MERLE TRAVIS THE E STYLE THE MAN WHO NAMED TH by Mark Humphrey
“I’d pr ob obably ably be l oo ooki ki ng at at the rear end of of a mul e i f it weren’t weren’t for M er le Tr avis avis.” .” —C —Che hett Atki ns “Well l , we liked “We li ked go good od whiskey whiskey and we loved loved the pre pr et t y gir l s And we l ove ovedd them guit ar s—me and Ol’ Ol ’ M er l e.” —Joe —J oe M aphis aphis,, “Me and Ol Ol’’ M er le,” Sil ve verr hil l M us usic ic (BMI ) “Now her her e’s Kentu Kentuccky’ ky’ss pr ide and joy, M r s. Tr avis avis’s ’s li tt le boy, boy, M er le, and his ten ten l it tl e bab babyy fin f ingger s on the ‘Cannonb ‘Cannonball all Rag ag.” .” —Clif fi e Stone Stone,, i ntr od oducing ucing Tr avis on on H ar mo mony ny H om omeestead tead,, KPAS,, Pasadena, KPAS Pasadena, Oct. 3 1, 1945 19 45 Though Thoug h its da days we were numbered, radio was still the supreme pop culture medi dium um whe when n Worl W orld d Wa W ar I I ende nded. d. I t hosted hosted eve everyrything from soaps to symphonies, but live hillbilly music was one of its top draws. The GIs who s march rche ed to to war with wi th he heads i v a r fulll of Roy ful Roy Acuff Acuff and and Elton Elton T y d Britt (“There’s a Star n i C f Spangled Banner Waving o y s e Somewhere”) returned to t r u o find hillbilly music em c o t o broile broil ed in i n a cri criti tica call tra trans nsii h P tion. They tuned in their radios to hear a revolution being waged in several forms of country music—what we’ve come to call bluegrass, Western Swing, and honky-tonk were plentiful on the air waves, and radiated a potent post-War infusion of energy. Toda Tod ay, th the e la l ate 19 1940s is de dee emed by many as as coun untry try’’s Golde Gol den n Ag Age. I t was a ti tim me of of emergi rging ng lege legends (Ha (H ank Wi Will l i ams foremost), and of adroit, aggressive instrumentalists who set high standards to which subsequent generations have aspired. This wa was the the era wh whe en Earl Earl Scrug rugg gs rede redefine fined d the the ro role le of of the 2
banjo in Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. Bob Wills was leading his most progressive group of Texas Playboys then, with the jazz ja zzy y ste tee el of Noel Noel Bog Boggs and blue lues sy guita uitarr of J un unior ior Ba Barna rnard. rd. And Wills’s band was only one element of an effervescent country talent pool on the West Coast. Coast. I t was was in such swift swift currents that a 27 year-old Kentucky songwriter/guitarist was singled out as something uniquely exciting, even in the fast company of Texas Playboys, singing cowboys, and sundry Hollywood dudebillies. With little seeming effort, Merle Travis delivered a dazzling new sound to country guitar, one with a distinctive signature. We’ve come to call this style “Travis picking” for the man who shaped and popularized it. Looking back over more than three generations of country, folk, and rock guitar players, it’s hard to imagine our world without it. Honored extensively in his later years, Travis was relentlessly self-effacing about his achievements. He was not the father of Travis picking, he insisted. Credit for its paternity must be shar shared among among Mose Mose Ra Rage gerr, I ke Everly, Everl y, and othe others in in Western Kentucky who inspired him. As for popularizing the style, Travis allowed that he probably had, but lavished praise on his star pupils, Chet Atkins and Doc Watson among them. Their The ir ta tale lent nts s, he said, sure urely ly surp urpa assed th the eir ma maste ter’ r’s s. But even those who share Travis’s self-deprecating assessment acknowledge that it was Travis who was the seminal catalyst for one of the Ame Ameri rica can n guita guitar’s r’s signifi significa cant nt styli styl i stic l eaps. Rank him hi m am among such “pri “prim me move overs” rs” as as Lonnie Lonni e J ohnson in in blue bl ues s and and Cha C harl rlii e Christian in jazz. Travis was of that stature. Remarkably, guitar playing was not his only talent. Travis had early aspirations of making a name as a cartoonist, though we can be grateful that his talent with a pencil was never rewarded sufficiently to detract from his genius on the guitar. He had considerably better luck as a songwriter, and little wonder. wonde r. He wrote with with wit wi t and and pathos of Ke K entucky's coal coal mi ne ners rs in songs which became folk-pop classics, “Sixteen Tons” and “Dark As A Dungeon.” His other well-known songs reflected honky-tonk humor humor (“Divorce (“Divorce Me C. C.O. O.D.”) D.”) and and cornpone cornpone l ust (“Sweet Temptation,” “So Round, So Firm, So Fully Packed”). Thoug Tho ugh h his song ngs s abou outt mining mining li life fe ha hav ve been likene likened d to Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads, Travis had a knack for being topical in song without being overtly political, a pragmatic stance in the McCarthy era. He was also a gifted prose write wri terr and scripte scri pted d the “Ri “Ride de Thi his s Tra Tr ai n” se segments of J ohnny Cash's Cas h's 1969-71 ABC TV T V seri serie es. In I n la l ate terr yea years his hi s autobi autobiog ographi raphi-3
cal reflections were published everywhere from Guitar Worl d to the scholarly John Edwards Memori al Foundation Quart er ly . Travis described himself to this writer as “a fidgety per son... I 'm not a per son that can sit down and sit sti ll and star e... I 'm a fr ustr ated car toonist, and I wr it e a few lit tl e poems.” That Travis channeled his nervous energy into creativeoutlets is to his enduring credit, and has surely been to our benefit. Merle Robert Travis first saw light in Rosewood, Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, on November 29th, 1917. He was the youngest of William Robert and Laura Etta Travis's four children. Decades later, he recalled that his family “was as well off as anyone else,” but that, in Kentucky coal country, wasn't really saying much. In Chet Hagen's Countr y Legends In The Hall Of Fame (Thomas Nelson Publi sher s, Count r y M usic Foundat ion Press, Nashvil le, 1982) , Travis wrote an autobiographical sketch with these recollections of childhood: “The Rob Tr avis fami ly never li ved in a house with electr icit y, pl umbing (i nside or out), we never had a radio... D ad never owned a car in his life... t her e was no money and new clothes, bought on credit at Beech Creek Coal Company store, came seldom... our clothes were patched-over pat ches...But we stayed clean, and always had enough to eat except a few time dur ing coal mi ne str ikes... “The fi r st house I coul d r emember living in was owned by a good old N egro coupl e that we call ed Uncle Rufus and Aunt Rowena Li ttlepage. They had been slaves befor e the War Between the States and were quit e old when we moved to the old Li ttlepage place at the top of Browder Hi ll ...I t was in t his old pre-Civil War house that I discovered music.” Music arrived in the form of a 5-string banjo Rob Travis had gotten from his brother, John. “I was fascinat ed by that as a ki d,” Travis told me in 1979. His father played such tunes as “Ida Red” and “Going Across the Sea” in the frailing style, and Merle soaked it up. While he learned the banjo, his brother, Taylor, made a flat-top guitar which he abandoned after landing afactory job in Indiana. “I must’ve been about 12,” Merle recalled. “Taylor wr ote a lett er back, and at the end of the letter he said, ‘Give Mer le the guit ar.’ Then I took an i nter est i n it .” Taylor was nearly 20 years older than Merle and was already married. “Hi s wif e May played Travis recalled. “Old stuf f she played fi nger picking styl e r eal good,” li ke ‘The Devil and Old Aunt Dinah,’ ‘Lost John,’ and a whole lot of pretty stuff .” While the Travis family lacked electricity, that didn’t prevent them from owning a Westrola phonograph. “We had a 4
Travis remembered. “One side guitar solo r ecord by Ni ck Lucas,” was call ed ‘Picking the Guitar ’ and the other side was call ed ‘Teasing the Frets.’ And, boy, we’d say, ‘Can’t t hat feller play? Wow!’ M e and my br other, John, we’d pl ay i t over and over again. We also had one by Chr is Bouchil lon, you ever hear of hi m? He was a comedian and he’d t alk, and man, i f he hadn’t been t alking people would’ve said what a great guitar player he was! He’d play f inger picking style behind hi s tal king stuf f l ike ‘Bor n I n Har d Luck’ and i t was fine, good picking.” Aside from his sister-in-law and the family phonograph, Travis was soon exposed to plenty of “fine, good pi cking” via a thriving local guitar scene. We don’t know why the guitar was the favorite instrument around Muhlenberg County but it had overshadowed the fiddle and banjo by the mid-1920s. “Downhome, t hem ol’ boys just ki nda knocked on a banjo and pl ayed after a fiddl e,” Ike Everly recalled at the Newport Folk Festival in 1969. “All of ‘em down there liked the guit ar . I t seemed to be all guitar players. Get out on the rai lr oad cr ossing, you know, and ther e’d be a bunch as big as thi s and you’d just pass the thi ng [gui tar ] ar ound, and ever y guy would t r y t o outdo the next one, you know. Or seems as though he did. They all coul d play.” And there were plenty of them. I n his careful efforts to give credit where due, Travis often reeled off the names of unrecorded Kentucky guitarists of the 1930s who impressed him:
Photo courtesy of Cindy Travis 5
Orval Raymer, Pip Stevens, Plucker English, Raymond McClellan (“H is eyes were crossed and hi s lower lip stuck out”) , and Cundiff Durham, whose “finger s wer e a foot l ong,” Travis wrote in GUI- TAR WORLD . “When he played ‘Ti ger Rag’ his hands looked li ke giant spiders.” There were others too, and while we can’t know how much of their music we would today call “Travis picking,” there was a strong current of fingerstyle guitar music running through Western Kentucky. One of its sources was an AfricanAmerican guitarist/fiddler, Arnold Shultz (1886-1931). Shultz made an enduring impression on Bill Monroe, who grew up north of Travis’s territory in Rosine and vividly recalls “seconding” Shultz as a kid. Monroe credits Shultz as the source of many of the blues elements in bluegrass. Shultz appears to have played a similar role in the development of the guitar tradition around Muhlenberg County. “About 1920 Shult z had met and i mpr essed a young whi te man fr om the area, Kennedy Jones,” wrote Charles K. Wolfe in Kentucky Countr y: Folk and Countr y M usic of Kentucky ( The Uni ver sit y Press of Kentucky, Lexi ngton, 1982). Jones provided the link between Shultz and the players who had the greatest impact on Travis, such as Ike Everly and Mose Rager. “He was the fir st guy I ever saw play wit h a thumbpick,” Rager said of Jones. “And so I j ust went crazy about that k ind of picki n’...he could pick a tune out on the guitar and it ’d sound like two guitar s playi n'.” At a Newport Folk Festival workshop, Phil Everly said of this style, “Dad learned it fr om a man named Kennedy Jones, who learned it fr om Arnold Shul tz... If you look at t he ar ea ar ound Dr akesbor o, Muhlenber g County, K entucky, your basic elements of count r y music come fr om a black man.” Travis never saw Arnold Shultz, and only saw Kennedy Jones after his own career had begun. Of Everly and Rager he would say, “I’d li ke to hear somethi ng today that t hr il led me li ke they did then...I thought t hat i t was the pretti est music I had hear d in my l ife. So I went home and found a pi ece of cellul oid t hat was a comb or iginall y, and I scr aped it down thin enough to put in hot water and shape into a thumb pick. And I t r ied to play l ike they did.” Everly demonstrated just how they played at the Newport Folk Festival, picking such tunes as “Ike Everly Rag”. What he played sounded not unlike the guitar ragtime of Gary Davis: there may be a stylistic kinship between Piedmont style guitar and what some historians tag “western Kentucky choking style.” Everly played “the oldest tune I know,” an unidentified melody picked straight, slow, and sentimental. “Then,” he said, “if you want ed t o dance...” He picked up the pace of the tune, laying 6
down the thumbed bass and melodic syncopation, demonstrating the clear bass-treble register separation which is a signature of ‘Travis picking’. I t’s asound less suggestive of old-time banjo (one supposed inspiration for the style) than stride piano. I n the same way that pianists learned to “rag” (syncopate) a familiar tune, Kentucky guitarists made “square” melodies danceable. And that may be the original “raison d’etre” of Travis picking: it was a means for a lone guitarist to produce dance music in the absence of other musicians. Travis was mastering the guitar style which would later bear his name during the Depression. Chronic unemployment left the men of Muhlenberg County plenty of time to hone their guitar skills. The picking parties ended, however, when Travis became one of the quarter million young men who went off to Civilian Conservation Corps camps in the wake of the New Deal legislation of 1933. “I was paid thirty dollars a he recalled, “but I month,” had to send twenty-five back home, so I ended up making five dollars a month.” But a Depression dollar went a long way, so Travis easily saved enough to buy a Gretsch (“the fir st decent guitar I had”) . With a new guitar s i and ample teen spirit, v a r T Travis bummed around y d n the country for a few i C f o months with a mandolin y s e t ist, Junior Rose. They r u o c sang and played for tips o t o on street corners: “I have h P a si ck si st er i n T exas,” Travis would lie. “If any of you people woul d li ke to help us, just pitch any loose change you have in your pockets her e in fr ont of us.” He stopped over in Evansville to visit his brother Taylor, and found himself playing for a live broadcast of one of those infamous “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” dance marathons. “I played ‘Ti ger Rag’ as much l ike Mose Rager as I coul d,” Travis recalled. The performance led to a job for the 18-year-old on Evansville station WGBF as guitarist with the Knox County 7
Knockabouts. By 1936, radio was well established as the major means of communication and entertainment in America, and radio jobs, even ones where the only pay was the opportunity to plug gigs, were coveted. Travis’s stint as a Knockabout was short-lived, but he returned to Evansville radio in another band, the Tennessee Tomcats. Then he hit the road with a legend of American fiddling, Clayton McMichen (1900-1970). For the better part of a year, Travis was a Georgia Wildcat. (I n 1981, Travis recorded a tribute to his old boss, “TheClayton McMichen Story,” CMH-9028.) Travis was closing in on the big time, which meant exposure at a major radio station. Cincinnati’s WLW had 50,000 watts and was heard across much of America. Travis arrived there as a Drifting Pioneer, one of a quartet garbed in buckskins and coonskin caps two decades before the Davy Crockett craze. The Pioneers sang gospel and played what Travis believed “today would absolutely be called bluegrass music. We had a mandolin, fiddle, guitar and bass, and I played 5-string banjo now and then. This was from 1938 to 1941, something like that.” A Drifting Pioneers’ Song Folio from WLW offered brief bios of the band members, and underlines the extent to which Travis’s guitar style was already a draw: “Mer le (‘Pappy’) Tr avis, youngest member of t he gr oup, sings bass in t he quar tet and i s famous for his guitar playi ng, which he fi r st l ear ned in t he hil ls of old Kentucky at Dr akesbor o.” Travis’s stint at WLW introduced him to other musicians who became lifelong friends and legends in their own right, notably the Delmore Brothers and Louis M. “Grandpa” Jones. In his autobiography, Ever ybody’s Gr andpa: Fift y Year s Behind the Mike (with Char les K. Wolfe, the Uni ver sity of Tennessee Press, Knoxvill e, 1984) , Jones wrote: “Mer le was r ough-and- tumbl e in those days, and he and Red Phil lips used t o go out and get in f ights just for the exercise of it. Someti mes they’d come in pr ett y banged up, but they woul d be able to do their show and pi ck as clean as ever .” WLW took “Travis picking” to remote hamlets; Doc Watson, who grew up in Deep Gap, North Carolina, has often recalled onstage how he tried to apply Travis’s style to the Delmore Brothers’ “Deep River Blues.” I n his autobiography, Country Gentleman (wit h Bil l Neely, Ballanti ne Books, N ew Yor k, 1974), Chet Atkins wrote: “I would pick up W LW and Mer le about once a month when condit ions wer e ri ght.. .His guitar style was closer to that sound I had been sear ching for t han anyt hing I had ever hear d. The clever way he played melody and r hyt hm at t he same time 8
knocked me over . I knew he was fi nger picking, but I didn’t know how he was doing it ...Fr om Merl e Tr avis I added a lot of songs to my r eper toir e. H e cer tai nly sti mulat ed my imaginati on as to what could be done with a guit ar .” Working at a major radio station gave Travis the opportunity to refine his own playing, too. “I used to li sten t o big bands,” he recalled, “and li sten to that guy pl ay those pr ett y chor ds. When I got on radi o, we’d do our countr y pr ogr ams, and then I’d sli p in t o where the big orchestras were playing and I’d watch the staff guitar ists reading t hat music and playi ng them chor ds!” The orchestral chords and harmonic sophistication learned from radio staff guitarists added another dimension to the style Travis brought with him from Kentucky. December 7, 1941, the “Day That Shall Live In I nfamy,” changed everyone’s life in America. Well-fed radio musicians were understandably not among the first to enlist to repel the Axis, though their day would come. Meanwhile, Travis, the Delmore Brothers, and Grandpa Jones were performing sacred songs on WLW as the Brown’s Ferry Four. “We sang spir ituals, Travis recalled. “Spir it uals got a lit tl e gospel number s, and hymns,” har d to fi nd, but we found a source. We would go down i n the black part of town on Centr al Avenue in Cincinnati and go to a used-r ecor d shop. W e’d go to wher e it said ‘Spir it uals,’ and, man, t hey were there by the dozens, by the Golden Gate Quartet and other black quar tets.
Photo courtesy of Cindy Travis 9
Now t he fellow who owned t his [shop] Syd N athan, was a l it tl e short man who had asthma and wor e real t hick glasses. W e got acquainted with him. One day he said, ‘W hy don’t you boys make your own r ecor ds?’ W e said, ‘Well , t her e ain’t nobody asked us.’ He said, ‘Well , I ’m aski ng you. I ’m going to star t me a r ecord company. I want you boys to recor d for me.' ” Fearing the wrath of WLW, with whom they were under exclusive contract, Travis and J ones became the Sheppard Brothers in a Dayton, Ohio recording studio in September, 1943. They recorded “You’ll Be Lonesome, Too” and “The Steppin’ Out Kind.” The record (King 500) went nowhere, but is significant as the first release on Nathan’s King label, which figured prominently in the R&B, bluegrass, and country of the 1950s. Travis’s first solo effort became the second King release. Though attributed to Bob McCarthy, there was no attempt to disguise his signature guitar. Thirty-six years after making his first record, Travis played a chipped, cracked copy of its A side for me. “When Mussolini Laid His Pistol Down” celebrated the demise of I l Duce in J uly, 1943. There was the unmistakable Travis guitar style, accompanying a much higher voice than I’d ever heard from him! Bob McCarthy had a one-shot recording career and Merle Travis joined the Marines. His was a brief military stint (“I wasn’t no Ser geant Yor k”), and he returned to Cincinnati in the bitter winter of 1944. WLW welcomed Travis home, but he was restless and borrowed enough money for a train ticket to Los Angeles. There he found himself in the midst of one of the most active country music scenes in the nation and one with the lure of Hollywood films attached. Travis never said he went West with movies in mind, but he no doubt had seen the silver screen’s variously-talented crooning cowpokes and may have figured he could do that too. Travis did not star in any of the Forties ‘oaters’ Hollywood’s second-string studios delivered en masse, but he did whoop, shoot, ride down hills, and deliver the occasional line: “Let’s see what Nevada’s got t o say,” uttered in a Ray Whitley epic was his first. The singing cowboy fraternity embraced Travis, and his friendship with the likes of Tex Ritter, Eddie Dean, Smiley Burnette, and Jimmy Wakely kept Travis steadily employed, sometimes on movie sets and more often on bandstands and radio soundstages. Cliffie Stone was perhaps his most important early L.A. ally, for Stone was an affable MC/bassist who enlisted Travis to perform on several L.A.-area radio shows—Harmony Homestead, Dinner Bell Round Up, Hollywood Barn Dance, etc. 10
He also apprised Capitol A& R man Lee Gillette of Travis’s talents, and Capitol signed him as an artist in 1946. Travis’s first release under his own name on a major label, “Cincinnati Lou” b/w “No Vacancy,” became a double-sided hit. And the hits, for a couple of years anyway, flew thick and fast from Travis.
H a n k T h o m p s o n & M e r l e T r a v i s ( P h o t o c o u r t e s y o f C i n d y T r a v i s )
Ironically, his best remembered recordings from his commercial prime were flops which Travis produced with some reluctance. “People got f olk song happy for awhi le,” Travis recalled. “Cli ffie Stone said, ‘We [ Capit ol] need you to make an album of folk songs.’ In those days, albums didn’t mean anything; it was singles that sold. I said, ‘Clif fi e, Bradl ey Ki ncaid and Bur l Ives have sung ever y folk song that I ever hear d of.’ He said, ‘W r ite some.’ I said, ‘You don’t wr it e folk songs.’ He said, ‘Well , wr it e some that sound like fol k songs.’ ” Travis wrote “Sixteen Tons” and “Dark as a Dungeon” for the eight-song “Folk Songs of the Hills” 78 album, which met with little commercial success in 1947. Its eventual impact is discussed at length in Archie Green’s Only a Miner : Studies in Recorded Coal-M ini ng Songs (U niver sity of Ill i- nois Press, Ur bana, 1972). While his first album bombed, Travis’s singles (especially “So Round, So Firm, So Fully Packed”) were among the most popular country records of 1947, the same year Travis wrote Capitol’s first million seller, “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette),” for Tex Williams. He was 30 and in his creative 11
prime, a Kentucky cowboy on a motorcycle whose wild side occasionally landed him in the drunk tank. But more often he was up to something interesting like designing a solid body electric guitar. Travis admired the sustain of steel guitars and reckoned it “was because the steel guitar was soli d.” An announcer for L.A. area motorcycle races, Paul A. Bigsby, had made a beautiful steel guitar for Joaquin Murphy and Travis drew a guitar “with a peghead showing all the pegs on one side” and asked Bigsby to build one. A few weeks later Bigsby called, saying, “Travis, I’ve got that crazy l ooking guitar you wanted.” It attracted a lot of admirers, including Leo Fender, who asked to borrow and copy it. Travis obliged, and the rest, they say, is history. The original Travis/Bigsby solid body is now in Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame Museum. At this time too, Travis was experimenting with multitracking, an innovation usually associated with Les Paul. “I had a r ecor d r eleased like that befor e Les did,” Travis said. “I l ear ned how to do that by messing around wi th the old home r ecor ding machines. I ’d t ake the thing that t ur ned the tur ntabl e off and that would make it t ur n slow. I’ d cut i t slow and then play it back fast and it would sound sor t of l ike Mickey M ouse. And I had a r ecor d r eleased called ‘M er le’s Boogie Woogie’ wher e I did that .” The 1948 recording, a natural for the hillbilly boogie craze of the late Forties, included a line Travis got from Leadbelly. “Me and Leadbelly and he recalled. “They r ecor ded us Tex Ritter once played for an affai r ,” as we per for med, and then aucti oned off our r ecor ds for a benefi t. Leadbelly taught me a verse I used on one of my ) s old r ecor ds, one of t he fi r st i v a r multi-track recordings I T y d guess was ever made. I t n i C f went, ‘Got a li tt le gal wi th o y s e gr eat bi g legs, wal ks like t r u o she’s walki n’ on soft-boiled c o t eggs.”’ o h P ( The flood of Forties s i v a r hits turned to a trickle T e l in the Fifties, though r e M Travis remained active & a r as aperformer in Los An t a n i geles. He was a fixture S k n a of early television coun r F try variety shows (“All 12
American J ubilee”and “Town Hall Party”), and had a small but significant role as Sal Anderson singing “Re-enlistment Blues” in the classic 1953 film, “From Here to Eternity.” This was the era, too, of the Snader Telescriptions which comprise the lion’s share of this video. Travis remembered them in Recoll ections of Mer le Tr avis: 1944- 1955 (John Edwards Memor ial Foundation Quar- terl y, Vol. XV, N o. 54, Summer 1979) . “Mr . Snader fi gur ed, now that television’s her e, folks wil l want to see the people who make r ecor ds as well as hear them. H e reasoned t hat a day would come when t her e’d be some sort of ‘j ockey’ on TV playi ng music but they wouldn’t call him a disc jockey. H e’d pr obably be a fil m-j ockey. For years tr anscri ptions wer e played on the r adio, so why not do the same thing with fi lm? So that is how Snader T elescri ptions came about.” “I made a good many of t hem. I done some alone, wher ein I ’d walk on the scene and spout off a li tt le bit about what I was going to pick and sing, then go to it . I also made a few with Judy H ayden [ Tr avis’s second wife] . They were fun. I sti ll have a few of them. When I see the fi lms I wonder if I was ever that young and foolish.” Television liked Travis alright but loved the face of a man Travis had first met as a radio announcer, Tennessee Ernie Ford. ) s i v a By 1955, Ford’s r T y face was familiar d n i across America C f o y from his week-day s e t r half-hour show on u o c NBC. It was there o t o h heintroduced Jack P ( s i v Fas-cinato’s ar a r T rangement of “Six e l r e teen Tons,” and M & when he recorded d r o F it in September, he e i n r effectively E changed Travis’s life. (“I owe my soul to Tennessee Erni e For d,” Travis ruefully sang in later years.) Ford’s “Sixteen Tons” had already rocketed to number one on Billboard pop charts by Thanksgiving, and by December 3rd the music trade marveled that “Sixteen Tons” was “possibly the fastest r ising plat ter to ever hit the char ts.” It had, in less than three months, sold over a million records. The song was more than a hit—it was a sensation, and its author became a folk hero. Back home they dedicated a monument to Travis in 13
Ebenezer, Kentucky in 1956, engraved with the chorus of “Sixteen Tons” and an image of Travis with a guitar to his left and a miner’s pick and shovel to his right. “Hi s songwr it ing, his singing and his guitar playi ng,” reads the inscription, “have won the hear ts of many and the r espect of hi s fell ow worker s.” Twentyseven years later, his ashes were scattered near this monument. The success of “Sixteen Tons” was a foreshock of the folk boom ushered in by the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley” in 1958. Travis appeared at Carnegie Hall in 1962 on a bill with Flatt & Scruggs, but missed the opportunity to play much of a role in the 1960s urban folk revival. (The role to which he seemed best suited fell, by default, to Doc Watson.) Unreliability and tales of whisky and pills made bookings scarce and a 1963 album, “Songs of the Coal Mines,” shared both topicality and commercial obscurity with “Folk Songs of the Hills” without ever yielding another “Sixteen Tons.” Bob Kingsley, who today hosts the syndicated American Country Countdown radio show, toured with Travis in the mid-Sixties while Travis was attempting a comeback. Kingsley’s job was to chauffeur Travis and keep him straight. “He had a r eal pr oblem believing how great he was,” Kingsley recalls. “He didn' t beli eve it when people told hi m he was an innovator and one-of- a-ki nd. That’ s what made him crazy. ” Craziness and creativity have never been strangers, and a mellowed Travis played a stronger elder statesman role in the 1970s. When the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band went to Nashville to record the influential “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” album in 1971, Travis was among the honored elders enlisted to perform, along with Doc Watson, Roy Acuff, MaybelleCarter, Earl Scruggs, etc. The recordings underscored Travis’s seminal role in country guitar, and brought him to an audience of baby boomers scarcely conceived in his commercial heyday. I n 1975, he shared a Grammy with his star pupil, Chet Atkins, for “The Atkins-Travis Traveling Show” (the album won in the category, ‘Best Country I nstrumental Performance’). Nashville’s hierarchy honored Travis with induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1977, and the late Seventies brought Travis to a new label, CMH, for which he recorded extensively in his last years. Those years were spent in eastern Oklahoma, where the landscape turns lush and hilly as one moves towards the Arkansas Ozarks and its lake country. Merle Travis settled there in a wooden ranch house overlooking scenic Lake Tenkiller with his last wife, Dorothy. He suffered a heart attack at home and died in Tahlequa, Oklahoma, on October 20th, 1983. 14
In the decade since his passing, his legacy as guitarist has been poorly served by CD reissues. Almost none of the classic guitar solos from Travis’s 23-year-stint with Capitol are available on CD. Let’s hope that changes. Meanwhile, guitarists needn’t hesitate to apply the pause and rewind button when viewing this video. There’s a heap of hot licks here. And nonplayers can simply enjoy the avuncular personality of a multitalented Kentuckian who gifted Muhlenberg County’s best music on the world.
Notes by M ark H umphr ey Thanks to Mar y Katheri ne Aldi n for the Ike and Phil Ever ly materi al.
Photo courtesy of Cindy Travis 15
AN INTERVIEW WITH MERLE TRAVIS WITH MARK HUMPHREY JUNE 21, 1979
P h o t o b y D a v i d G a h r
How di d you come to r ecor d the coll ecti on of guitar solos call ed “Walk in' T he Str ings?” Now they had such a thing as fillers, and I went in to do some transcriptions, and Cliffie Stone was the producer. Now they call it producer, which is a weird name because that’s the man who puts up the money and the director’s the guy who tells you what to do. So Cliffie Stone was directing the session. He’d say, “Play something that lasts 30 seconds.” OK; when the clock went straight up I’d just begin picking something, and when the 30 seconds was up I’d quit. “Now play one that lasts 45 seconds,” and so forth and so on. So I played one — “Keep playing till you get tired” — so I played “Ike Everly’s Rag,” one that Ike Everly used to play. But some of these transcriptions only lasted 15 seconds. A fellow named Joe Allison went to Capitol Records and said, “You should releaseall those transcriptions on an album by Travis,” and they did. And they made up names to the tunes — one was called “Louisville Clog,” and one was called “Pigmeat Stomp.” And you had nothi ng to do wit h the names. No indeed. What year would t his have been? I don’t know. This was in the ’40s when I recorded it, I’m not sure when they released it. And t his is the album call ed “Walki n’ the Str ings.” Capit ol, 1960 Fr ench Reissue, Pat héMar coni 1550801 1984 Yeah And that’s kind of a rar it y, isn’t i t? 16
Well, it should be. (laughs) I didn’t know this thing was released, and I was somewhere playing a show, and somebody came in, saying, “Play ‘Pigmeat Stomp.’” And I said, “You got me there, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of it.” He said, “Well you should, you recorded it!” I said, “Well, you’re thinki ng of someone else. Maybe Chet Atkins, although I’ve never heard Chet play it, and I’m sure I never recorded “Pigmeat Stomp.” He said, “You sure did!” And I said, “Well, now buddy, I ’d like to see a record of it.” He said, “I’ve got it out in the car.” (laughs) He brought in this album, and on it was a tune called “Pigmeat Stomp.” And if it was to save my life, I had no idea what it was. I’l l bet t his has thr own some curve balls to r ecor d r esear cher s thr ough the year s, because Big Bill Broonzy r ecor ded a t une in 1930 called “Pigmeat Str ut,” and some folk s have pr obably looked at a Tr avis discogr aphy and said, “Aha! he got that f r om Big Bil l Broonzy.” (Laughs) I have no idea where they came up with those titles. I had no idea Big Bil l Broonzy had a tune called “Pigmeat Strut.” That’s a new one on me. Did he record “Louisville Clog?” I don’t thi nk he did. W as thi s on electr ic guitar or acousti c guit ar ?
That’s the funny thing. The boys down at Capitol Records always seemed to get all screwed up in what they tried to do with me. Not one single tune on the “Walking the Strings” album had an electric guitar note on it. And on the cover was me sitting there just as big as life with an electric guitar. Now then, one time I got Curly Chalker and Carl Cottoner and Harold Hensley and J immy Pruett and a bunch of good musicians there in Hollywood and I went down to re-cut some of the old stuff I’d done in the 1940s. This was in the 1960s. The title of the album was “Travis.” I didn’t pick one note of acoustic guitar. There they put a picture of me with an acoustic flat-top round hole guitar leaning up against a rock. I declare, I believe that if I’d made an album with me playing the clarinet, they’d have had me on the cover with a dulcimer. That ’s almost as bad as an album I have of bluesman Li ghtnin’ H opkins that has a pictur e of Rever end Gar y D avi s on it . (Laughs) Maybe they should release one of mine and put Johnny Cash’s picture on it. Among the thi ngs you ar e noted for is your design wor k on the fir st soli d body electr ic guit ar . How did that come about? This thing has backfired on me so many times! This is one of the things I told Chet Flippo about, the guy from Rolling Stone. You see, with a guitar like this (i.e., his Gibson Super 400), changing strings, you have to reach around, and I thought, “Boy wouldn’t it be nice if they made a neck with the keys all on one side?” So I drew a picture of it. Now your recording machine (with the dials on top) 17
is exactly how they should make an amplifier. They put the controls down below so that when you need to adjust your amplifier you’ve got to squat down and stick your rear end right towards the audience. They should put them on top. But I’ve never been able to talk them into it. Well, with the guitar, I thought, “Why not put the keys on one side? And if they have the electric pickups on it, why all this?” (i.e., a reference to the full acoustic body of the Super 400) Paul Bigsby was a friend of mine who announced motorcycle races. He could build anything, he was a pattern maker at a factory. He’d built Joaquin Murphy, who played with Spade Cooley, a steel guitar. I said, ‘Could you build me a guitar if I’d draw you a picture of it?’ And Paul was a loud-talking braggart sort of guy. He said, ‘I can buil d anything!’ So I drew him a picture. I said, “Now I want this just a little over an inch thick and solid, because the pickups are what makes the noiseanyhow.” I drew him apicture of the neck and said, “I want all the keys on one side.” Well, he built it. It worked fine and it played good. Cliffie Stone was playing a dance at Placentia, CA four miles out of Fullerton. In those days, that meant four miles of oranges. Now it’s probably four miles of houses. Well, Leo Fender came out and said, “How do you like that guitar?” I said, “Fi ne.” I told him all the advantages — “you haven’t got all that bulk, you haven’t got so much to carry, when you want to tune it all the keys are right there handy, you don’t have to reach under to get some.” He said, “Could I borrow it for a week and build one like it?” I said, “Sure.” So he took it, and the next week he brought one out like it, and it was just P h o t o c o u r t e s y o f C i n d y T r a v i s
18
as good, although mine was built out of Bird’s Eye Maple, and he hadn’t gone to that much trouble. Three or four fellows went to Bigsby and said, “I want one of those solid-body guitars with all the keys on one side li ke Travis has got.” Well after three or four, Bigsby said, “Look, I ain’t got time to mess with those things. I f you want one of those silly things, go out to Fullerton, Leo Fender will build you one.” And they go out there, and Leo would buil d themone. He built themone hundred, he built them one thousand, he built them one million, and he built a big factory (laughs). He revolutionized the guitar. Naturally, somebody had to design it, even if it was an idiot like me. I told this story to Chet Flippo and he would go out to the Fender factory, asked someof the boys, and they said, “Travis never played a solid-body guitar in his life.” The Vice-President of the Fender Co., Forrest White, saw the article in Rolling Stone and he sent me a picture of me and steel guitarist Speedy West and Paul Bigsby sitting out in my backyard, and me with this guitar. The picture was taken two days after i t was built. And I’ve got a garage full of pictures of me playing this thing long before the Fender guitar was ever built. Let me say this about Fender guitars — they’re fine precision built instruments, and I love ‘em. They’re great. I’ve learned not to do this, but I have walked up to some young fellow and said, “How do you like your Fender guitar?” He’d say, “Oh, I like it.” I’d say, “I don’t blame you, it’s good. By the way, I designed that guitar.” And they’ll look at me like I had smallpox, and walk away. I can imagine them saying, “You know some old character came in here; he was a little off his rocker, he thought he’d designed the Fender guitar.” I guess they think it grew out of the ground that way. I don’t think they think anybody designed it. You didn’t tr y to patent i t or do anything li ke that at t he ti me? There’s nothing to patent. You couldn’t patent a design. Like that drinking glass that you have there. You can make a glass any way you want to; it’s already been invented. As far as solid-body guitars, the solid-body steel guitars gave methe idea for mine. Steel guitars have so much more sustain; you pick them and they just keep on sounding. And I thought, ‘Why don’t they buil d regular guitars solid?’ And the keys all on one side because I was lazy. I think it’s unhandy to have to reach under here. Thi s would’ ve been ar ound 1947? Probably so. You had somethi ng to do wi th the Bigsby bar also. Yeah. I had the first one ever built, but now a good friend of mine in Los Angeles, Tom Bresh, has it. This one on my Super 400 is probably one of the last ones ever built. He only built three of 19
these with the long handles — two for me and one for Hank Thompson. This one was all dolled up (there’s some fancy engraving on it) by a gunsmith, Dick Allen. I had a Vibrola bar and Chet Atkins had one, made by the Gibson company. They worked up and down (parallel), just the opposite of the way the Bigsby bar does (horizontal). I like the effect, you got a good vibrato, but they pulled the strings out of tune. So I griped to Bigsby, I said, “You say you can fix anything. Can you fix this thing so it won’t pull the strings out of tune?” “Absolutely!” Well he took it and worked on it, so I put it back on my guitar and it still pulled the strings out of tune. He tried it a couple of times, and finally said, “The way that thing’s designed, you can’t fix it to where it won’t pull the strings out of tune.” I said, “Why don’t you buil d one?” He said, “I could buil d one that would never pul l the strings out of tune.” I said, “You can’t do it.” He said, “By George, I’ll show you.” Well, in about a week he came up with the one Tom Bresh has now. And it does not pull the strings out of tune. He said he sets the strings on a needle valve in there. They sit on a thing the size of a needle inside there. The fi r st soli d-body i s in the Countr y M usic H all of Fame now. Yeah. It has quite a bit of decor ati on. Was all that your design? Yeah, I thought that would look pretty. I always thought a banjo looked pretty because it had an armrest, and a fiddle looked pretty because it had a tailpiece. So that one’s got an armrest and a tailpiece. I admire people who stick by their principles, and I’ve heard people say, “I would never pl ay an electric instrument. I play an acoustic guitar because I don’t want the people I play for to hear an amplified guitar. So I play an acoustic guitar, period.” And then when they go to perform they will gripe their head off unless the hall has a$100,000 public address systemin order that his listeners can hear his guitar amplified through that system. Why not have one like this (his electric Super 400) with the pickups on it and the amplifier sitting down by you so you can adjust it yourself? It’s exactly the same thing. If you make a record, the man in the control room turns the controls up to make the guitarist’s instrument sound big and pretty and loud. That’s exactly why the pickups are put on here. This is carrying the microphone on your guitar instead of sitting in front of it. The acoustic guitar purists all mean well, but they haven’t stopped to think, “Now wait — this is a guitar with the microphone under the strings instead of out in front of it.” So you don’t change your styl e at al l pl ayi ng acousti c or electr ic guit ar ? No. 20
I wanted to ask you about t hat beauti ful Guil d hanging on the wall . I ’ve wondered about that since I saw i t on t he cover of the album, “The Best of M er le Tr avis.” Is that another one you designed? Yeah. I was playing that solid-body for awhile, and the Gibson company asked me, “What could we do to get you to go back to playing a Gibson?” Of course I’d started out playing a Gibson as soon as I had enough money to get one. I said, “if you’ll build me a Super-400 the way I design it, I’ll play it.” They said, “We’ll do it.” So I drew a picture of a Super-400, I put a star up here, I put my name on the neck, I dolled it up, and said, “The Gibson, Special.” So they built it for me, and it’s worked pretty well. I ’ve got 2 or 3 of these things. The same story with Guild. They said, “What can we get you to do to play a Gretsch?” I said, “I’ll do it if you’ll build one exactly as I draw it.” I had some ideas, and it’s not bad. I said, “I want you to carve the top out s i v of a one inch piece of a r T wood, but leave the in y d n i side uncarved. Leave it C f o flat inside.” So that gui y s e t tar i s arched on top but r u o it’s an inch thick under c o t o the bridge. And the h P back, too. I drew the whole thing — the red checkers around, I got that idea from a guitar Gene Autry used in pictures years ago. The sound hole is copied from an old-time Gibson — the oval sound hole. And I designed that top up there, the curlicue. And y ou designed t he armr est and t he pickguar d al so. Yeah, I thought it made it look better. Why such thi ck wood? For sustain. I wanted it to sound like a solid-body but look otherwise. The reason I don’t use it more is because the neck was a little too broad, and I took it to a fri end and said, “Make the neck a little smaller.” And he cut it down to where it’s like a ukulele neck. (laughs) Would y ou tell me about y our acousti c guit ar ? It’s a D-28 Martin with a Bigsby neck. How old i s the M ar ti n body? I bought it probably in 1939. I had Bigsby put that neck on just 21
after he made that fi rst solid-body guitar. I liked the neck so well, the size and everything, that I had him put one on the Martin. Now the neck on the Gibson is exactly the size of the Bigsby neck. That’s not a regular Gibson neck. It’s smaller and thinner. So you’ve been playi ng the body of t hat acousti c gui tar for about 40 year s, and t he neck for about 30. Yeah. Have you had to modif y i t at all in r ecent y ear s? I put a new bridge on it not long ago. Have you had to change the fr ets? No, I haven’t. What gauge str ings do you use? I just go in and say, ‘Give me a set of Gibson electric and a set of Martin acoustic,‘ and put them on and forget about it. When I open up the package and look at those numbers, I haveno ideawhat they all mean. So you don’t bother about l ight gauge or medium gauge. No, I don’t. Di d you ever use fl at- wound str ings? Yeah, but I never had much luck with them because they died too quick. After about one day they’d just go, ‘thump, thump.’ Maybe they’ve improved, I haven’t tried them in a long time. Do you change your str ings ver y oft en? Not very often. If I’m recording a guitar solo I like to have strings that are fairly new because you get a better ring from them. Otherwise, I don’t change them too often. What k ind of t humbpick ar e you using? These little old thin thumbpicks are hard to find, but if I can find them I use them. I have no idea who makes them. You’ll find me awfully dumb when you ask me what gauge these guitar strings are. I use a Music Man amplifier, and I’ll have young fell ows come up and say, “Hey, I like your amplifier. I like the way that amplifier sounds. How many amps has it got?” And I don’t know what to say. I say, ‘You know, I never have counted them.’ They’ll say, “Well, how many watts does it have?” I say, ‘I don’t know. I never sat down and counted ‘em. It might be 3 or 4 or 100.’ I haveno ideahow many watts or amps. I f it sounds good and loud and clear, that’s good. Most people thi nk you pick wi th j ust the thumb and fi r st fi nger , but sometimes you use two finger s. Sometimes I use three. Like in “Caravan”. (Demonstrates, playing a treble roll over the top three strings with three fingers.) Even in “Wildwood Flower”. (Demonstrates again.) Years ago, I used just thumb and index finger. In that style you can get a choke sound or you can play with open strings. How di d you develop that choki ng effect? 22
Mose Rager played like that. (Demonstrates with a blues.) On the album I did with Joe Maphis for CMH, we recorded “Ike Everly’s Rag.” We told the company president that the song is owned by Margaret Everly, I ke’s widow. We also recorded one called “Mose Rager’s Blues,” and the royalties will go to Mose. That’s the least we could do. (The album referred to is Country Guitar Giants (CMH9017).) You r ecor ded somethi ng wher e you put a hi gh E str ing on for the thi r d str ing and tuned that up an octave above normal pit ch for the thir d str ing G. Right. It was like the top E string fretted at the third fret. I recorded with this string setup on “Beer Barrel Polka” and “Black Diamond Blues.” On some of your guit ar solos, on the recor ds of “Fat Gal ,” “Sweet Temptation” and “Follow Thr u”, t he guit ar breaks sound ver y hi gh. W er e you using any ki nd of unusual str ing setup? No, I might have been using a capo. Did you ever play in alt er nati ve tuni ngs? Yes, I ’ve pl ayed s some in open G. That’s a i v a r good tuning for blues. T y d When I was a kid I used to n i C pick some in that tuning, f o y fretting with a bottle. s e t r u That’s no bi g deal . o c o Everybody’s done that. t o h Then there’s one where P you tune the fifth string (A) up to B. This is very good for playing rich orchestral-jazz type chords. What was your fir st electr ic guit ar? It was a Gibson L-10 with a DeArmond pickup. The first time I used it on radio was on a show called “Plantation Party’, a network show. This would’ve been in 1939 or ’40. It was sponsored by Bugler cigarette tobacco. I r ecently hear d a tape of some stuff you had r ecor ded when you were using mult i- tr acks and speeding up the tape, the sort of thi ng I’ ve hear d Les Paul do. Yeah. I had a record released like that before Les did. I learned how to do that by messing with the old home recording machines. 23
I’d take the thing that turned the turntable off and would make it turn slow. I’d cut it slow and then play it back fast, and it would sound sort of like Mickey Mouse. And I had a record released called “Merl e’s Boogie Woogie” where I did that. Let me say this about Les Paul. I don’t think anybody will ever top him on doing multi-tracks, because he had in his head just exactly how he wanted the bass, the rhythm, every fill, every harmony part, every obbligato, every bit of it from start to finish. He perfected it. I might have been the first one to butcher a li ttle old tune on record, but Les Paul was the best. In y our l eft -hand sty le you play wi th your thumb a lot and you don’t play barr e chor ds. Oh, sure, (Proceeds to play some complex barre chords.) But mostly I don’t. Mostly I just grab a guitar neck like a hoe handle. Would you l ik e to say any thi ng about how you developed some of your famous gui tar solos — “Walki ng the Str ings”, “Cannonball Rag” and “Blue Smoke,” for instance? “Walking the Strings” and “Cannonball Rag’ are actually dolledup versions of a couple of little old tunes that Ike and Mose used to play. (Plays the breakneck intro of “Walking the Strings.”) Simplest thing in the world to play. For you, maybe. “Blue Smoke” (plays), now there’s one where you use three fingers. “Cannonball Rag” is a round robin tune. There’s a million tunes like that. What do you mean by r ound robin? A round robin chord progression, like “Salty Dog”. (Plays a C/ A7/D7/G/C chord progression.) That’s a round robin. You’v e been using a f i nger pick on the in dex fi nger some whi l e demonstr ating thi s. I haven’t seen you use one befor e. Before this contract with CMH Records I was to do an album in Nashville with Shot Jackson. I was there, and my index fingernail broke off to the quick. Without that, I can’t play anything at all. Not that I pick with the fingernail, but I useit as a brace. So Shot Jackson said, ‘Why don’t you try a steel pick?’ I put it on and said “Good Lord, I couldn’t play with one of those things if it was to save my life.” He said, “If you practised you probably could. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about your fingernails.” So we called and cancelled the session, because I couldn’t play without that fingernail. But Shot said, “Take that pick anyhow.” I’vebeen messing with it, and you get real good sound out of it. (Plays.) It’s much softer without the pick. For playing some tunes it’s a lot better. I never used one in my life til l Shot Jackson gave me this one last fall. I t’s the only one I’ve ever owned. On some of your tunes you play a lot with t he top E str ing open, and t his 24
r eminds me somewhat of banjo playing. Well, of course, the banjo is the first instrument I played. I talked to Sonny Osborne the other day and he said, ‘You playing any drop-thumb these days?’ I said, What in the world is that?’ He laughed and said, ‘You’ll find out.’ Do you have any f avori te solos among your instr umentals? No, I don’t. I like to play slow pieces better than fast pieces. I like to put a rhythm and bass track on tape and sit and play with them, because every time you’ll play it different. I do that as a pastime a lot. What about pr acti ce? I’m sur e thr ough the year s you’ ve been so busy worki ng that you haven’t had to wor r y about i t, but I guess at some point you did. I don’t think I ever said, “I think I’ll sit down and practice”, because if I wasn’t in the mood there wouldn’t be a bit of use in practicing. Now since I’ve been talking to you I’ve been sitting here picking on the guitar because I’m a fidgety person. I ’m like Johnny Cash, I’m not a person that can sit down and sit still and stare. If you weren’t here I’d be out there cutting grass or in there helping Dorothy can beans. I ’m always busy. So when I ’m doing nothing else I play. When I’m sitting watching TV I play every commercial and everything with them. Without even knowing it, I do it. I just feel better with a guitar in my hands. That’s about all the practice I do. The jazzy chords that you play , those wer e thi ngs you just work ed out? I guess so. I never took any lessons. The nearest I ever came to taking lessons was bugging Alton Delmore. I said, “What about those shape notes?” And I learned that Do i s the tonic note, it doesn’t matter what key you’re in. The Sons of the Pioneers, when they’re talking about harmony, will say, ‘You’re supposed to hit a La there.’ Which is a lot easier than going to a piano or guitar and finding out what key it’s in. You know that La is the sixth note. When you are rehearsing singing, it makes it so much easier if everyone knows shape notes. When did you fi r st hear Chet A tk ins? Hey! Now you’ve brought up something. I don’t think that there will ever be a chance for any other guitar player to be as great as Chet. He was born at a time when turn-of-the-century music, the songs of the ’20s and big bands were still around and not laughed at. He knows it all, from the music to commercial stuff to what was recorded this afternoon in Nashville. He is the greatest guitar player that has ever been on this earth, in my opinion. I don’t think there will ever be anyone greater. And that’s what I think of Chet Atkins. What was your r eacti on when you fi r st hear d him? Chet had written me a letter or two and I had met him in 25
Nashville. He told me he listened to me on the radio from Cincinnati. He said, “I try to play the guitar like you.” The first time I heard him really turn l oose was in about 1945. I’d been out of the Marine Corps a short while and I was going back to Cincinnati to visit friends. It was a cold morning; we did our shows early in the C h e morning, before dayt A t k light in the winter i n s time. Well, Chet & M Atkins was on the ra e r l e dio at the time on T r a v WLW in Cincinnati. i s ( P And I was listening to h o t the radio and the an o c o u nouncer said, “Now r t e s we’ll have a guitar solo y o f from Chet Atkins.” He C i n started playing, and I d y T pulled the car over — r a v i it was snowing like s ) everything — and sat there and listened to him, and I thought, “Wow!” Chet honored me by naming his daughter after me. Doc Watson honored me by naming his son after me. One day I sat down, looking through letters, and found 43 people had named their children after me. And I have the worst name in the world! They get Merle mixed up with Earl and Pearl and Burl, and Travis mixed up with Davis and Traveler. Still, there’s a lot of youngsters, because of me in my stupidity, named Merle and lots named Travis. When you made the album with Chet a few years ago, was that somethi ng you’d both planned to do for a l ong ti me? We’d talked about it for many years, and I ’d been tied up with Capitol and of course Chet’s a big man at RCA. We’d talk about how much fun it would be to make an album together. When we finally made it, I think both of us could’ve done a lot better picking than we did, because we were visiting so much and having fun. We cut half of it in Nashville and half in Hollywood. Jerry Reed was in the control room. As they say, he was “producing” most of it. Chet was playing some harmonics, and some of them weren’t sounding right. Jerry calls everybody “son”. He hollered through there at Chet, who is his boss at RCA, “Son, when you hit them harmonics, just brush ‘em, son, brush ‘em.” Chet looked over at me and grinned, he said 26
(imitates Atkins’ voice), “OK, son, I’ll just brush ‘em.” You know Chet has a beautiful East Tennessee accent. I imitate Chet, and Tom Bresh imitates me. You pl ayed some ni ce har monics on your r ecor ding of “Bicycle Bui lt for Two”. Now Chet, he’s got the world skinned on that. He can hit a chord that’s half harmonics. “Bicycle Built For Two” was a multitrack recording. What’ s the tr ick t o har monics? Well, you pick with the thumb and damp with the first finger 12 frets below the note you’re fretting (plays some chords in harmonics). Chet, he plays harmonics all over the place — half chords and half harmonics, as well as arpeggios in harmonics. Is that a two-dollar word? (Demonstrates use of harmonics in playing “Dance of the Golden Rod.”) The more you play harmonics, the easier it is to play. Is that a tune you l ear ned fr om a French harp pl ayer ? No, I made up “Dance of the Golden Rod.” “Goodbye My Bluebell” is the one I learned from French harp player Paul McCormack. What do you thi nk of Jer r y Reed as a picker ? Let me quote Chet Atkins on him. Chet said, “You know, you’ll get to thinking you’re a pretty good guitar picker, and then somebody like Jerry Reed will come into town and cut you to ribbons.” That’s what he said to me one night, when he called and said, “I want you to come over to the house and listen to Jerry Reed play.” I said, “Does he play pretty good?” And that’s what he told me. Jerry’s fantastic. Have you work ed wit h Doc Watson since you played at Winfi eld, Kansas in 1976? I worked with him in Santa Barbara, California. I ’m not sure when that was. I wish I had more time to be around Doc, because I was thrilled to death to meet him. When we made “Will The Circle Be Unbroken?” I walked in and recognized Doc and went over to talk to him. I ’ve got a gold record over there of “Will The Circle Be Unbroken?” I’ve got six gold records upstairs. I hope William McEuen doesn’t read this, but I ’ve got two copies of the album, and I’ve never listened to all of it, so I don’t know exactly what I said to Doc. But anyway, I walked back into the control room and Earl Scruggs said, ‘Do you know they were recording you guys?’ I said, “What?” He said, “They had the tape running when you were talking.” I walked over to the engineer and he said, “Ah, we might not use it.” And later somebody came up to me and asked me about that conversation: “Was that real or a put-on?” So I’ll have to dig that out and listen to it sometime. 27
It was gr eat t o hear the two of y ou together at W inf ield. We laughed about that later. Three polar bears got up and left, said, “I’m going back to the North Pole where it’s a little warmer.” Me and Doc Watson were sitti ng there just about to freeze. Remember how cold it was? Stuart Mossman took me out to his guitar factory while I was there and gave methat beautiful guitar there. It’s a shame that he’s not selling them on every street corner because it’s one of the finest guitars I’ve ever seen. They’re dandies. The best par t of the per for mance to my ear s was when t he two of y ou wer e tr ading off li cks dur ing “Mi lk cow Blues”. Then you star ted playing some beauti ful sock chord r hyt hm behind Doc which was a gr eat sur pr ise, because I’d never hear d you pl ay t hat sty le befor e. I never really got to do the stuff that I wanted to do with the guitar on Capitol. I did one album in Nashville called “Strictly Guitar” that I was very disappointed in. That album’s terrible. One, a very brilliant engineer in Hollywood twisted the knobs and that’s called “The Merle Travis Guitar.” That one I’m not too ashamed of. The rest of the stuff sort of embarrasses me. Most people in this business have copies of everything they’ve ever recorded. I don’t have any of mine. But Martin Haerle, president of CMH Records, has given me a free hand in the recordings I’m doing now. He’s said, ‘Whatever you want to record, record it, and record it your way.’ I’ve recorded 30 tunes with Joe Maphis. The album should be out any day. The cover-picture was taken on a mountain top in New Mexico, with snow-topped mountains in the background. So the scenery’s pretty, whether me and Joe are or not (laughs). The album with Joe is all instrumental. (This was the set “Country Music Giants” (CMH9017) referred to earl ier.) And I have another album coming out where I do some songs (“The Merle Travis Story” (CMH-9018)). I’ve re-recorded a bunch of the old tunes. Alex Brashear, who played trumpet with Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, was on that session. Alex sent me a card saying ‘Thank you for having me on your session.’ That’s the first time any musician has done that. Another former Playboy, Johnny Gimble, was on there, too. He called the man who owns the record company and said, ‘Hey, when are we going to do another session?’ We had a big time, you know. Steel guitarist Herb Remington was on there also. Curley Hollingsworth was the piano player, and two super pickers from Nashville, Buddy Harmon played drums and Billy Linneman played bass. The album with Maphis is done on electric guitars. On the other one I play some acoustic guitar. I did “I Am A Pilgrim” and “Bluebell,” “Re-Enlistment Blues” and a bunch of stuff on acoustic. How l ong does it take to make an album like that? 28
When I worked with other record companies, they would say, “We’re going to do a session, and it will be three hours. We expect you to do four tunes in three hours.” And most of the recordings I’ve done have been hurry up affairs, because we’d have three hours and the union says that in that period we’re allowed to do four sides. I don’t care if the image in Nashville is that they take it easy back there. My foot, they don’t! When you listen to a playback and it’s a take, every musician will run to the telephone to call and see where his next session is. That’s all right, but it’s not easy-going. The only easy-going recording I’veever done was with Hank Thompson, who produced his own records. He put up the money. His albums were fun to do. But outside of that, I ’ve never enjoyed recording except for some of the early stuff with the boys at Capitol, Cliffie Stone and Lee Gillette. But working with Martin Haerle at CMH has been enjoyable, because we were able to take our time. Human nature being what it is, when they told us “Take all the time in the world and do it the
J o e M a p h i s & M e r l e T r a v i s ( P h o t o c o u r t e s y o f C i n d y T r a v i s )
29
way you want it done,” me and J oe Maphis cut 30 tunes in about 2 1/2 days, which is unheard of. But that’s the way we wanted them to sound. When I went down to cut these vocals — “So Round, So Firm, So Ful ly Packed,” “Sweet Temptation” and some of the other old songs — I recorded 24 sides in two days, which you could never believe could be done. But they suit me. "So Round, So Fir m, So Ful ly Packed" — was that an expr ession befor e you wr ote the song? That was the trademark for Lucky Strike cigarettes. They sponsored a lot of radio shows and their slogan was “Buy Lucky Strikes. They’re so round, so firm, so fully packed.” Cliffie Stone came to me and said, “Eddie Kirk’s been trying to write a song. He’s got a great idea, he’s going to write a song, ‘So round, so firm, so fully packed, that’s my gal’.” I said, “Wait a minute, what’s that cigarette company going to say?” He said, “They can’t copyright that.” He said, “Write a song.” So on the sheet music it says “by Cliffie Stone, Eddie Kirk, and Merle Travis.” Every songwriter in Nashville, including me, is waiting for somebody to sneeze and they’ll write a song called Gesundheit! Fifteen of ‘em will have a song called Gesundheit! that they’re peddling the next day. I was with a music publisher, and I lived way out past Madison in the suburbs of Nashville. There was a church that had a marquee, and they always had some sage saying on it. I left Nashville one day, I passed the church, and up there on the marquee it said “Today is the first day of the rest of your life”. ‘Wow,’ I said, ‘what a great song title!’ Man, I went home and started writing last lines (laughs). So I cameup with a song called “Today Is The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life.” And the next morning early I rushed down to my publisher, Tree Publishing Company. I said, “I’ve got a terrific idea for a song! It’s all written — here it is.” Now a lot of hillbillies lived out in that section besides me, and the guy said, “Yeah, about 15 songs have come in this morning titled “Today Is The First Day Of The Rest Of My Life,’” So after I fainted, I walked on out. Let me br ing your career up to date. You moved to Nashvil le in 1966, and among other thi ngs you wer e a scri ptwr iter for the Johnny Cash TV ser ies ther e. Then you moved back to the West Coast for a while, and then came her e to easter n Ok lahoma. That’s right. How have your audi ences changed? You’ ve played concer ts al l over the world. I would guess that one dif ference would be that you wer e play ing a l ot of dances in t he ’40s. In the ’40s, yes. With the Tennessee Tomcats and the Knox County Knockabouts, the first groups I played with, we played very few dances because we didn’t have amplified instruments. But from 30
then on 'till after World War II, man, we wouldn’t think about playing dances or honkytonks. Oh, no! That’s for the guy who can’t get a job on the radio. And I was always lucky enough to have a job on the radio. I wasn’t used to that. But after the War, i n order to eat, I learned that people liked to get together and dance and hear upbeat tunes that got tagged Western Swing. But I haven’t found a heck of a lot of difference in the reaction of the audiences at all. The first date I ever played with Clayton McMichen, they were lined up for blocks to get into the biggest auditorium in Columbus, Ohio. They were lined up like that for two shows. I t was a country show, with Clayton McMichen, the Delmore Brothers, Cowboy Copas, Natchez the Indian and a few others. Working with Clayton McMichen, I’ve found that his pet gripe has become one of mine. And Mark, I want you to remember this. A reporter would come up after the show and say, ‘Mr. McMichen, may I have an interview?’ ‘Why, sure.’ The reporter would ask, ‘Why do you think country music is getting so popular?’ And McMichen would hit the ceiling. “Because, by God, me and Gid Tanner and the Skillet-Lickers sold a million records of ‘Corn Licker Still In Georgia’ is one reason. Another reason is that all over the United States are hillbillies and country acts on radio, and people are listening to it. They sell a lot more overalls than they do tuxedos, and that’s another reason.” McMichen was Irish, and he’d get real mad. Now maybe tomorrow I ’ll go out and some fell ow will come up and say, “Mr. Travis, may I have an interview?” “Yes.” And they’ll ask, “Why do you think country music has suddenly gotten so popular?” And I’ll think back to 40 years ago when Clayton McMichen got so mad about that. There has never been a time when country music was not popular. Today there are more people, more auditoriums, more places to play, and television, but it hasn’t become any more popular. People still like to wear denims, checkered shirts, comfortable shoes, and listen to things that they don’t have to wear a tuxedo to hear. Only stuffed shirts would do that. And even the folks who go to the tuxedo concerts probably laugh about it when they get home, change their clothes and go down to the honky-tonk to hear Arkansas Joe & His Hog Scrapers. One thing saddens me a little bit. A lot of people who claim to be playing country music are really not. I don’t know what country some of that’s from. They’ll say, “I’m going to sing you a song,” and here’s 25 fiddlers, four cello players, five bass players, 14 French horn players and a whole section of reeds. I don’t think that’s country music. I don’t hardl y believe that exists in any country. Would you have any wor ds of advice for young musicians tr yi ng to star t in the business? I think I ’d just say, keep pickin’, and if you have it, somebody’s 31
going to discover it. You’re not going to wind up working down at the corner shoe store if you have the talent of a Les Paul or a Chet Atkins or Barbara Mandrell or Larry Gatlin. I mention these two young people because they’re very much on the scene today. I listen to the old Sons of the Pioneers and I listen to the beautiful voice of Bob Nolan who sang so true and right on the key, and I wonder, ‘Why aren’t there more singers li ke that around today?’ There are — Marty Robbins is one of them. Of course, he’s in between the generations. And now young Larry Gatlin — maybe he doesn’t sing the same songs, but he has the same voice control and can sing just as well as anybody. And Barbara Mandrell has all the spark, spunk and personality of a Cousin Emmy or Mi nnie Pearl or any of the oldtimers had. So young people who look and say, “I wonder why Larry Gatlin and Barbara Mandrell are doing so well?” — one reason is because they’re super-talented. In your song "Thr ee Ti mes Seven" you say, “I just won’t tame, I ’m gonna be the same ti ll I ’m t hr ee times 21.” Now that y ou are almost t hr ee ti mes 21, woul d you care to make any comments summi ng up your career ? I’m just about there! (laughs) I also wrote something that was in a national magazine some time. I said that when I’m 90 years old (and) some young fellow is playing the Galaxy Theater on the planet Mars, I hope I’m the old guy sitting back there watching the door and listening to the show. That’s how much I love the business.
Our deepest thanks to Merlene and Cindy Travis for making this project possible. And to Archive Films, Wild Oak Pictures, The Country Music Foundation, Austin City Limits, and William F. Cooke Television for permission to use their material.
32
MERLE TRAVIS THE VIDEO COLLECTION / RARE PERFORMANCES 1946-1981 1. NO VACANCY
Merle Travis & His Bronco Busters and Betty Devere (Soundies, 1946) 2. NINE POUND HAMMER Merle Travis, vocal and acoustic guitar (Snader Tr anscription, 1951) 3. MUS’RAT Merle Travis, vocal and acoustic guitar (Snader Transcription, 1951) 4. I’M A NATURAL BORN GAMBLIN’ MAN Merle Travis & His Westerners: Merle Travis, electr ic Bigsby guitar and vocals; Eddie Kirk, guitar; Speedy West, steel guitar; Jack Rogers, bass; Harold Hensley, fiddle; Alex Brashear or Danny Auguire, tr umpet; Hank and Dorothy Thompson, card players. (Snader Transcription, 1951) 5. TOO MUCH SUGAR FOR A DIME Merle Travis & His Westerners. Vocal duet with Judy Hayden. Personnel same as tr ack #4. (Snader Transcription, 1951) 6. SPOONIN’ MOON Merle Travis & His Westerners. Vocal duet with Judy Hayden. Personnel same as tr ack #4 (Snader Transcription, 1951) 7. LOST JOHN Merle Travis, vocal and acoustic guitar (Snader Transcription, 1951) 8. DARK AS A DUNGEON Merle Travis, vocal and acoustic guitar (Snader Transcription, 1951) 9. PETTICOAT FEVER Merle Travis & His Westerners. Personnel same as tr ack #4). (Snader Tr anscription, 1951) 10. SWEET TEMPTATION Merle Travis & His Westerners. Personnel same as tr ack #4). (Snader Tr anscription, 1951) 11. JOHN HENRY Merle Travis, vocal and acoustic guitar (Snader Transcription, 1951) 12. I’LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS Merle Travis, acoustic guitar (Ozark Jubilee, 1960) 13. MIDNIGHT SPECIAL Merle Travis, vocal and acoustic guitar (Porter Wagoner Show, 1968) 14. CANNONBALL RAG Merle Travis, acoustic guitar (Porter Wagoner Show, 1970) 15. I AM A PILGRIM Merle Travis, vocal and acoustic guitar (Porter Wagoner Show, 1971) 16. SIXTEEN TONS Merle Travis, vocal and acoustic guitar (Austin City Limits, 1977) 17, SMOKE, SMOKE THAT CIGARETTE Merle Travis, vocal and acoustic guitar (Austin City Limits, 1977) 18. BARBECUE RAG Merle Travis and Tom Bresh, acoustic guitars (Nashville Swing, 1981) 19. I’LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS Merle Travis and Tom Bresh, acoustic guitars (Nashville Swing, 1981) 33
DISCOGRAPHY The Best Of Merle Travis Rhino R2 70993 The Merle Travis Story CMH 9018 Merle Travis / Unreleased Radio Transcriptions 1944-1949 Countr y Routes RFD CD09 Merle Travis Collection Bear Records
Photo by David Gahr 34
T HE G UITAR O F
M ERLE T RAVIS Taugh t by Marcel Dadi The guitar playing of Merle Travis has been a great influence on generations of guitarists. His playing combined blues, jazz ragtime and country music into a unique style that defined “Country Fingerstyle Guitar” and has become the standard for guitarists of yesterday and today. His playing featured an alternating bass technique with a strong m elodic sense and a sophisticated feel for complex chord voicings. In this unique video lesson Marcel Dadi teaches seven of Merle' s greatest instrumentals: FULLER ' S B LUES, CA NE B REAK B LUES , B LUE B ELLS, SATURDAY N IGHT SHUFFLE, M EM PHIS B LUES, CANNON B A LL R A G and W ALKIN ' THE STRINGS . Also featured are five performances by Merle Travis from 1951 of N INE POUND H AMMER, L OST J OH N , J OH N H ENRY, M US' RA T and TOO M UCH SUGAR FOR A D IME. All the tunes are transcribed in a 60 page tab/music booklet which is included FREE. “ My fir st k now ledge of Marcel Dadi came around 1973. Here w as a gui tarist w ho had figu red out w hat it w as all about.” Chet A tk ins -
GW VIDEO 918 $39.95
To order or to receive a free 64 page catalog, wri te: S TEFAN GROSSMAN' S GUITAR WORKSHOP
PO BOX 802, SPARTA , NJ 07871 35
