RIP-Eldon Shamblin
Pierre
By John Wooley World Entertainment Writer
8/6/98
Eldon Shamblin, once called "the world's greatest rhythm guitar player"
by Rolling Stone magazine, died early Wednesday morning. He was 82.
Services, under the direction of Butler-Stumpff, are set for 1 p.m.
Monday at the Sheridan Road Baptist Church.
A hugely influential western- swing, jazz and country guitarist,
Shamblin
is perhaps best-known for helping create, through both his playing and
arranging, the classic sound of the seminal western-swing band, Bob
Wills
and the Texas Playboys.
Born in Weatherford on April 24, 1916, Shamblin taught himself to play
guitar as a teen-ager, acquiring a skill that allowed him to move from
the wheat fields of his hometown to the Depression-era beer bars of
Oklahoma City's skid row.
"I got my basic training in the joint days, in 1933 and 1934," he
recalled in a 1985 World interview. "Those (were) low-life places, the
worst joints in the country. But I had such a yen for music that I
played
wherever I could."
In 1934, Shamblin signed with an Oklahoma City radio station to do a
regular 30-minute program in exchange for two meals per day. By the next
year, he'd joined Dave Edwards' Alabama Boys and moved to radio station
KVOO in Tulsa, where a Texas emigre named Bob Wills was starting to make
some noise.
"I was the first one out of the Alabama Boys to join the Wills band," he
said, "but they all gradually joined."
As Bob Wills' Texas Playboys gradually became stocked with better and
better musicians, Shamblin's fluid and innovative guitar style became a
linchpin of the Playboys' sound. Staying with the bandleader until 1959,
Shamblin co-wrote a number of songs (including, with steel-guitarist
Leon
McAuliffe, the classic instrumental "Twin Guitar Special"), arranged
such
swing standards as "San Antonio Rose" and "Faded Love," and managed the
group for Wills.
When Wills died in the early '70s, Shamblin was one of the key band
members who kept the sound and the memory of the band alive, joining up
with Bob Wills' Original Texas Playboys, a group of ex-Wills sidemen
that
recorded for the Capitol and Delta labels.
In 1975, Shamblin also began touring and recording with Merle Haggard,
an
affiliation that lasted until the mid-'90s. Even after Shamblin had long
quit the road, Haggard usually managed to persuade Eldon to climb back
on
the bandstand whenever the country superstar played a job in Tulsa.
Well-known in jazz circles, Shamblin also recorded and played with the
likes of Joe Venuti, Herb Ellis and Shelly Manne. Jazz players, in fact,
knew early on of Shamblin's work with the Playboys, and how much jazz
influence Shamblin brought to the Wills sound.
"I talked to Les Paul last year," said Don Rhodes, producer of
Shamblin's
last album, in 1996. "He told me that he drove all the way across the
country back in January of '38 just to see Eldon play. He got there, and
Charlie Christian was in the audience. He'd come to see Eldon, too."
Revered by both musicians and music scholars in his later years, and
named one of the "most important prime movers in guitar history" by
Musician magazine, Shamblin continued to appear with various ex- Texas
Playboy groups and other players until health problems curtailed his
appearances. But he was still able to pull things together when the
occasion demanded. On April 24, 1996, for instance, he made an
appearance
on KVOO radio to promote what would be his final solo album, "There'll
Be
Some Changes Made." The date marked his 80th birthday.
"The album feels good," he said at the time. "Real good . . . There's a
bunch of fine pickers on there. I guess they're all on there because
they
didn't have anything better to do."
That kind of self-effacing, can't- take-it-seriously line identified
Shamblin just as much as his peerless guitar style. Almost
paradoxically,
the greatest rhythm guitarist in the world was forever denigrating
himself and his music. Fans know how he'd mutter about the music
business
before playing a show, wondering aloud why anyone would want to make a
career of it. But fans also knew that behind the putdowns of the
business
and himself, Eldon Shamblin loved his work so much that every note he
hit
was an expression of joy, and a blessing.
"I've survived in this business. I'm fortunate," he said in an interview
at his home in 1985, as his fingers moved up and down the fretboard of
the first Fender Stratocaster guitar ever made. Given to him by Leo
Fender, the company's president, it was one of many instruments pressed
into his hands like offerings from people who knew what he could do with
six strings.
"Yeah," he said then. "I always laugh and say these guitars were given
to
me because a guy that plays music can't afford to buy one."
Shamblin was preceded in death by his mother, Susan (Brooks) Shamblin
and
father, William Bruce Shamblin.
He is survived by two daughters, Rita Shamblin Miller and Sue Lackey,
both of Tulsa; a brother, J.C. Shamblin, of Dallas; seven grandchildren
and 10 great-grandchildren.