Grady Martin: rockabilly pioneer and doyen of Nashville guitar-pickers

The most insanely wonderful six seconds of guitar playing I know is the intro to Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s 1956 rockabilly classic,“Train Kept A Rollin’”.

For many years it was accepted that the musician responsible for this blast of fuzz-toned brilliance was the band’s lead guitarist, Paul Burlison – that was certainly what he claimed. Grady Martin, key member of the so-called A-team of studio musicians used by Owen Bradley at his Quonset Hut studio in Nashville, always maintained a dignified silence on the subject – but he was the genius responsible for that exhilarating swoop from spitting double-stops on the top strings down to the first appearance of fuzz-tone on the low E string.  

                                                  

Burlison - the chap doing the miming in the above video - was by no means a bad guitarist but the difference between his contributions on other Johnny Burnette records and the sublime work of Grady Martin on tracks like “Sweet Love On My Mind” and "Honey Hush” is almost embarrassingly evident. Just listen to Burlison on the New York-recorded "Tear It Up" and it's screamingly obvious that it's a different guitar picker using an entirely different make of guitar. Martin plays with the precision of a nuclear clock and the attack of a SWAT team and his tone is big and fat. Besides, Burlison could never recreate the sound of those realy rockabilly trailblazers – Martin went on to do it again and again, to order, for other artists. For instance, here he is - in great form - on Jimmy Lloyd's wonderful "Where the Rio De Rosa Flows":

I’d always loved rockabilly, but it was only in the mid-‘70s when Decca released two compilation LPs, Rare Rockabilly Vols. 1 and 2 that I realized just how much I loved it (all the tracks on those LPs are now available on various volumes of the That’ll Flat Git It series on Bear Family Records.) That realization came when I first listened to Don Woody’s “You’re Barking Up The Wrong Tree”. I knew I’d heard that metronomically precise machine-gun guitar somewhere before, but assumed it was a style that had been copied from the early Johnny Burnette stuff: I didn't realise it was the same picker. 

A few years ago this definitive article revealed to me that Grady Martin had not only leant his stupendously honed technique to Don Woody’s tiny but distinct oeuvre, but had also been responsible for bringing drive, sparkle and humour to many of the records on my all-time Top One Hundred, including Brenda Lee’s “Bigelow 6200”, Johnny Horton’s “I’m Comin’ Home”, Buddy Holly’s “Rock Around With Ollie Vee” and Roy Orbison’s "Oh Pretty Woman" (yes, that riff), as well as the sublime acoustic guitar on Marty Robbins’ “El Paso”.

Sheer kismet was at work in 1961 when Marty Robbins recorded his last Top 10 hit, "Don't Worry". An electrical fault in the recording equipment made Grady Martin's guitar sound weird, and Robbins decided to keep the effect:

The weird thing about all this is that Martin reportedly despised rockabilly. His own recordings with his band The Slew-Foot Five are hard to take unless you’re a hardened fan of early MOR Country. Maybe we should thank capitalism for the fact that Martin, in order to make a living, was forced to work in a genre that didn’t interest him, but to which he made a towering contribution.

A few years back  I was browsing in HMV when a strange thing happened – I needed to leave and get home, but something stopped me walking away from the rockabilly section (don’t sneer – I had just spent an hour in Classical). I stood and stared at the CDs on offer for about five minutes, realizing that something must have snagged my subconscious. And then it came into focus: Roughneck Blues, 1949-1956, a compilation of tracks featuring Grady Martin. Talk about discovering footsteps in the sand. Yes, I bought it, and, yes, when I got home I played it first, ahead of the three classical CDs I’d already purchased. Bliss! Utter bliss!

Grady Martin died in 2001, at the age of 71, and there’s a ridiculously sentimental part of me that hopes he’s up there still playing with the Nashville A-team, backing Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Johnny Burnette, and all the other greats to whose work he added such lustre when he was with us. 

Thanks, Grady.