words from it. The original demo sounds nothing like that. And we did it in that kind of rhythm and blues kind of bag, you know? That was the only old song, everything else I’ve written in the last year or so.
The cool thing about this song is that you play a little wah-wah guitar on it. Yeah, I bought a new wah-wah pedal. I got to where, on my gigs, I wouldn’t put any gizmos in-between me and the amplifier because they would always break, and I would stand there embarrassed on stage. So I quit playing with any gimmicks. I used to play wah-wah many years ago, but I kind of got tired of it. Every- body was playing wah-wah everywhere, then it kind of faded out. So, I put some wah-wah on this album, I guess out of boredom. (Laughs)
You also went back to the hometown and brought in some local Tulsa musi- cians that you knew from the old days to play on this album. Yes, I went back to see Steve Ripley, and the rest are all from Tulsa. What the deal is, we had a BBQ there on a Sunday and we invited everybody there that I used to know out that day. And, there are about two or three cuts with about 13 or 14 musicians on it. I cut a whole lot more stuff than we put on the record. There are only five tunes on there from the Tulsa sessions. Walt Richmond, Don White. I used to play guitar for Don. When I came back from California broke, Don gave me a job. He was a country singer-songwriter and he is really good. You know when country music went from strictly country to country boogie? I guess like Garth Brooks, when country started to sound more like rock and roll? Don was doing that before anybody. He went to Nashville for a while. He is up there around my age, and he’s got a couple of songs that would kill you, man. It is an independent
thing, kind of a local Tulsa thing, and no one will ever hear it.
Why has so much good music come out of Tulsa over the years? Well, it’s a good music town. It never paid anything, so the first thing these musicians did after they learned their craft was get the hell out of there. Because it was one of those ten dollars on Friday and Saturday night-all the beer you can drink things and that was the extent of the business there at the time. So, everybody went to LA in the 60’s. But there isn’t no more a ‘Tulsa sound’ than there is a ‘Cincinnati sound.’ I mean, every town has got some musicians that have done pretty good. I think that was a marketing tool, so they could figure out how to market me. ‘He’s in the Tulsa sound.’ Leon did good, David Gates of Bread did pretty good. But, a lot of the sidemen musicians there are joint players, blues players, and so on.
I got a Tulsa story for you J.J.; back in the middle 1940’s Bill Monroe had a member of his band named Sally Anne Forester. She played the accordion, be- lieve it or not, and sang and was on those first eight sides that Monroe recorded for Columbia Records. And, she was in Monroe’s band for three months at the same time as Earl Scruggs. She grew up there in Okla- homa and got the music bug by going to some Bob Wills concerts at the Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa with her grandpa in the 1930’s. So, a connection can be made between Bob Wills in Tulsa and the father of bluegrass music, Bill Mon- roe. Oh, wow. Well, you’ve done some research to come up with that, man. I just played Cain’s, and I hadn’t played there in 30 years. I hadn’t played in Tulsa in a long time. We played
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