sixstr stories

Charlie Christian was born Charles Henry Christian on this day, July 29, in 1916 in Bonham, Texas. The family moved to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma by the time Charlie turned three.

Charlie’s father, Clarence Henry Christian, played guitar and it is believed that he gave Charlie and his two older brothers their first music lessons. In 1958, novelist Ralph Ellison recalled that Charlie “and my younger brother were members of the same first grade class. I can remember no time when he was not admired for his skillful playing of stringed instruments.” Sometime in 1931, brother Edward, a pianist and bandleader, began schooling Charlie in playing Jazz and would occasionally have him sit in with his band.

There are various stories about when Charlie started playing electric guitar. One story says he was playing electric in Oklahoma City clubs in 1936. Another story was told by fellow electric Jazz guitarist Eddie Durham: In 1937, Eddie was in Oklahoma City playing with Count Basie. Charlie (who was playing piano at the time) approached Eddie and asked him for pointers on playing the electric guitar. According to Eddie, Charlie “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 upstroke, which makes a tag-a-tag-a-tag sound; use a downstroke.'”

Whatever the process was, by August of 1939, Charlie had definitely mastered the instrument. Singer/pianist Mary Lou Williams heard Charlie play and called Columbia Records talent scout and producer John Hammond in New York. John flew to Oklahoma, heard Charlie play and called bandleader and clarinetist Benny Goodman in Los Angeles and strongly recommended that he audition Charlie. John brought Charlie to LA and, on August 16, 1939, Charlie played with the Benny Goodman Quintet and passed the audition with flying colors.

The 23 month whirlwind had begun.

For starters, on August 19, the Benny Goodman Sextet played their first national radio broadcast from Detroit, Michigan. The show featured Charlie’s electric guitar solo on “Flying Home.” On October 2, Charlie made his first commercial recordings with the Sextet: “Flying Home,” “Rose Room” (his audition piece) and “Stardust.” On October 6, Charlie played with Benny at Carnegie Hall. Charlie went from earning $2.50 a night to $150.00 a week.

Historically, Charlie was not the first electric guitarist.

He was, however, the first electric guitarist who mattered.

As Scott Yanow wrote in the All Music Guide To Jazz: “Virtually every Jazz guitarist who emerged during 1940-1965 sounded like a relative of Charlie Christian.” There were and still are Jazz guitarists who call themselves Jazz guitarists solely because they can play some of Charlie’s solos. It is, I believe, very safe to say that any electric guitarist in any style of music who steps up to play a  solo owes something to Charlie Christian. Electric guitar started with him.

Charlie did his final recording on June 11, 1941. He was hospitalised in July of 1941 and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. 

Charlie Christian died in New York, NY, on March 2, 1942. He was 25 years old.

If you’ve never heard Charlie Christian, please do so soon. His playing is pure joy.

In early June, 1933, Texas-based Folk song collector John Lomax and his 18-year-old son, Alan, drove out of Dallas on a mission. They were going on “the first major trip in the United States to capture black folk music in the field.” (All quotes, unless otherwise noted, are from: The Life & Legend of Lead Belly by Charles Wolfe & Kip Lornell.)

The elder Lomax was no stranger to song collecting. In 1910, he had published the results of many years of work in the book: Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. Through subsequent research in the published and unpublished folk song collections of the Library of Congress, several Ivy League colleges and elsewhere, he found that there was “a dearth of black folk song material.”

John Lomax wanted to rectify this deficiency and came up with the idea for a new book to be called: American Ballads and Folk Songs. He envisioned that this book would “especially focus on the neglected genre of the black work song.” To collect such music, he decided to visit “sections of the South with a high percentage of blacks.” Specifically, his journey would pinpoint “labouring camps, lumber camps… and eventually, prisons and penitentiaries.”

He convinced the Macmillan Company to give him a contract and a small advance and the Library of Congress to provide research funds and a new disc-based recording machine.

Unlike the pen-and-paper way that John collected songs at the turn of the century, the technology existed in 1933 to first “capture” the songs in recordings. This became known as making “field recordings” and was something that commercial recording companies had been doing for a while. The Lomaxes started their trip with what they had: a dictaphone machine that recorded onto metal-coated cylinders and made “scratchy and squeaky sounds” at best. The state-of-the-art disc-cutting machine with it’s 12-inch annealed aluminum discs that the Library of Congress had promised did not catch up with the travelers until they reached Baton Rouge, LA in early-July.

But it was just in time.

On or about the 12th of July, the Lomaxes arrived at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, LA. After four days of listening to and recording both male and female inmates, Captain Andrew Reaux of Camp A introduced them to inmate Huddie Ledbetter on Sunday, July 16. John later wrote that “we found a Negro convict so skillful with his guitar and his strong, baritone voice that he had been made a ‘trusty’ and kept around Camp A headquarters as laundryman, so as to be near at hand to sing and play for visitors. Huddie Ledbetter…was unique in knowing a very large number of songs, all of which he sang effectively while he twanged his twelve-string guitar.”

The Lomaxes recorded Huddie, also known as Lead Belly, playing and singing eight different songs, recording “Irene,” a piece they’d never heard before, three times.

In his wonderful book, Delta Blues (2008), Ted Gioia writes: “Prisons are not supposed to play a role in the history of music.”

Good thing John and Alan Lomax didn’t know that.

OK, readers, here’s a little quiz for you.

What British, Muddy-Waters-inspired, Rock & Roll/Rhythm & Blues band had their first gig at the Marquee Club in London on this day, July 12, in 1962? Band members at the time included an Ian, a Keith, a Brian, a Dick and two Micks.

Have fun! To answer, leave a comment.