Listen to the best of the best

[JohnDavisStringsHere]

Bobby Black has got to be in his late 80's by now born in 1934 as far as I know still playing like a god!


Cannot get link to work Marc could you help me please?

[Arcada]

Cannot get link to work Marc could you help me please?

YouTube links must be to individual videos, playlist links won't work. Your link was also to YouTube music (music.youtube.com) which is another reason it didn't work.

A link to the first video in the playlist: -

[JohnDavisStringsHere]

thank you Marc, have a listen, its really worth it,Fab.player.

[JohnDavisStringsHere]

I made a complete bollox trying to put this on here but if it paste's ok go to bottom of blurb and there are links to Bobby's work
Open in app
Sign up

Sign In



You have 2 free member-only stories left this month. Sign up for Medium and get an extra one.


Member-only story

marthature
marthature

·
Follow

7 min read
·
Nov 12, 2022

Listen


Share

BOBBY BLACK HAS BEEN PLAYING PEDAL STEEL SINCE 1948 AND YOU’VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF HIM.

Bobby Black, Pedal Steel Genius
Bobby Black (Robert L. Black, May 11, 1934 — ) is one of the world’s foremost pedal steel guitarists. He has been inducted into the California Western Swing Society Hall of Fame and the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame. He was the pedal steel player in Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, Asleep At The Wheel, and the New Riders Of The Purple Sage. He has played with Barbara Mandrell, Elvin Bishop, Tom Waits, Maria Muldaur, and numerous other acts. He has performed on television and radio programs, including A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor. At age 88, he’s survived Covid-19, and just last week played a gig with Maria Muldaur. And you’ve probably never heard of him. So let’s do the enlightenment dance, and here we go.

Bobby was born in Prescott, Arizona in 1934. His father, Robert Black, worked for Woolworth’s department store; his mother, Ruth, was a homemaker and a pianist. Bobby’s brother Larry was born in 1936. Both brothers took piano lessons.

Growing up, Bobby listened to pop and big-band music on the radio. Ear to the airwaves, he listened to Western swing — Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, and Spade Cooley, whose steel guitar player Earl “Joaquin” Murphey caught Bobby’s attention. When he heard Harry Owens and His Royal Hawaiians, he was taken with Eddie Bush’s steel. He was struck by the sound and its sliding notes and decided he wanted to learn how to play the instrument. He was hooked.

In 1947, the family moved to San Mateo, California. In 1948, on his 14th birthday, Bobby received a six-string Rickenbacker steel guitar and amplifier. In 1949, he heard Jerry Byrd’s recording, “Steelin’ The Blues.” Formerly with Grand Ole Opry star Ernest Tubb’s Texas Troubadours, Byrd at the time was America’s most visible and most influential country steel player. Bobby wrote a letter to Byrd, saying that he’d bought Byrd’s record. Byrd wrote back and gave Bobby his C6 pedal steel tuning.

(Understand that the pedal steel guitar is an ingenious or fiendish musical instrument, depending on your perspective. In 1940, someone put pedals under a lap steel guitar, creating a device that requires the musician to coordinate feet, knees, and both hands, multiple necks on the instrument, and different tunings. For a detailed history of the pedal steel, see Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedal_steel_guitar. And if you are saying to yourself “There must be an easier way to make music,” the answer is “Yes, but listen to the pedal steel. . .”)

Black put the tuning on and it started him playing by ear, copying the solos on the records he heard. Thus equipped, Bobby Black convinced his younger brother Larry to learn guitar so that they could play together as an act. He quickly began playing a short-scale Fender Dual 8 Professional, with two eight-string necks and a 22 1/2″ scale.

Got this? Bobby is 15 years old, he’s in school, he’s playing a two-necked guitar that was not even invented until he was 6, and now he’s going to go pro with his kid brother.

Of course.

So in 1950, Bobby and Larry Black were invited to join the Double H Boys, playing swing music for dances in San Jose and around Palo Alto. Bobby was 16, Larry 14. In 1951, they joined Shorty Joe Quartuccio and his Red Rock Canyon Cowboys, the house band at Tracy Gardens, a big old-fashioned dance hall where almost anyone of note in the hillbilly/Western swing field played. The brothers accompanied local amateurs like a serviceman stationed at nearby Moffett Field known as “Little Georgie Jones, the singing Marine.”

In 1952, Bobby joined Blackie Crawford and his Western Cherokees while brother Larry stayed at home. He toured with the band during the 1950s , traveling in Texas and all over the mid-west. The band, who’d backed Lefty Frizzell and Webb Pierce, relocated to Beaumont, Texas, in 1953. Bobby was 19.

Neva’s, a Beaumont, Texas club, became the Cherokees’ home base. Owner Jack Starnes had just co-founded Starday Records, and used the Cherokees as the house band on the label’s early recordings. Bobby was showcased on a Western Cherokees’ single titled “Cherokee Steel Guitar” and backed singer Arlie Duff on “You All Come,” Starday’s first national hit. He accompanied George Jones on the Starday session that kicked off Jones’ career. But now he was homesick, and his high school girl friend… so he left Texas and returned to California to get married.

The couple settled in San Mateo, and Bobby went to work for Pacific Bell; Larry married soon after and worked at Lockheed. The brothers joined fiddler Big Jim DeNoon’s band on the local “Hoffman Hayride” TV show (later renamed “California Hayride”). Hosted by Cottonseed Clark, the show was one of the biggest live shows on television in the Bay Area at that time.

The Black brothers put together a band they called the West Coast All Stars, including Jack Greenback, drummer, pedal steel player Pee Wee Whitewing, his wife Doye Whitewing on vocals, Hank Doust (fiddle), Larry Murphy (fiddle), and Steve Stefani and Jack Greenback (drums). This created an untenable situation. Both men were holding down day jobs, supporting their families, and working in two bands. The brothers were fired from the California Hayride, and the All Stars disbanded.

Rock and roll was emerging as the most successful popular music, and in 1959, steel guitar’s popularity recovered some of its former cachet with the release of Santo and Johnny’s guitar-steel pop hit “Sleepwalk.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBRCvVp ... lMusicHome

The Blacks, now both divorced, and ex-West Coast All Stars drummer Jack Greenback began writing songs and recording on a two-track Ampex in Larry’s bedroom. They shopped the tape around Los Angeles in 1960, and in early 1961, Dore Records issued several vocal singles by The Tides, and the instrumental “Gently My Love” by The Triplets.

Dolton, the Ventures’ label, issued three of the boys’ instrumentals under the name the Five Whispers from 1962 to ’64, and their eerie rendition of Lionel Hampton’s ballad “Midnight Sun” hit #1 in Bakersfield.

When they visited Nashville in 1965, Pete Drake, one of Nashville’s top pedal-steel players, got them signed to United Artists Records. Renamed by the label as U.S. 6, they blended instruments and vocals, and backed up singers in the Bay Area. But Bobby was not happy with the material the band was playing and he and his brother took the band back to playing clubs, ultimately becoming the house band at Cowtown. And now it’s 1971.

At Cowtown, Wednesday Amateur Nights offered a $50 prize. In 1971, contestants included the Lost Planet Airmen — Bill Kirchen, John Tichy, and fiddler Andy Stein. Stein played a particularly enthusiastic and drag-race winning “Orange Blossom Special.”

Andy urged Bobby to join them, to replace the departing steel player Steve Davis, alias The West Virginia Creeper. Andy gave Bobby a copy of the Commander Cody band’s first album, Lost in the Ozone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_the_Ozone, featuring singers Billy C. Farlow, Bill Kirchen, and John Tichy, pianist George “Commander Cody” Frayne, bassist Bruce Barlow, and drummer Lance Dickerson.

“At first I thought, ‘These guys, they’re dreamers’,” Bobby said. “I thought, ‘No, I don’t think I want to play with them.’ But they persisted.”

Persistence paid off and Bobby joined the band, transforming it from a bar band to a highly polished and professional troupe of musicians. Bobby entered the band, and he brought the band The Force.

“When Bobby came in, as far as I’m concerned, that made the classic lineup of the band,” said Billy C. Farlow, the Airmen’s lead singer. Vocalist John Tichy calls Black’s playing “super tight, accurate, professional, and everything perfectly in tune. Every lick, he nailed.”

“Bobby, for me, was the living link to the past,” said Bill Kirchen, lead guitar of the Lost Planet Airmen. “But he also was the most advanced player in the band. We could look all the way back and all the way forward with him. He was the guy who met Hank Williams, started playing in the ’40s on a straight (lap) steel… And on the other hand, he was the best bebop player in the band. It was just extraordinary.”

With Bobby on board, the Cody band “suddenly became a real western swing band,” said Farlow. A series of hits followed, with nonstop roadrunning, a European tour, several albums, and screaming dancing audiences everywhere from The Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin to Germany, California to New York, Ann Arbor to Alabama, and all points inbetween.

But the band began to encounter financial obstacles within the recording industry, and in 1974, Bobby left the Cody band and he and brother Larry moved to Nashville.

He played steel for Barbara Mandrell, then returned to California and joined the New Riders of the Purple Sage from 1978–1980. He played with Asleep At The Wheel from 1980 to 1981. He also played with the Moonlighters, a Commander Cody spinoff band.

And from 1949 to the present, Bobby has played continuously. He has worked with Robert Gordon, Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion, Bill Kirchen, Merle Travis and Merle Haggard, Doug Sahm and Lily Tomlin, and he’s still playing. He’s recorded at least 7 albums, and has played some notable concerts, including the famous 1972 Ann Arbor, Michigan gig with John Lennon, Stevie Wonder and Chuck Berry. He has played for President Nixon in Huntsville Alabama; With the Cody band, he’s played in Harlem opening for the Eagles and Earth, Wind, & Fire, he played Meadowlands in New Jersey, with New Riders of the Purple Sage, sharing billing with Willie Nelson and The Grateful Dead (77,000 in attendance). He’s been in three movies, 12 television shows, 5 radio shows, and 2 musical stage productions.

In 2021, Black received the Arhoolie Foundation Award celebrating America’s roots music.

When you get a chance, you might enjoy listening to his music. You’ll be in good company. Try it here: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list ... ture=share

[dessa]

Thanks for the link. MAGNIFICENT!