Eddie Durham, Charlie Christian, And A Handwritten Letter From Floyd Smith

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Eddie Durham, Charlie Christian, And A Handwritten Letter From Floyd Smith

By Jas Obrecht June 4 2011 907 views No Comment Add a comment

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While honored today as the first influential electric guitarist in jazz, Charlie Christian was not the first to feature the instrument on a record. In our interview, producer John Hammond noted two others playing electric guitar before Christian: “One was Leonard Ware in New York. He was very good, but he was not in Charlie’s class. The other jazz guitar player was Floyd Smith, but he played a Hawaiian guitar.” Ware, who didn’t do much recording, used an electric guitar on several 78s cut with Sidney Bechet and His Orchestra in November 1938. Floyd Smith made his mark in jazz history on March 6, 1939, when he recorded “Floyd’s Guitar Blues” while a member of Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy. Jazz historian Leonard Feather wrote of this record, “A minor sensation, it was the trigger for the whole fusillade of new guitar styles to be issued only months later by Charlie Christian’s arrival in New York. With the advent of Christian, the guitar came of age in jazz.”

Credit where credit is due: Two other electric guitarists of note appeared on jazz and blues records before Ware, Smith, and Christian. In Chicago, young session ace George Barnes, later a mainstream jazzer, soloed on a stack of 1938 blues 78s featuring Big Bill Broonzy, Hattie Bolton, Blind John Davis, Jazz Gillum, Louis Powell, and Washboard Sam. In the pure jazz vein, Eddie Durham played electric guitar on the historic Kansas City Five and Kansas City Six recordings cut in March and September 1938. And just the year before, Durham had met and influenced both Charlie Christian and Floyd Smith.

A renowned trombonist and arranger, Durham had credits that extended back to Walter Page’s Blue Devils of the 1920s. He’d also been among the first to experiment with using an amplified guitar on jazz records. Leonard Feather wrote that Eddie Durham’s solo on Jimmie Lunceford’s “Hittin’ the Bottle,” recorded in September 1935, was “probably the first recorded example of any form of guitar amplification.” In the Eddie Durham article I co-wrote with Joel Siegel for the August 1979 Guitar Player, Durham explained that he began his experiments in 1929, while a member of Benny Moten’s Kansas City Band. “I got one of those tin pie pans and carved out my acoustic guitar’s top and put it down in there. It was the size of a breakfast plate. When you’d hit those strings, the pie pan would ring and shoot out the sound. I’d use a megaphone with it. I didn’t have that for too long, though, because I got a National steel guitar. It had a resonator in it, and it was usually played with a bar. I removed the bridge and put an acoustic-guitar type bridge on it so the action was lower. I fooled around with that for a long time, and nobody else was playing a guitar like that back then.”

Eddie Durham with a resonator-equipped guitar.

With Lunceford, Durham said, “I went back to using a wooden guitar with a resonator. I used to let Lunceford put the microphone up to the soundhole. Then later on DeArmond came out with a pickup, which I got, but they didn’t have sound amplifiers. So I’d get any kind of amp I could find and sit in the corner of the stage and run the cord to the guitar, and that was it. And if we were in an auditorium, I’d go directly into the sound system. You couldn’t play rhythm like that because it was too loud. I used to blow out the lights in a lot of places. I’d just play solo work, and I think that at the time I was the only guy playing that kind of guitar in a jazz band.”

In 1937 Durham joined Count Basie’s band. During a stop in Oklahoma City, he was approached by Charlie Christian. “Charlie was only playing a little piano then – he wasn’t playing guitar,” Durham remembered. “He wanted to know technical things, like how to use a pick a certain way. So I showed him how to sound like I did. I said, ‘Don’t ever use an up-stroke, which makes a tag-a-tag-a-tag sound. Use a downstroke – it gives a staccato sound, with no legato, and you sound like a horn.’” Durham described how Christian obtained an “old, beat-up five-dollar acoustic guitar” and began taking lessons from him in a pool hall. “I never saw a fellow learn so fast, nor have I seen anyone rise to the top so quickly. The next thing I knew, Charlie Christian was a star with the Benny Goodman band. If he were here now, nobody would be able to touch him with that style.”

At another stop during Basie’s 1937 tour, Durham encountered Floyd Smith. Durham remembered that this happened in Omaha, Nebraska. He went on to say, “Floyd wanted to play like me, but he said he didn’t have a guitar, and his mama wouldn’t buy him one. I was always being written up in the paper, and he came to me and asked me to say to his mother, ‘Mrs. Smith, this boy could be a genius on the guitar if you’d just buy him one.’ After I did that he got his first guitar. Before he left town, I made sure he tuned it up right.” Among his many accomplishments, Eddie Durham arranged Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood,” co-wrote Count Basie’s “Topsy,” and made enduring recordings with Harry James, Artie Shaw, Earl Hines, Wynonie Harris, and others. He was close friends with Lester Young, who nicknamed him “Pound Cake.” (For more on Eddie Durham, check out his family’s website at http://www.durhamjazz.com/ .) Durham was 73 at the time of our 1979 article, and he survived another six years.

As soon as that August 1979 issue of Guitar Player hit the newsstands, I received a hand-written letter from Indianapolis, postmarked 21 July 1979. The author was none other than Floyd Smith, responding to some of the things Durham had said. As soon as I read it, I called the musicians’ union in Indianapolis and got his phone number. Floyd was happy to hear from me, and six days later we did an in-depth interview about his role in jazz guitar history. A complete transcription of this interview will be the subject of my next post. Until then, here’s a scan of Floyd’s letter, in which he clarifies his background, points to his recording of “Lazy Rhythm” with the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra as another early electric guitar solo, and describes his role in getting Charlie Christian into Benny Goodman’s band. Click on the images to enlarge.

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