so that if your mama walked in in the middle of it, she would know what you were playing.' And for almost 50 years I've always tried to follow that advice." The beginning of those 50 years came on Christmas 1949, when Jimmy got his first real steel guitar, a six-string model. The next year, 16-year-old Jimmy played the first of thousands of honky-tonk shows yet to come. In 1951, after he graduated from high school, he auditioned for and was hired by the Louisiana Hayride, a radio show in Shreveport that had made its debut three years earlier. In hindsight, it's hard to imagine the changes that were fixing to storm across American music -- and it would have been even harder for a young steel guitarist to imagine he was walking into the eye of that Louisiana hurricane. The Louisiana Hayride: A pair of kings, the birth of the pedal steel (1951-1955) When Jimmy got the gig with the Louisiana Hayride, he began working for Webb Pierce. Shortly thereafter, Pierce went up for his first Nashville recording session and took lap steeler Billy Robinson with him, but on the follow-up session Pierce took not only Jimmy but also a piano player Jimmy had been friends with since the seventh grade, Floyd Cramer. That session produced several songs with Jimmy on steel, including "This Heart Belongs to Me", which went to No. 1 before Jimmy's 18th birthday. In the spring of 1952, Jimmy started playing some shows with Hank Williams. In November, Hank asked Jimmy to be in a new band that he was going to start a few weeks after New Year's. As it turned out, it was a sad New Year's for Jimmy and all Hank Williams fans. "I came over for dinner on New Year's Day and my mom was listening to the radio. She told me, 'Hank's dead.' Everybody was very sad," Jimmy remembers. As if to balance out life's fortunes, 1953 began with Hank's death but ended with the birth of a new instrument for country music. Steel guitar innovators such as Alvino Rey, Speedy West and Bud Isaacs had been trying systems of cables, rods and pedals for the purpose of changing tunings. On November 29, Webb Pierce asked Isaacs, who had a pedal setup on his steel, to record a ballad called "Slowly". That day, Isaacs used his pedal in a way no one else ever had, "playing" the pedal to actually create the melody on the steel. This event represents the birth of what we think of today as the pedal steel guitar. "Slowly" went to No. 1, and the first sounds of the pedal steel were drifting across the country's airwaves, setting afire steel players' imaginations, including Jimmy's. Jimmy spent 1954 playing lap steel for Lefty Frizzell and keeping an eye on the changing instrument beneath his hands. In the Nashville studios, the new pedal steel was beginning to make the lap steel obsolete. But for Jimmy, there would be one more gig with the lap steel. Jimmy and Floyd Cramer returned from a long tour with Lefty, and their staff band fell apart as various members joined Hank Thompson and Ray Price. Everyone left but their drummer, D.J. Fontana. In 1954, after the boys got their spots back on the Louisiana Hayride, Elvis Presley showed up with guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black. Elvis was booking gigs but was short on material; he hired other singers to fill out the show, and he needed a full band to back them up. Day, Cramer and Fontana matched perfectly for what the trio was missing. They would back the other singers, yet when Elvis came on, it would be just Moore and Black. Early in 1955, at Elvis' request, all six musicians performed together. Elvis liked it and kept his band as a six-piece for the rest of the year. Eventually Elvis asked Day, Cramer and Fontana to stay on and accompany him to Hollywood. Fontana accepted the offer, but Day and Cramer declined because they'd had their sights set on the Grand Ole Opry ever since they were little kids. Looking back, Day ponders, "it would have changed rock 'n' roll forever. Rock 'n' roll would have had a steel guitar." Nashville: Ray Price and the Sho-Bud pedal steel (1956-1962) Jimmy finally got his first pedal steel guitar: a Wright Custom, which he played on Ray Price's "Crazy Arms". In 1956, he moved to Nashville and joined Price's band, the Cherokee Cowboys. Playing for Price meant Day also joined the Grand Ole Opry. Just 22, Jimmy had reached his childhood dream. For the next six years he toured, recorded and played the Opry with Price and Jim Reeves. In the meantime, the pedal steel was in chaos. Some players were trying to convert their lap steels to pedal setups. One of the people drilling holes and placing rods into Fender, Gibson and Bigsby lap steels was Jimmy's old friend, Shot Jackson. Day convinced Jackson that instead of modifying lap steels, a better thing to do would be to build pedal steels from scratch, making them complete and ready-to-go. Jackson took Day's advice, and 1957 turned out to be a grand year for American machines. In Detroit, General Motors was building the classic '57 Bel Air, and in Nashville, Jimmy and Buddy Emmons started building Sho-Buds, the first classic pedal steel guitar, which included Jimmy's first Blue Darlin' steel. Texas: Lone Star days (1962-present) The pedal steel was well on its way to becoming part of the soul of country music. In the late '50s, Jimmy was still playing with Ray Price, but he started filling in as a substitute player for Ernest Tubb's Texas Troubadours. In 1962, he left the Cherokee Cowboys and worked some sessions in Nashville, but eventually decided he didn't care much for session work and left to join Johnny Bush's band, with Willie Nelson. By 1963, Jimmy was in Texas, playing with Willie, living the outlaw life. Texas, with the exception of a few years here and there, would become Jimmy's home state, and it still is. Yet for the road player, bands come and go like drifting opportunities. From '63 on, a few names on Jimmy's list would include Ferlin Husky, Leon Russell, Clay Blaker, George Jones, Don Walser, and several more tours of duty with Ray Price and Willie Nelson. "I have followed Jimmy's career ever since I met him and that was back in the late '50s," says DeWitt "Scotty" Scott, founder of the International Steel Guitar Convention. "He has had many ups and downs since then, but somehow has always managed to survive each one and is playing better now than he ever has -- if that is possible!" Scott, who also produced Day's album All Those Years and gave him his nickname, "Mr. Country Soul," continued: "In the minds of many people, Jimmy is the best. When you listen to Jimmy playing a slow ballad, you will hear sounds that no other player can duplicate. He just seems to melt into the steel and squeezes the pedals to milk every sound he can with his phrasing." The secret to Day's success is bound up not in words but in the feelings he evokes in those who are fortunate enough to have heard him sit down and play the Blue Darlin'. Those sweet, heartbreaking steel lines are Jimmy Day's riches. Riches he is still sharing with us after all those years. And after all those years, asked what he considered to be the high point of his career, Jimmy smiled and said, "I'm still looking." --Dennis Scoville Jimmy Day's Steel Guitar Recordings: All Those Years Golden Steel Guitar Hits/Steel & Strings (double) For Jimmy Day Fans Only In Jesus' Name We Play Jimmy Day & the Texas Outlaw Jam Band Mr. Country Soul Swing & Blues Southern Style The Offenders Reunion A Day With Remington (with Herb Remington) "If it ain't got a pedal steel, it ain't country." --Gene Watson Turn a pedal steel guitar upside down and it looks like a mutant insect with its legs up. Buried in the steel's skeletal underbelly are metal rods leading to foot pedals, rods leading to rods leading to strings, and knee levers leading to god-knows-where. Yet from all this mechanical chaos, when the pedal steel is upright and a master is at its helm, there is no sound as pure, as full or as human as the swoops, cries and purrs that pour from its innards. The International Steel Guitar Convention, held annually in St. Louis, has celebrated this defining instrument of country music, and its players, for the past 26 years. Those who choose to play the esoteric pedal steel are unsung heroes. In fact, unless you scrutinize an album's liner notes, you might not even recognize their names. But without players such as Buddy Emmons, Jimmy Day, Noel Boggs or Joaquin Murphy, country music would lack much of its emotional punch. In other words, without the steel, there wouldn't be nearly as many tears in your beer. But every year these unrecognized luminaries get their glory, congregating at the convention to renew friendships, share stories and engage in some friendly one-upsmanship. Thousands of country music fans, steel guitar admirers, amateurs, and those who are simply curious flock to the Regal Hotel to marvel at the top-notch (and often historic) performances and to mingle with some of greatest players in the history of the lap and pedal steels -- Day, Emmons, Doug Jernigan, Ralph Mooney, Billy Robinson, Hal Rugg and Herb Remington among them. This year, Remington sat at his booth, dabbling with his triple-neck lap steel and trying out his new bar. Designed with a concave end, the bar has a spot for Remington's thumb, allowing him to slant the bar over several frets at once. "With this," he said while playing "Steel Guitar Rag", "I can reach the notes I need." Down the hall, former Hank Williams sideman Billy Robinson doodled on his lap steel and told stories about traveling to Germany in 1949. "There's Roy Acuff, there's me," he said, pointing out the fresh faces in an old sepia-toned photograph. "And there's Little Jimmy Dickens. He was always getting in trouble with the German police." At the convention, stories like these float through the air, sometimes whispered, other times shouted above a steel solo whooshing out of the ballroom. In the hall, at a booth, at the bar, you may bump into a legend, strike up a conversation and come away with a piece of history. The convention has a curious history of its own. "Back in the '60s, I would go to Nashville, Tennessee, and attend the disc jockey convention," recalled DeWitt "Scotty" Scott, founder of the International Steel Guitar Convention. "That is where I heard the steel guitar being played in a way I did not think it could be played. There was playing around the clock; there was someone playing somewhere as long as you knew where it was and if you could stay awake. When I left for Nashville on a Wednesday, I knew that I would not see a bed until Sunday. And I didn't." Back in St. Louis, Scott was becoming discouraged at the shaky local country scene, and "it was then I decided I'd have to bring those musicans to St. Louis," he says. In October 1968, 65 ardent fans and players attended Scotty's first steel guitar show, held at the Parkway House, with Maurice Anderson as the featured steel player. In the past quarter-century, as the convention's digs have gone upscale -- from the American Legion Hall to the Regal Riverfront Hotel -- and the range has broadened to include performances, booths, gear and instructional seminars, attendance has exploded, averaging 3,000 people over the five-day event. The record draw was 6,000 in 1993. Legends of the instrument are permanently honored on the lower level of the Regal at the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame. Among the 36 faces peering from the wall are Jerry Byrd (1978), Curly Chalker (1985) and Buddy Charleton (1993). This year, Grand Ole Opry regular Weldon Myrick joined the distinguished group as is the 1997 inductee. Thirteen of the Hall of Famers have passed on. Most of the pioneers and innovators, now in their 60s and 70s, are nearing the ends of not only their careers, but also their lives. While the flame is handed to younger players such as Joe Wright, Paul Franklin and Scott Walls, there will never be another Noel Boggs or Shot Jackson. Nowhere was this more poignant than with Speedy West, whose manic steel style is a hallmark of music ranging from Loretta Lynn to Looney Tunes. West hasn't played since suffering a stroke, and he has to wear a fleece glove on his picking hand because its always cold, but he's always ready to talk. This year, West said, he was supposed to be undergoing surgery for a blocked carotid artery, instead of milling around on the convention floor. But, he explained, "My son's playing, and I told him I'd be here if it killed me." And at the convention's close, several of West's friends bid him goodbye, saying, "We'll see you next year, Speedy. We'll come pick you up." -- Lisa Sorg Lisa Sorg is the music editor and crime reporter for the Bloomington Voice in Bloomington, Indiana. Her Favorite songs are murder ballads. Dennis Scoville is a pedal steel guitarist from Bloomington, Indiana. He credits Jimmy Day as the reason he started to play.[/b] |
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