Jimmy Wyble - He brought BeBop to Western Swing!

Jimmy Wyble & Cameron Hill BeBop guitars with Bob Wills 1944

The Legendary Eldon Shamblin

Coming soon - Eldon Shamblin rare private solo recordings from the mid-70's LP produced by fellow musicians and friends in Oklahoma!

This music will set the record straight in regards to many who want to label him as a 'country' guitarist or merely a Western Swing pioneer. Eldon started out in the early 30's studying his mentor Jazz guitar pioneer Eddie Lang. What Eldon gleened from Lang was an understanding of chords & harmony on a par with contemporary guitarists at the time who were also cueing in on Lang's sophisticated understanding of the fretboard and more importantly, a knowledge of music well beyond folk & cowboy rendering of chords and guitar solos. Eldon's name rightfully belongs among the greatest of the 30's Jazz guitar stylists ie George Van Eps, Dick McDonough, Carl Kress, George Barnes, Tony Romano, Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian and others who were hopping on the band wagon after Lang's untimely demise in 1933 left a gaping hole in contemporary music of the day. One by one they ran to the fore to take their decidedly unique & individual interpretations of Lang's approach and made it their own, each in their own right with their own path - each with their own style.

The truth is Lang's disciples had about as much to do with Appalacian 'country' & 'hillbilly' music and the Western 'cowboy' music as did Lang himself! Likewise, few if any stylists from Nashville in the 30's were hip to what was happening in terms of Jazz or Pop music in New York, Chicago, Philly, Kansas City, Okie City or Tulsa. Save for Jimmie Rodgers keen understanding of combining styles, gathering stellar sidemen from various genres & styles, incorporating them into his own Blues based, renderings of regional folk music that he was atune to and Tin Pin Alley.

In many ways Jimmie Rodgers for all that he was and still is considered the Father of Country Music, in truth Rodgers was the REAL Father of Western Swing NOT Bob Wills OR Milton Brown whom some historians are all to happy to pit one against the other saying one swung more than the other while the other was more primitive, the fact remains BOTH were heavilly influenced by Rodgers stunning 7 year career, with a stellar catalog of material of well over a 100 tunes that incorporated elements of Swing while still in it's infancy, predating the Big Band with arrangements that pair up some interesting harmonizations with instrumentation from some of the most virtuoso sidemen available delivering milestone performances on real Hawaiian steel guitar, spot on fiddling by Clayton McMichen who could have competed in Texas as a frontier fiddler yet he was a country fiddler from Georgia who was more associated with acts that were known on the Grand Ole Opry. In truth McMichen was well as versed in Jazz, Blues and hokum as well as longbow fiddling of the Lonestar state as he was that of Gid Tanner, hence his presence on some of Rodgers sessions. He was the best of both worlds and Rodgers was keenly aware, perhaps seeing the future where 'Country' & 'Western' would meet.

Rodgers was also keen on using sidemen from the New Orleans Jazz world including pianist Earl Fatha Hines, Louis Armstrong and Eddie Lang among others. Though Rodgers own guitar style was perfunctory strumming of 'Montgomery Ward' chords with alternating bass and little runs and fills during intervals & turnarounds, his use of the runs & fills weren't far off from Lang's influence who can be heard on another of Rodgers influences Emmett Miller, who also had a hand in the crafting of Western Swing; ie Miller also used Lang & a future all star cast of future band leaders including the Dorsey's (Jimmy & Tommy), Benny Goodman, Harry James and others.

THESE are the people who influenced Western Swing pioneers like Eldon Shamblin who if not the architects were the actual brick layers who built upon the foundation layed by Rodgers & Miller, interpretet by Wills and Brown whose respective bands may or may not have been more influencial than the other. For one thing Wills musicians were typically down home boys who were street wise, street crawlers while Brown's musicians save for a handfull shared between the two, were made up mainly of city slickers like Brown himself.

Brown's men didn't understand the Blues which is evident in their rendering of tunes with Blues titles, tunes associated with Rodgers, Big Bill Broonzy and others, which in the end came of as a bunch of white guys who for lack of a better way of saying it, frankly they were just "too White" to play the Blues! With that gaping hole in their foundation of what they contributed to Western Swing, that hole left another dynamic lackluster in their performances, which was the 'swing' portion of their music. It doesn't make it swing to merely call it swing. One has to actually understand how to play their instruments in that fashion or style and to improvise on the melody in time signatures associated with 'Swing' music ie 2/4 & 4/4 and the necessary synchopation (emphasis on the 'Up" beat) and the difference between a country beat which is a 1/3 or called 1 & 3 with emphasis on the 1st and 3rd beats.

The sad fact is for all of Bob Dunn's so-called foray's into Jazz or hokum, the time signature for most of their songs in NOT Swing time and it's partly due to a lack of understanding of the Blues! And the reason is one that could be deduced to a racist factor because Milton Brown didn't want his band to "sound like a bunch of niggers!" Bob Wills and a vast majority of his sidemen he hired in the Golden Era of his hey day were comfortable with playing the way their Black mentors from cotton field blues singers & Juke Joint Jazz & Blues musicians, playing their 'Jive', Boppin' and Swingin' gettin' all the little beats where they belong and the flatted 7th's where the "sposed to be" to keep that music alive with a life of it's own.

Lang understood this - hence his guitar duets with Black Blues & Jazz guitarist Lonnie Johnson with Lang appearing as Blind Willie Dunn because of all the racism and reverse racism. By contrast Wills & Co wanted to sound like a bunch of Blacks not a stage full of White cigar salesmen in their 3 piece suits and high brow approach to songs that should have some Jump to them. In truth Rodgers music swung a LOT more than Brown's and Wills was merely a logical conclusion to the aggregation of Rodgers long list of sidemen. Wills maintained a primitive approach until he was able to find musicians like Eldon Shamblin who brought sophistication in chords, music theory in terms of arranging and harmony to the mix.

That said, Eldon's privately made recordings produced by his Oklahoma friends and fellow musicians reveal the kind of music Eldon cut his teeth on, tunes like 'Stardust' & 'Georgia', 'Stomping At The Savoy', 'La Golondrina', 'There Wasn't Anyone 'Til You', 'Someday', 'Sophisticated Lady', 'There'll Never Be Another You', 'St James Infirmary' etc as well as a bucket list of tunes that take on a life of their own in the Western Swing genre, particularly 'Right Or Wrong' which is as far from country music as daylight is from dark, yet the Tin Pan Alley piece lends itself well to the capable hands of Wills & Co brought straight from Emmett Miller then resurrected by Western Swing's latter day supporters, Merle Haggard, Asleep at the Wheel, George Strait etc who brought the genre (and the song) back into popularity long after they died in the mid-50's on the heels of the emergence of Elvis and rock & roll, and have kept it alive since the resurregence in popularity - and strangely enough Eldon Shamblin's input, influence & and actual presence can be found in all of these artists renderings of this music.

In any event, Shamblin was more than just a three chord hick cowyboy picker from Oklahoma with a cud of chewing tobacco in one cheek and a straw protruding from the other side of his mouth. Eldon was one of the few guitarists around who could play a song using full chords instead of single strings or double stops. He knew ALL the chords, all the intervals, all their positions and variations. Fellow Tesas Playboy Leon McAuliffe once told a stage full of rehearsing musicians who trying to find the chords to an old standard that the band hadn't touched in 40 years, struggling while Eldon walked away for a breath of air and some water, "Don't worry - Eldon knows all the chords and he can't be stumped!"

Junior Barnard - Boppin' On The Wills Bootleg

Junior Barnard 1946 with his Epiphone Emporer gettin' it lowdown & dirty!

Junior Barnard was one of the most forward thinking electric guitarists to come out of the modern guitar era when American guitar stylists were electrifying their instruments. A lot of the guys were exploring Jazz, Swing and Country music, some were developing a more Western style, while a handful were discovering BeBop and of course the Blues. Junior had a little bit of all these elements in his playing but regardless he was a Blues guitarist and a White electric Blues player on top of that!

Certainly there were many influencials in this time period who made their mark. Just who had the 1st electric guitar on recordings is one of those questions that will probably be disputed forever. Was it Floyd Smith playing an electric steel on 'Guitar Blues' or George Barnes on one of those early electric guitar solos he recorded in Chicago with one of the many acts he cut records with? Maybe it was Bob Dunn on his steel with Milton Brown or Zeke Campbell with the Lightcrust Doughboys or maybe Leon McAuliffe with Bob Wills? Perhaps it was Eddie Durham on one of his spurious tracks or Les Paul who claimed to have invented the electric guitar somewhere in the eons of time past about the same period someone invented the wheel. Or was it Les Paul who invented the wheel? Or was it T-Bone Walker or George VanEps? Was it Tiny Grimes or was it Leonard Ware? Someone, somewhere, sometime has made the claim that one of these guys did it first! And ya know what? It doesn't really matter! Who gives a rip? All of these guys brought something to the table that made inroads into what shaped the electric guitar. Inroads, that is... merely inroads. When Charlie Christian came along in September 1939 with the Benny Goodman Sextet & Orchestra, with his over the top presence on Goodman's 78 rmp recordings of 'Flying Home' and the flip side 'Rose Room', all bets were off, because all that had went before went to the wayside!

Charlie Christian reinvented the electric guitar, which had at least a dozen different players record before he did, yet in the 1st 8 bars of either side of Goodman's record, Charlie completelty revolutionized everything that came before and more importantly he shaped everything that was to follow in the electric guitar world for the coming 50+ years. Charlie left a high water mark in so many veins of music that his influence is difficult to assess properly. In terms of the electric Jazz guitar Charlie set THE standard. All who've come along after him are judged by his creative flow, his ability to swing and improvise, to reinvent the melody chorsu after chorus, his unique ability to play so free it's like he was on auto-pilot. For all the Barney Kessel's, Herb Ellis's, Tal Farlow's, Kenny Burrell's, Joe Pass's and a 100 others, they all had to rise to the challenge to pass muster, with Charlie as the yardstick. Surely all of those who came later brought elements of their own to the genre, perhaps mining the vein he had plundered before his untimely demise not 3 years after he arrived on the scene - seemingly from out of nowhere. Charlie redefined the guitar in terms of the electric blues scene as well, which was developing in bips and beeps along the way across the musical landscape with a handfull of influencials on the radar screen rising to the surface here and there, but when Charlie came along he took the bull by the horns in terms of electric blues guitar as well. It's evident in the pre-Charlie recordings made by the blues guys who dared to plug in before Charlie came along to tame the wild beast of electronicly amplified guitar, which he seemed to have accomplished overnight and then compare with their recorded output in the weeks, months and years to follow after Christian appeared on the scene, his light burning bright, then burning out in a blaze of glory alone in a tubercular wing of a NY Sanitorium. To a man all these fellows play blues based riffs reminiscent of Charlie with a tone thick and swell, just like his, with a distorted sustain made available via Gibson's over-drivable circuitry, Walker, Ware, Grimes, Durham and other fell right in line and took a double portion of what Charlie had to offer in terms of approach, tone, skill, and dynamics, they all quote him profusely - as did all the electric Jazz players. As if that's not enough, Charlie was burning the already too short candle of his life at both ends playing in nightly after hours jams on 52 St in Harlem at clubs such as the legendary Minton's Playhouse and Monroe's with Jazz luminaries Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespe, Kenny Clarke and a handful of others who were the architects of Bebop, Charlie being THE pioneer of the genre as THE achitype BeBop Jazz guitar player. Already sick and dying, Charlie gave it all he had until he could give no more. Then they locked him away to die alone in his diseased state.

Junior Barnard certainly heard Charlie Christian on the radio out of Oklahoma City before John Hammond "discovered" him at the suggestion of Mary Osborne, a capable guitarist who had befriended Christian, whom saw her as a protege and indeed one of the best to come along - gender notwithstanding. Goodman told Charlie to "turn that damn thing down" as did many of Junior's employer's at the time. One who didn't was Bob Wills - in fact he told Junior, "Go ahead son, turn that sumbitch up; make it talk!" Drawing on his influences of Scrapper Blackwell, Kokomo Arnold, Big Bill Broonzy and other Blues players who weren't plugged in when he was influenced, Junior took his natural ability, like Christian, to tame the wild beast of electrons amping up the volume and increasing the intensity of the music and broadening the tone into a wide swath as his notes plowed thru a room full of dancers. Charlie didn't draw upon the influences of all the other Blues players who took their cues from Charlie. He heard Charlie's dynamics and borrowed his intensity, but not his licks. His brother Gene Barnard was intent on being the next White Charlie Christian as was Jimmy Wyble and any number of Jazz heads with an ES-150 and matching EH-150 amp. In short Junior heard from a different drummer, though he had borrowed from Charlie, his Blues were different and to this day remain a specific watermark of his own vein.

Junior was heard to good advantage across the country via syndicated radio, SRO dances, juke boxes crowded with records featuring his solos. 100's of transcribed rasdio broadcasts were recorded and played on 50,000 watt clear channel stations that sent their signal across the US, deep into Mexico and well into Canada. Yet for all that, he died tragically in 1951 in an auto accident, with popular music in America poised to succumb to transistion as one style of music after another either fell by the wayside or merged and morphed into something else, as the recording industry was undergoing a face lift in the way music was recorded and even the medium of media evolved into so many changes in the coming decade that within 10 years of his death none of his recorded output was available. Shocking as that may seem even more shocking is the coming generation of guitarists within what was to become the Rock & Roll era tipped their hats to him albeit anonymously because when these aspiring rockers were up and coming kids gravitating towards a musical goals Junior name was probably long lost on their memories, but the sounds remained.

Here's a tribute to guitarist Junior Barnard concocted by some blogger who goes by the interesting handle of 'the bootlegger' - this aint an official release by any means so if you see it on the web for sale let the buyer beward - Cavaet Emptor! The are several mistakes on this thing including three songs Junior isn't playing guitar on. Plus the notes are a bucket list of errors. Be that as it may, there it is there:








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