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!"