Pedal Steel Music

Hello fans and fellow players,

I’ve been seeing some information about the old and famous rat pack which included Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford which in itself is a pretty hilarious group of characters. It made me think about the steel guitar player rat pack which was Buddy Emmons, Jimmy Day, Big Ben Keith, Gary Adams and Darrell McCall.

These guys were the tightest of friends. If one of them had a job anywhere near Nashville, you could count on the rest of them being there. Darrell was a great singer. Of course, Buddy was a high quality steel guitar player as was Jimmy Day. All of them were dearly loved and could put on a great show by themselves if you had a microphone and a stage to perform on.

I could remember Jimmy Day’s personality totally changing when any of the rest of the rat pack went into a club where he was working. These boys performed well together and very well apart. I feel sorry for any poor singer that had these boys on the stage when he was trying to do a show because they would be upstaged by their sideman.

When it came to a good jam session these guys were right there to do their tricks. Quite an interesting rat pack. I’ve seen them get together on the road. I remember when I was working with Ray Price and they’d just come in and take the bandstand over.

It was a lot of fun to see them together. I used to think it would be a good idea for them to put their own show together. I don’t know how easy it would be to book, but with Darrell McCall singing and Buddy playing the steel or lead guitar and of course Jimmy Day playing bass, it was a great show as Buddy worked the microphone very well.

Gary Adams was one of the best lead players around so these guys in a jam session were like watching the who’s who of the jazz world. Big Ben Keith and Johnny Paycheck added a lot of talent and entertainment value to the rat pack. These guys were as hilarious as you’d ever want to see together.

I remember them scaring people like Faron Young off the stage at times, but Faron would always end up fighting for the microphone for himself. I’m sure many of you remember all these guys and especially when they were together onstage.

We have just received a big shipment of Peavey steel guitar amplifiers. We’re giving a free vinyl amp cover and free shipping within the lower 48 United States so now’s the time to jump on an amplifier whether you need one or not.

We have the new Mullen “Discovery” guitars in stock. These guitars are full professional guitars, three pedals, four knees, weigh only 27 pounds out of the case and 44 pounds in the case. In the case, they will go in the luggage bin over the seats inside an airliner. We have them in stock and ready to ship immediately so hit the phone and you can have one as fast as UPS can deliver it.

Check out our monthly specials at www.steelguitar.net/monthlyspecials.html and we’ll try to save you a lot of money.

The friend of all bar holders,
Bobbe Seymour
www.steelguitar.net
sales@steelguitar.net
www.youtube.com/bobbeseymour

Listen To Steel Guitar Music Streaming 24 Hours A Day!

Steel Guitar Nashville
123 Mid Town Court
Hendersonville, TN. 37075
(615) 822-5555
Open 9AM – 4PM Monday – Friday
Closed Saturday and Sunday

Hello fellow players,

Well I’ve had hundreds of emails asking me to finish the Don Helms story about he and his last days with Hank Williams Sr.

I asked him, “Were you in the car when Hank died Don?”

He replied, “No, me and three other members of the band were on the way to a gig in West Virginia and had stopped to eat in a restaurant on the way from Alabama when word came over the radio that Hank had died.”

I said, “What happened then Don?”

Don said he decided to go straight back to Nashville to try to find another job. The rest of the band went with him and immediately started looking. They had many offers by the time they had gotten back.

As soon as Don went to the funeral, he started a job with Ray Price. This is back in the day when Ray sounded very much like Hank Sr. himself. Later on, Ray became infatuated with the styles of Dean Martin, Bing Crosby and so on and left the original Hank Sr. sound that he had started with.

This was back when stars were paying about $15 a day for road players. I asked Don during this little mini interview how this affected the bands livelihood. He replied that they were all very sorry about Hank’s death and that it affected them financially very deeply.

Don had just bought a nice house in Hendersonville and was not sure how he was going to pay for it. However, it must have not been too big a worry because it was as nice a house as there was in Hendersonville at that time and it was the house that he raised his kids and kept until the day he died. His widow Hazel is still there today.

The band had Jerry Rivers as the fiddle player and Pete Wade as the guitar player for awhile and all these boys stayed very close friends after Hank’s death, even buying houses near each other in Hendersonville on Riverside Drive.

Marvin Rainwater played bass. Sammy Pruitt played guitar at some point. It’s just hard to remember everybody at this point. I’m sure you can find more information on the internet. Information you’re getting from me is information that I’ve gotten direct from Don from talking to him here in my store during his many visits.

Somebody asked me if Hank ever traveled by bus or had his own bus. I never remember hearing Don say anything about them ever having a bus so I don’t think they did, however in those days, 1950-1953, everyone traveled by car or car and trailer, even to the point of putting the big bass inside the four door sedan.

Pretty interesting and tight fit, but remember these guys weren’t making very much money and transportation of any kind was expensive. With the musicians making $15-25. a week and stars seldom making over $250 a week, it was hard for anyone to get rich.

Don’s story about flat tires on the cars in those days was pretty interesting. He said it was hard to drive around the block without having a flat. Heck, I can remember that myself. Steel belted radials were a thing that was coming up in the future.

Don said, “At least the Cadillac had air conditioning and power steering which was very rare for any car in those times.” Even the places they played didn’t have air conditioning.

Don did write an autobiography before he died called Settin’ The Woods On Fire that you can buy from his widow Hazel.

After hearing Don play pedal steel guitar and remembering the old days, I grabbed him and sat him down in my store one day when he brought his pedal guitar in for some major work.

I said, “Don, you sounded much, much better on the non-pedal guitar. Why don’t you get rid of the pedal guitar and go back to playing the way everybody loves your playing of the past. I promise you Don, if you’ll throw that pedal guitar away, pull out your old non-pedal Gibson, you’ll make a lot of people happier, including your banker.”

He said, “Well I’ll tell you what I’ll do just for you. I have a guy that I’m going out this weekend with named Mike Church and I think he would like me playing non-pedal better than pedal anyway. I’ll try it and let you know when I get back in town Monday.”

Don came in town with his pedal guitar and said, “I’ll never want to play it again. You were totally right. Everybody loves my Gibson with no pedals.” So that’s the way the rest of Don’s career went.

Check out our monthly specials at www.steelguitar.net/monthlyspecials.html and we’ll try to save you a lot of money.

Your buddy,
Bobbe Seymour
www.steelguitar.net
sales@steelguitar.net
www.youtube.com/bobbeseymour

Listen To Steel Guitar Music Streaming 24 Hours A Day!

Steel Guitar Nashville
123 Mid Town Court
Hendersonville, TN. 37075
(615) 822-5555
Open 9AM – 4PM Monday – Friday
Closed Saturday and Sunday

Hello fans and fellow players,

A player who asked to remain anonymous sent me this email.

Bobbe,

You mention tone many times in your newsletters and I am amazed at how many people miss the point. They confuse tone and pitch thinking they are one and the same when actually they are two different dimensions of sound.

Let me explain tone the way most people comprehend it. Elvis had a good sounding voice. The tone of his recorded voice is very pleasing to the ear, especially to female ears. Gilbert Gottfried has bad tone. Gilbert could sing any Elvis song in tune and still sound like fingernails on chalkboard.

Now contrast that to pitch. Leann Rimes has excellent pitch. She sings notes that are exact matches of what you’d get playing a piano. She sings the “keys” as we say in the studios of Nashville. Roseanne Barr has terrible pitch. We say she sings the “cracks” meaning she hits somewhere between the piano keys. She has a key all of her own and it’s unknown to the rest of the world. She sings “off key”.

When we talk about the tone of a steel guitar we’re talking about the quality of the timbre and how pleasing the sound is to the ear.

When we tell someone a certain steel guitar doesn’t have good tone and they tell us to get a tuner and tune the thing, I know they don’t have a clue about the difference between tone and pitch.

If a guitar is out of tune it is easily corrected by tuning. If a guitar doesn’t have a good tone, no amount of tuning will correct it. If you think this will help clue in some of the clueless, go ahead and print it. Just don’t use my name.

Well my reply to these comments is somewhat unnecessary as you’ve taken care of it yourself the way you explained it.

I’ll go into it a little deeper. Gilbert Gottfried not only has bad tone, but his pitch is bad also. However he could do it and have you laughing about all the way through.

When we talk about steel guitar tone we are talking about the beauty in the sound of the note and how pleasing the sound is to the ear. Like you say, if the guitar is out of tune, it is easily corrected by tuning. I f the guitar has bad tone, it’s true that no amount of tuning will correct it. No amount of adjusting the tuning will help the tone of a steel guitar.

Country music to me is Hank Williams, Faron Young, George Morgan and so many of these great singers from the late forties into the mid sixties. The standard that kicked off the great days of country music was Hank Williams himself. We just lost the last member of Hank’s band a short time ago and this gentleman, Don Helms, was a steel guitar player and quite a legend himself.

Don used to come to my store here in Hendersonville several times a month during his last days of life. We would talk for hours about some of the last legends of country music. I would ask him about the road travel in those days during the late forties and into the early fifties.

Because of his life on the road and as involved as he was with other legends like Patsy Cline, Ray Price and so on, he never seemed to run out of great stories. I loved Don like the steel guitar brother that he was.

Before I left my hometown on the east coast in the early fifties, I talked to Don about his cars, motels he had to stay in, other band members and sometimes even Hank himself. Don always made the story interesting and full of humor.

I told him about stories I had heard from Pete Wade’s father and sister. Pete’s sister Shirley told us about her brother Pete that is now a very famous Nashville musician, racing his ’56 Oldsmobile against Don’s 55 Cadillac. Don said Pete’s Oldsmobile may have been a little faster, but the Cadillac had the Olds beat for comfort and still had tremendous power.

I told Don, I said, “Don, I can see you and Pete out there racing in my mind and having a great time doing it.”

Don said it’s a shame Hank couldn’t have lived just a little longer because the Cadillac’s got a little faster after that first one he had. Hank’s car was a powder blue ’52 convertible. These cars are a little rich for my blood now, however for $40,000 to $80,000, you should be able to pick one up.

Don related to me that the first year of the really good Cadillac’s was 1953. It was the first year of the 12 volt battery system, first year for GM air conditioning and a good boost in horsepower because of the 331 cubic inch V-8 which took the car from 190 to 210 brake horsepower.

The cars were very dependable depending on the wiring. The Fleetwood model was by far the most luxurious. Don had a late model ’55 Coupe DeVille. As long as you could keep liquids in the Cadillac like STP, octane booster and Marvel Mystery Oil, the car would pretty well go forever. And a bottle of Jack Daniels in the trunk never hurt anything as Hank was known to do.

Don told me many times that the only reason Hank kept him in the band was to keep him drinking. Don was quite a character and I’m sure his stint playing steel with Ray Price along with the thousands of miles he did with Hank Sr. was what made him the highly loved steel player that he was.

Don told me the old Cadillac could get 13.7 miles per gallon on those old two lane highways on a good day as long as there weren’t too many towns to go through.

I asked, “How did you sleep in that car on long trips Don?”

Don said it was about the only place he could sleep after he’d been on the road so many years. He said if he could buy one now, convertible or four door, he’d park it behind his house and use it for an extra room.

Don said he saw the papers on Hank’s Cadillac which is now owned by Hank Jr. and saw that Hank paid $5200 for the car, plus insurance and financing. He got a bank loan for $3818. and agreed to pay $212 per month for 18 months.

Because this newsletter is so long right now, I’m going to cut it off. However if you want to hear more about it, let me know.

Check out our monthly specials at www.steelguitar.net/monthlyspecials.html and we’ll try to save you a lot of money.

The friend of all bar holders,
Bobbe Seymour
www.steelguitar.net
sales@steelguitar.net
www.youtube.com/bobbeseymour

Listen To Steel Guitar Music Streaming 24 Hours A Day!

Steel Guitar Nashville
123 Mid Town Court
Hendersonville, TN. 37075
(615) 822-5555
Open 9AM – 4PM Monday – Friday
Closed Saturday and Sunday