yourself? I guess I was exposed to music before I was ever born. My Daddy, since he was a teenager, played fiddle. He played old time fiddle which is a genre, is that how you say that? Not to be confused with bluegrass.
Right, it’s a different thing. Old-timey music they call it. Yeah, it’s old-timey music, it’s sort of a folk thing. Actually the tunes he learned, he learned them from other old time fiddlers and they learned ‘em from other old time fiddlers and probably a lot of those songs came over from the old country, from Europe, you know, from England, Ireland, whatever, ain’t no tellin’…
Yeah, a lot of it came over from Ire- land. It was almost an insult to my Daddy to be re- ferred to as a bluegrass musician, because, it’s funny, my dad had his own way of doing things and thinking about things and he de- fined that, it had all them high, lonesome vo- cals. The Bill Munroe vocals, you know, where you sing up high. He didn’t like that kind of singing, he didn’t think that was manly. (Buffalo Laughs) He thought a man ought to sing down low, you know. So he did- n’t want to be involved with bluegrass music. So anyway, these old tunes and I used to hear him play, he and his cousins, the Tindals, they used to play schoolhouses and there were no bars and nightclubs in that part of the country. Most of Alabama was dry back then, probably still is, but there was no night- clubs or anything like that so he’d play schools and house parties and cake walks, square dances and fund raisers and all kind of stuff. They’d always pass the hat around and you know, if they got a quarter for a gallon of gas to get home on, they felt like they had a good night. At least it didn’t cost ‘em to play
it so I grew up hearing this kind of stuff and when I was about 14 I started playing. he had an big old Gibson,- I mean an old, old Gibson guitar laying around and I’ve still got that old guitar- but what I remember was the way it smelled back then. I thought, “Now that’s the way music smells.” It’s funny, them old tar- nished, black diamond strings on it, they just had a smell to ‘em.
Yeah, you’re right. I remember that. And so he showed me a few chords on the guitar. He could play some guitar as well as fiddle and most of the tunes he played didn’t have more than three chords anyway so I soon mastered those three chords, could play along in any tunes he knew and within six months, I knew more guitar than he did and I got exposed to Chet Atkins guitar playing and then there was the Ventures and the first time I heard that twanger bar on a Ventures record I think I had a crop circle formed in my pants. (Both laugh loudly.) Yeah, I mean, that was the most wonderful sound I’d ever heard. I heard “Walk Don’t Run,” I heard that twanger bar…
Oh yeah, oh yeah, that was something new, boy. So I kinda moved on past old time fiddle fa- vorites about that time. And there was nowhere to play and nobody to play with and the only other person I knew about that time that even owned an electric guitar was a schoolmate of mine that was about two years older and he lived in the county adjoining our county. He was the only person I knew that owned an electric guitar. In fact, I used to just drive to his house just to look at it before I learned to play it, you know. I just felt, “God, that’s a wonderful thing right there.”
Do you remember what kind he had? He had a Fender. The first Fender guitar I
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