Pedal Steel Music

Hello fans and fellow players,

This newsletter will be answering questions from you readers. Dave Anderson in southern California wants to know what my early guitars were that I learned to play on. Well, first of all, since I was an extremely broke little boy at the time, everything I got was either given to me by my father or uncle.

My very first guitar was a Sears Silvertone selling for about $150 at that time. No case, sounded fine but I was sure looking forward to my next one which was a double neck 8 string per neck National, but it had no legs and I didn’t have a stand for it. What I really wanted was a Fender Dual Professional or a triple would’ve been okay, but this guitar never materialized in my early life.

However, my uncle had a single neck Epiphone and a double neck Epiphone that he very cleverly made into a triple neck with one pedal, which was the main staple of my learning for several years and until I got into the Air Force.

While in the Air Force, I bought a triple neck Fender Stringmaster that already had a homemade pedal on the middle neck that went from E to A. This guitar worked pretty well and held until I could get out of the Air Force and got a professional job working in Hobbs, New Mexico with an incredible band where everybody in it was a star. All were well-known players. I was trying to replace Tom Morrell on that job. He moved to Dallas to work with the Starlighters.

From there months later I also went to Dallas and continued fighting the horribly junky guitar that I had. I was way out of step with the times. Then while on a playing stint in Colorado Springs, I made enough money to buy a Fender 1000, then a triple neck Bigsby and there was no holding me back from that point on.

I’ll always recommend that any new player get as fine a guitar as he can afford from the beginning. I’m sure that my playing would have blossomed sooner if I would have had better guitars from the beginning.

The next question. How did I learn the things that I learned in the beginning? This question has been asked me many times by many different players. How did you actually learn?

One important thing that I did was carry a compact reel to reel tape recorder. Norelco I believe, mid sixties. I would go to hear the finest bands that I could find in Dallas, take the recorder home and play along with it and copy the steel players down the n’th degree. So today I owe much of my playing ability to Maurice Anderson, Tom Morrell and Billy Braddy.

These were guys that I could record on the spot in Dallas where I was living at the time and if I got stumped with something, I could ask them personally and they would show me exactly what they were doing. One hundred percent of what I learned this way was C6th. I applied very little of it to the E9th that I heard on the radio, but I will have to admit that a friend of mine from Duncan, Oklahoma named Ralph Mooney was very inspirational for my E9th playing abilities. He claimed he got most of his knowledge and experience from a California player named Fuzzy Owens.

Now for the next question. Do you stay in touch with these players that helped you with your basic roots? My answer is many of them are no longer with us. Ralph just passed on and left us as did Billy Braddy and Tom Morrell.

Wonderful friend Norm Hamlet who is now a fellow Hall of Fame member called yesterday and he says he’s still with Merle Haggard and loving the job as much as ever, claiming Merle is not just an employer, but a great friend.

Today you don’t have to carry a reel to reel recorder. Today we have play-along tracks that we can buy to learn from. As a matter of fact, I have a series of tracks that I have produced that I recorded with Nashville’s very finest top name recording musicians. You know, the same guys that you’ve heard on hit Nashville tunes for the past thirty plus years, the guys that play the real country music.

These tracks are standard country tunes we all need to know in the keys that they are most normally played. It’s the new tech way to learn great old songs.

Jeff Surratt, builder of the beautiful new Sho-Pro steel guitar came to see me yesterday with an English steel guitar player visitor named Spencer Scott. As I’m sitting here thinking about all the steel players we’ve lost, I am also thinking about these new whiz-kids that are replacing us. They are out on the road today making history, raising Cain, starting trouble and creating stories that they’ll be telling the younger guys about later in life years. Sound familiar?

But rest assured, there’s a new wave coming. Players like Randall Curry, Eddie Dunlap, Chad Udeen, Travis Toy, Tyler Hall, Steve Poluchek (hey Steve, sorry for the way I’m butchering your last name here) and many others.

There is a wonderful undercurrent of steel players in Nashville that are flying under the radar and are making a really good living doing what they love most, playing steel guitar. Players like Stu Basore, Ron Elliott, Cal Sharp, Weldon Myrick, Billy Poe, Tommy Hannun, Mike Cass, Joe Rogers, Jeff Surratt, Tommy Killin, Allen Rudd, Lynn Owsley and Dave Robbins.

These guys may not be right in your face all the time, however they are all great players that are doing well here in town. I feel these guys deserve recognition as much as the highly visible players do. Of course, there are more.

And then we have all the great road players. So as you can see, there are many good steel players working and living in Nashville, Tennessee. If you are striving to be a professional steel guitarist, buy the very best steel guitar you can afford. If you buy from me, I’ll give you the best price I can, plus give you a great trade-in when you move up and you’ll get the best service around. We can take care of you so you can make money.

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

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

Now and then. I was just really thinking about my playing career in my early days. Some people may call it reminiscing about the old times. I have made some decisions lately that are putting many of these crazy things I’ve done even farther behind me. But then again, the whole world has changed dramatically since I first went on the road as a steel guitar player in the east and west.

One of the first things I am observing is how food has changed and how we obtain it. We used to go down a two lane winding road with the upright bass tied to the top of the Cadillac limo and somebody would get hungry in the car so we would start looking for a little cafe when we drove through the small towns. Remember, there were no Burger Kings, McDonalds, Waffle Houses or the like back in those days.

I will have to say, when we did find a place, the food was usually pretty good and you know it was a lot cheaper. Sometimes, the whole band would buy a loaf of bread and a pack of cheese and we’d all eat like kings until we got paid for the next job. Now that I look back, that wasn’t that bad.

I remember one of us getting a tea bag and we’d all use it to make our beverage for the full meal for everyone. Remember, the less we spent, the more we made. We’re talking about fifty years ago now. Gasoline was 21 to 24 cents a gallon. A quart of oil was about 50 cents for the best oil possible.

Things might have been different, but when it came to getting paid, we really didn’t get much. Sometimes as high as $5 to $7 per job per night. I remember some club owners in Dallas paying $5 a night through the week, but raised up to $7 on Friday and Saturday. I thought this was great as I didn’t really have to spend as much money not on the road.

Back then, there were no Cobra Coil guitar strings, so consequently, string breakage was high and so was the price of strings that the drugstores sold. Can you imagine that? Drugstores selling Black Diamond guitar strings.

There were no unbreakable strings like there are today, and you can imagine trying to find a gauged set for steel guitar. The E9th chromatic had not been invented at this time. You could get C6th strings from Ernie Ball or Rickenbacker guitar company, but they were totally the wrong gauge and if you got Gibson strings and just looked that them, they’d break.

No power steering and no air conditioning. No power brakes and no automatic transmissions. So you know there were no such things as power windows and cruise control. The big mono AM radio was usually very good. We all fought for the steering wheel and wanted to drive and we would buy bags of fruit if we could get them cheap enough and have contests driving down the road seeing if we could hit road signs and anything of interest while we were moving. So much for boredom.

I remember hearing a story about Sonny Burnette, traveling steel guitar player with Webb Pierce, riding through little towns at night – remember here now, most towns did not have a bypass, we had to drive right through the center of them day or night. Sonny was throwing fruit out at signs somewhere in western Tennessee when the police pulled him over, pulled him out of the limousine, hand-cuffed him and took him to jail. He missed the whole tour, but Webb Pierce himself, stopped back through on the way to Nashville, paid his fines and took him back home to Nashville.

Sonny said he really had a rough time explaining to his wife what happened to the money he was supposed to have made on that tour. This has always been a real sore spot with Sonny. He doesn’t even want to hear anybody mention it today. But now, if you mention this story around Weldon Myrick, I’m sure you’ll get a very humorous reaction since Weldon was sitting next to Sonny when the car got stopped by Dyersburg’s finest.

But anyway, thinking about those old rhythm sections, upright basses, archtop rhythm guitar players and those great, simple country songs just gives me chills. Webb Pierce was singing along with the great voices of the likes of Jean Shepherd, Faron Young, Stonewall Jackson, Jim Reeves, David Houston and several of the famous girl singers that nobody ever thinks of today like Charlene Arthur, Martie Brown and Wilma Burgess.

Every time I see an automobile made in the fifties, I just have to open the door and smell that old decomposing interior and wipe the tears out of my eyes, get back in my stupid Mercedes and go home. No cars are being used anymore today. Everything is buses that are many times nicer than the finest hotel room I ever saw when I first went on the road. However, I loved it and I wouldn’t trade any of those first days for anything.

My little Sho-Bud Permanent and early Fender Twin and beautiful tweed covering on the amp are greatly missed. I’ll never forget traveling after the western swing days, when we traveled in 1941 Flxible 29 passenger buses. These buses had no heat and no air, but boy did we look good!

After moving to Nashville, my first road jobs were in a station wagon and trailer and the fast food restaurants were starting to make their appearance, so things were a little better all the way around. When we’d play Texas in the summer, the clubs did not have air conditioning, but instead monster evaporative cooling units with tremendously big centrifugal fans.

This cool, wet air that these monster dance halls were pumping in to keep the patrons cool really made the place smell kind of unique. The combination of dried beer, curing cigarette smoke from a thousand sweaty cowboys or more, gave these venues a unique smell that I’m sure is gone today, but they were part of that big, early day music scene.

Oh these guys today don’t know what they’re missing. Another thing I miss is all the musicians that came out when we’d pull up to do a job. We’d usually end up jamming throughout the rest of the night when the job was over. This is how I met Jimmy Day, Buddy Emmons, Bobby Garrett and most of the big western swing players like Curly Chalker, Gene Crownover, Bob Meadows, Shady Brown, Maurice Anderson and the like.

The storal of this morry is if you want to turn out to be a great musician, this may be the hard way to do it, but you’ll sure have a lot of fun and you won’t really gain a lot of weight because you won’t be able to afford a lot of food.

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

The friend to all bar holders,
Bobbe Seymour
www.steelguitar.net
sales@steelguitar.net
www.youtube.com/bobbeseymour
www.myspace.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 wonderful thing about this internet is the friends we can meet and the friendships that can grow in steel guitar because of the internet and mainly the Steel Guitar Forum. I have acquired several very close friends that I absolutely think the world of. One of these was a wonderful brilliant character named Eric West.

Eric turned up in the middle of one of my great internet tirades with a well-known steel player that is of course a great friend today. Eric sided with me with many great, brilliant arguments on my behalf.

When I heard that Eric was no longer with us last week, I immediately felt the loss because we were in the middle of another long involved conversation about steel guitars, amplifiers and the construction of both.

Just like the fact that not everybody agrees with me, not everybody agreed with Eric either, but for some strange reason, I pretty well agreed with him and most of his quirky ideas. Eric was a great mechanic and loved riding his 1949 Knucklehead Harley.

I restored an old Sho-Bud for him five years ago that he seemed to love greatly. I will miss Eric probably for the rest of my life, as I do many of my Steel Guitar Forum friends. I just hope we can all be together again someday in that big steel guitar jam session in the sky.

I’d like to remember also the great Byrd Burton, fellow pilot that played steel guitar and lead guitar with The Amazing Rhythm Aces and was a great studio musician on many wonderful hits to come out of Nashville. Byrd was also a flight instructor and was teaching some of my staff here at the store to fly.

I hired Byrd on several sessions including the David Allen Coe albums that I produced for Sun Records. It’s hard to believe so many people that I’ve known over the years I won’t see on this planet again, but as long as my mind keeps working, I’ll remember them all.

Everyone of you that I correspond with in this newsletter, on the forum or as a customer for my store mean something special to me. I am very proud to have you as friends.

I stay away from getting political in this newsletter, but this just makes me wonder what is going on in our government. Go to www.google.com and search for “Department of Justice tells Gibson to export labor”. It’s unbelievable that this could happen in the United States that I was born in.

The Tennessean is Nashville’s local newspaper. Here are links to what has been going on between the government and the Gibson Guitar Company.

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20110826/NEWS01/308260088/Gibson-Guitar-chief-denies-wrongdoing-after-raids

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20110904/BUSINESS/309030089/Gibson-goes-offensive

There is also growing concern amongst musicians about guitars that are being confiscated at airports. Here’s a link: www.delcamp.us/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=61916

Here’s an article entitled “Cross the border, lose your Bentley.” Apparently cars can be confiscated also. www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/08/cross-the-border-lose-your-bentley-the-lacey-act-applies-to-automobiles-too

Let me know your thoughts.

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

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