Jimmy Bryant - Biography
Jimmy Bryant could be considered the godfather of postwar West Coast country guitar. His lightning-fast electric picking set the standard for virtually every hillbilly axeman in his wake; he is generally considered the Los Angeles equivalent of Nashville hotshot and “A-Team” session star Hank Garland — like Bryant, a legendarily knotty and difficult, albeit gifted, individual.
Beyond his virtuosity, Bryant was also a trend-setter in his choice of equipment: He became the first LA guitarist to use the Broadcaster — later known as the Telecaster, Leo Fender’s revolutionary solid-body electric. Almost every LA country performer of note, including Wynn Stewart, Merle Haggard, and Buck Owens, would later employ the brittle, bright “Tele” sound, which set Southern California country apart from the sweetened, processed “Nashville Sound.”
Bryant was a top studio sideman who backed performers as varied as Bing Crosby, Ella Mae Morse, and Spike Jones, as well as the top LA hillbilly performers of the late ‘40s and ‘50s. But he remains best-known today for an astonishing series of hot, freewheeling Capitol Records instrumentals on which he was paired with a brilliant pedal steel guitarist, Speedy West, who matched him step-for-step. Many a picker has imitated the West-Bryant recordings, but they have never been equaled, and they still manage to sound futuristic to this day.
Sadly, Bryant’s heyday spanned little more than half a decade. By the late ‘50s, the hard-drinking, arrogant guitarist had managed to snarl his way out of a job in the house band for LA TV’s most popular country show, and out of a Capitol contract as well. He displayed his brilliance haphazardly on a series of mild-selling albums for Imperial Records during the ‘60s, and staged a one-album reunion with West in the mid-‘70s. But, after he moved to Nashville, his intransigence made him an unpopular figure among session players, and his career was in deep eclipse at his death in 1980.
Bryant was born Ivey J. Bryant, Jr., in rural Pavo, Georgia, on March 5, 1925. He was the oldest of his sharecropping family’s 12 children. His first instrument was the fiddle; he was taught by his father, who would beat him if he didn’t practice. The money Ivey, Jr. — later known as “Junior” and “Buddy” — made playing on the streets supplemented the family’s farming income. Life was harsh, and Bryant ran away from home; on one jaunt, he backed a teenage Hank Williams in Florida. He finally escaped in 1943 by joining the wartime Army.
Wounded in 1945, Bryant recuperated in a Washington, DC military hospital. There, he took up the guitar, acquiring an inexpensive Stella model through the Red Cross. His initial role model was the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. (The Gypsy guitarist’s most famous sides featured a fiddler, Stephane Grappelli, who quite apparently influenced Bryant’s very adept recorded work on the instrument, as did Bryant’s friend, the great jazz violinist Stuff Smith.) Bryant played guitar and piano in the DC jazz clubs, under the name Buddy Bryant.
After taking a bride and a brief sojourn in Georgia, Bryant moved to California. He got work behind singer Eddie Dean and played small roles in Western films (later backing Roy Rogers for a spell). He also began to play country bars in the rundown part of Los Angeles’ Pico Boulevard. One night in 1947, Bryant dropped by Murphy’s Bar on Pico and spotted a steel guitarist who impressed him. He invited Wesley “Speedy” West down to the nearby Fargo Club to catch his set. West later told historian Rich Kienzle, “I couldn’t believe what I heard.”
Missouri-born West proved to be a ticket to the big time for Bryant, who quickly became his fast friend. The steel player succeeded Joaquin Murphy as the guitarist in Spade Cooley’s popular Western swing band. At around that time, he got instrument inventor Paul Bigsby to build a three-necked pedal steel guitar for him; he thus became the first country pedal steel player anywhere. His taste in equipment was as forward-looking as Bryant’s: He was among the first to use the high-powered amplifiers manufactured by Leo Fender’s Fullerton, California plant.
West’s virtuosity on the instrument attracted the attention of local radio host and Capitol A&R man Cliffie Stone, who enlisted West for the house band of his radio show “Dinner Bell Round-Up,” and then his new weekly TV show “Home Town Jamboree,” which became an important showcase for local performers Tennessee Ernie Ford and Molly Bee.
In 1950, West suggested Bryant as the replacement for the departing “Jamboree” guitarist Charlie Aldrich. With Bryant now rechristened “Jimmy,” the two musicians were soon featured on a special segment of the program, “the Flaming Guitars,” ripping out high-velocity instrumentals while framed on a set that simulated a conflagration. Thanks to Stone, the duo found work at Capitol; their breakthrough came on the Tennessee Ernie Ford-Kay Starr duet “I’ll Never Be Free,” which reached No. 3 on the pop charts and No. 2 on the “hillbilly” rolls in 1950.
That hit spurred Capitol to offer West a recording contract. Bryant (who would only be signed later) joined West on his first solo sessions on Jan. 18 and Feb. 8, 1951, which produced the instrumentals “Railroadin'” and “Stainless Steel.” These tracks would set the style for the many performances the duo would cut for the label over the next five-and-a-half years.
The formula for the pair’s records was fairly fundamental: Bryant traded bop-influenced, hard-toned, high-speed licks with West, whose glissando-filled, note-bending attack was as extravagant and outré as that of Alvino Rey, who was frequently heard on the Capitol recordings of musical spaceman Esquivel. There were some conventional country two-steps in the Bryant-West repertoire, but they also played polkas, blues, shuffles, and unclassifiable novelties like the bouncy and dissonant “Serenade to a Frog,” on which — Sonic Youth fans, take note -- both men soloed on deliberately untuned strings.
The sheer virtuosity of these recordings is enough to send most guitarists racing back to the woodshed. Originals like “Stratosphere Boogie” (performed by Bryant on an unusual custom-made twin-necked guitar), on which West’s pedal acrobatics bash up against Bryant’s light-speed lickology, spin your head like a gyroscope.
Among the most amazing numbers in the duo’s repertoire was “Lover.” Guitarist and technological wizard Les Paul had cut a hit version for Capitol in 1948, using unprecedented overdubbing and variable tape speeds to achieve dizzying effects. West and Bryant’s impertinent 1952 cover achieved the same breakneck pace in real time. The label, afraid of aggravating their hitmaker Paul, refused to issue their recording, which sat in the vaults until the late ‘90s.
Incredibly, not one of these astounding singles — many of which were collected on the lone Bryant-West album 2 Guitars Country Style (1954), West’s Steel Guitar (1960), and Bryant’s Country Cabin Jazz (1960)-- was a chart hit. But they attained a good deal of popularity among disc jockeys nonetheless. As Cliffie Stone explained to writer Kienzle, “[T]hey were hot instrumentals, there was no vocal, and a lot of the stations used them for themes, for opening a radio show, before the news, after the news. So [their records] used to get a lot of exposure. And there was no real [guitar] team like that.”
Bryant’s mulishness about what he would and would not play, his explosive temper, and his escalating drinking finally got him dropped from “Hometown Jamboree” in 1955. The following year, Capitol chose not to renew his contract, due mainly to friction between the guitarist and Ken Nelson, head of the label’s country division and its principal producer. The bad blood remained: Bryant refused to pose for the cover of the compilation Country Cabin Jazz (a model, shot from behind, was used), and, when West begged Nelson to use Bryant on his 1962 album Guitar Spectacular, the producer refused, and hired his more laid-back Jamboree replacement Roy Lanham instead.
Adrift for a time, Bryant divorced, remarried, jammed in clubs, and played on sessions for the Monkees and Mrs. Miller, the tone-deaf housewife who cut a handful of novelty hits. However, in 1965, Imperial Records producer and A&R man Scotty Turner met the guitarist at the North Hollywood country hangout the Palomino and brought him to the label.
Bryant made six instrumental albums, including an instructional LP, for Imperial. They ran the gamut from slick country to rock ‘n’ roll in a Ventures mode. One set, Wingin’ It With Norval and Ivy (1967), bizarrely paired Bryant with producer Turner (sitting in for pedal steel player Red Rhodes, who exited in a contract dispute), who played his solos through a “talk box,” a primitive version of the vocoder (the device used on Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do”). Most of Bryant’s finest Imperial LP, The Fastest Guitar in the Country (1967), can be found on the 2003 anthology Frettin’ Fingers; backed by a first-call band that included jazz guitarist Barney Kessel, drummer Shelley Manne, and saxophonist Jim Horn, the guitarist showed off his jazz chops in full. The set bears comparison to Hank Garland’s equally virtuosic Jazz Winds From a New Direction (1960); fittingly, Bryant’s LP contained a souped-up cover of Garland’s signature “Sugarfoot Rag.”
Bryant remained without a recording contract for the remainder of his life. Still, he popped up here and there: He played on Buck Owens’ 1968 hit “How Long Will My Baby Be Gone” (on Capitol, surprisingly), and wrote Waylon Jennings’ massive hit of the same year, “The Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line.”
Married for a third time, Bryant ran a Las Vegas recording studio for several years. In 1975, Pete Drake, the reigning Nashville pedal steel session man and a top producer, brought Bryant back together with Speedy West, who had taken a break from music for many years to work for Leo Fender in Oklahoma; when Bryant showed up for their recording session with a hollow-body Gibson guitar, West sensibly talked him into using a Telecaster that was sitting in the studio. Sadly, the session went unreleased until 1900, when independent Step One Records issued it, after the deaths of both Drake and Bryant, as For the Last Time.
Bryant moved to Nashville in late 1975. He quickly clashed with the town’s session community, which he found insular and uncreative, and he turned down most of the studio work he was offered, believing, rightly or wrongly, that he would not be able to play the way he wanted to on the dates.
In 1978, Bryant told his old partner West that he thought he was dying. Within weeks, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. In 1979, he made an appearance at an emotional benefit held on his behalf at the Palomino. He moved from Nashville back to his home state of Georgia, where his sister (and biographer) Lorene, a registered nurse, became his caretaker. He died on Sept. 22, 1980, at the age of 55.
Bryant left behind some of the most dynamic and exciting instrumental performances in country music. He was inarguably a pathfinder in modern country, and vestiges of his highly original and vital style can be heard today in the work of virtually and any country guitarist who flashes a hot Telecaster.