Pedal Steel Music

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

Hello fellow players,

Here in Hendersonville, we have many stars that live here and have lived here for many years, most of them are good friends with everyone in town like they are with myself. Hendersonville seems to be the old retirement ground for Nashville and the area. I feel this primarily because of the lake, fishing and swimming and being connected to the Mississippi River via the Cumberland River.

However, I don’t know many people that navigate the Mississippi, but I know many that use Old Hickory Lake for recreation.

We just lost another one of our permanent members that I’m sure many of you knew. He is comedian George “Goober” Lindsey. He enjoyed hanging around the Hee-Haw set, the Grand Ole Opry and did extensive touring.

I remember meeting him on one of the Hee-Haw episodes when I was lucky enough to work them. I enjoyed being around him very much. He seemed to really care about other people’s feelings. I remember right after the breakup of George Jones and Tammy Wynette, he came into a club I was playing and said, “Hey look Seymour, George and Tammy are back together.”

I said, “Yeah, but the wrong George.”

He said, “With his luck, it was probably the wrong Tammy too.”

After being around Goober on many shows, I realized that he genuinely a good, friendly guy and not just a squirrel like many country comedians are. I talked to him quite a bit about the Andy Griffith Show and he would bow his head like he really cared. I had the feeling that he was very close to everyone on that show.

I look at George Lindsay as a country comedian in much the same light as Gordy Tapp and George Gobel. Most of these guys were very nice people and very considerate of others, most seeming like they had an inferiority complex. None were a bit over-rated about themselves.

George was always asking me to teach him to play guitar. I told him I felt he could do much better than having me teach him. I said, “Maybe if you cut off a couple of fingers on your left hand, I’ll go ahead and teach you.”

I told him steel guitar would be a much easier instrument for him to learn to play. I said this to him jokingly, but he replied very sternly, “Let me know when I start.” He said, “I don’t have to pick it up and blow on it, do I?

I said, “Not unless you’re going to be in a marching band with it.”

A few things that Goober appeared in were M.A.S.H., Gunsmoke, Herbie The Love Bug, CHIPS, Cannonball Run II, The Rifleman, The Twilight Zone before he landed the part of Goober Pyle on the Andy Griffith Show in 1964 and was the voice for the Miss USA Pageant for several years.

In 1971 he recorded an album on Capitol Records called Goober Sings. He was a member of the Hee-Haw staff for twenty years. Being born in Fairfield, Alabama December 17, 1928 to parents George Lindsey and Alice Smith-Lindsey, his mother was disabled and spent most of her life in a wheelchair while his father struggled to find work.

He was the couples only child and was primarily raised by his grand-parents at his Aunt Ethel’s gas station. The family wore felt hats to keep grease and oil from dripping into their hair so it wasn’t just a prop later in life.

There are so many more things that we could say about him, however just remember, he was a hardcore country music and steel guitar fan and a credit to our little town here and we miss him.

Remember these things that I’m writing to you friends and neighbors are not just facts from offline, but are personally from myself and others here in Hendersonville. We all loved this guy and we all know where he is today. He was a very close friend of every country music star that I know and he loved the sidemen and the musicians.

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,

Here are some more questions and answers. I thought for awhile that I would shy away from answering questions, however many of you have said it has done you a lot of good in your playing and others of you say that there’s quite a parallel between what I would do in my early days and what you are doing and have gone through.

One of the first bands that I played with was a teenie-bop band. It was Gene Vincent and the band later became the Blue Caps. I see now that they have received recognition and permanent status in the Rockabilly Hall of Fame.

Now when I look back at those first years in Portsmouth and Norfolk, Virginia sometimes making long trips as far away a Suffolk, I realize now that I was playing so poorly that it could definitely be called rockabilly. Rockabilly was bad hillbilly music played even worse, however it turned into something that everybody loved when our lead singer Gene Vincent shook his leg and acted like Elvis did on his first trip to the area. All the girls went crazy.

I wasn’t really liking what I had to play, but all the groups that I played in were Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash sounding groups, but it was rapidly turning into Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps music. Yes I was ashamed of it and still am, however I realize now that there are people copying some of the licks I did on steel guitar and many are copying what our lead guitar player did.

I ended up leaving the band because of my father’s insistence on staying in school and studying so I could support myself later in life. Being a great musician, he had no belief that the skiffle band I was with would ever amount to anything.

If I had started my career in the middle of the United States I could have been right there with the originators of rock ‘n roll when they all started. The west coast rock ‘n roll version of this kind of music turned out to be much better in some ways and worse in others.

None of the guitar players I worked with could really play a true thumb style guitar so I worked on that until I could perfect it. Pretty soon I had most of the local guitar players banging on my door telling me how great I was. I started realizing after hearing Chet and Merle that Nashville may be a lot better place for me to launch my career.

Playing many different styles I thought would put me ahead of most steel players. It may have, however the main style all the producers and country singers wanted was that plain old hillbilly steel guitar that sounded a lot like bad dobro.

Another question. Bobbe, when you started doing sessions, did you mind producers changing your tone a lot to sound like different things?

I guess I did. If my steel didn’t sound like Jerry Byrd or Buddy Emmons, I could get pretty upset but I tried not to show it. I soon realized there was no way to make my guitar sound like a Bigsby or a Sho-Bud by just changing the settings on the board. Sometimes the producers would say these were the same settings they used with Buddy on such and such recording. I’d say, “Fine then, go ahead.”

It would come off sounding more like Cousin Jody with Brother Oswald and the boys.

Another question. Did the British Invasion and the rock ‘n rollers of the sixties affect what tone you wanted to use in your country music sessions?

The answer is absolutely not. Even when Buddy Emmons played on rock ‘n roll sessions or Duane Eddy sessions, he insisted that his tone be put on the master tape the same as he was putting it out of his amplifier. All I could do was sit back and say, “Yea.”

Another question. Being raised as a youngster in Virginia, did it affect your attitude toward rockabilly singers since you had sessions that were setting them aside as competitors to the artists you were recording with?

Absolutely, up to a point. People were calling me a rock ‘n roll hillbilly steel guitar player, so this is why I used the term rockabilly and keep telling people I was a rockabilly steel guitar player.

It definitely makes a difference where a person grows up and learns to play, however when I first heard Elvis Presley, Joe Edwards, later to be an Opry guitar player, Paul Yandell and Scotty Moore were all on the same show. Two of these players stood head and shoulders above the rest. Of course, these astounding players were Paul Yandell and Joe Edwards. I walked away without a lot of respect for Scotty and Carl Perkins.

Another question. What kind of amplifier did you use Bobbe? The early days after the Air Force, I had a Fender Pro and then I got a tube type Standel. Then it was the 46L6 Fender Twin tube amp. I used these up until the Peavey Session 400s which were remarkably superior to anything I had ever seen and heard before.

Another question. Having great success in your first years, did you realize what you were doing from a business standpoint? No. I was a total idiot.

Another question. Did you ever go back to play in western New York state where you were born? No I never did. There was no money there. I went back to Norfolk for a week and realized there was no money there either. I went to Dallas for awhile, loved the music but there was no money there either. The money was on the road and in the studios in Nashville.

Another question. What is your reaction and what do you feel inside when you hear a new younger steel player playing your licks and things you recorded many years earlier? I am greatly honored and appreciate the offhanded compliment but usually don’t say anything to them. I just shake their hand, pat them on the back, tell them how nice they sound and move on.

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