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:








Dead Link!