The 'Word' on Music
Guitar Music You Should Know: T-Bone Walker

by WordMan

The lovely and talented twickster asked me to contribute some music/guitar geekery to this first issue of the new-look teemings. Given the occasion, it seems logical to talk about someone who is pretty “firsty” when it comes to guitar. While Les Paul would have been an easy choice, I wanted to go for someone not quite as well-known: Aaron Thibeaux “T-Bone” Walker, a true pioneer of electric guitar.

T-Bone is important for a slew of reasons. To start with, he was the first electric blues guitarist to have broad commercial success. He was a major innovator in a new style of music called jump blues, along with Louis Jordan and a few others. Jump blues is a cool, fully-orchestrated (i.e., like a 1930s swing jazz band) music based on blues ’n’ boogie-woogie. It’s still played today — think the Brian Setzer Orchestra, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, the movie Swingers, etc. Jump blues was a critical progenitor to and influence on urban blues (and, later, rock-and-roll).

T-Bone also helped establish this new urban blues sound, with Ellington-jazzy arrangements and complex chords that make it sound far more refined and sophisticated than Delta/country blues. When he relocated to LA from Texas in the ’30s, he found a thriving African-American nightlife, which was one of the sources of urban blues. T-Bone worked regularly on that scene from the ’30s through WWII. As a sideman or bandleader, he emphasized both sound and style, with fancy suits, an orchestra on a bandstand, and all the trimmings. His showmanship set the standard for those who followed. Here’s a picture of T-Bone, resplendent in his white suit, doing a full split and playing guitar behind his back. This was 10-20 years or more before Buddy Guy, Chuck Berry, or Jimi Hendrix — the man knew how to work a nightclub crowd! And if you seek out videos of him on YouTube, you’ll find examples of him holding his guitar horizontally while he plays; that’s how he started.

His musical contributions, of course, are even more significant. For instance, he was an innovator in replacing some of the horns in these full orchestrations with guitar. You can hear this in “The Hustle Is On.” During the verses, there is a horn section playing bursts of music in between his singing, like in the first example.  Ah, but then there is a sax solo — listen to how his guitar is featured prominently, “trading licks” with the saxophone up front in the mix in the second example.

Can you hear how his guitar has stepped into the “horn section” spot at that point? And just listen whenever T-Bone plays single notes throughout the song, as when his guitar starts playing over the bass line at the beginning of “The Hustle Is On” (about 8 seconds into the first clip above). His makes his guitar sound like a combination of a clarinet, saxophone, and horn — he was clearly going after the sonic “real estate” formerly owned by the wind instruments in traditional big-band jazz and swing. Now, do you remember hearing much guitar on big band songs? Nah — there was guitar, but it was buried back in the rhythm section. But you do hear groups of horns in most big band music, right? Well, T-Bone swapped a now-amplified electric guitar into the horn section’s role, and everything changed.

His shoving guitar to the front was huge to later players who either had no money to pay for a horn section or who just wanted to take guitar to a new level. Chuck Berry is the classic example. Check out on Chuck’s song “Johnny B. Goode.” Right at the start, when he is playing what we have come to think of as “Chuck Berry licks,” he’s following in T-Bone’s footsteps, using a guitar to fill the function of the horn section.

While T-Bone influenced blues guitar in general, he is considered one of the fathers of Texas blues, yet another sub-genre. Texas blues emphasizes guitar leads, either full-scale ones played on top of the band, or a mixture of chords and little single-note lead licks. For instance, listen to Stevie Ray Vaughn play “The Sky Is Crying.” At the very start of the song, he sings a line while playing guitar chords; right after that he plays a little lead guitar lick, then goes back to singing-and-chords. That call-and-response “flow” between chords/singing and guitar licks is a very Texas blues thing. (This is very different from, say, B.B. King’s approach, in which he alternates simple leads with his singing — B.B. don’t play no chords, thank you.)

T-Bone was a master of the Texas blues approach. The best of the Texas players — including Albert King, Freddie King, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Johnny Winter, Billy Gibbons, and Stevie Ray Vaughn — cite T-Bone as a central influence and, in some cases, mentor. A huge common denominator is how they build off T-Bone’s groove/flow-based style. I would argue that you could draw a straight line from T-Bone to Pantera, the Texas “groove metal” band featuring the late Dimebag Darrell on guitar.

The last reason T-Bone is important is also one of the simplest: T-Bone flat-out rocks. Just listen to his slinky intro over the boogie bass in “The Hustle Is On” (above; the guitar starts about 8 seconds in), or the chords he hits at the end of “Strollin’ with Bone.” His command of his guitar and the use of jazzy chords on top of blues foundations is sublime. And listen to his tone — round and warm, with just enough distortion in the tone to make it sound thick and help it cut through the mix to be heard. His tone was not quite the singing, sustaining distorted lead tone that evolved in the ’60s, but for the 1940s it was cutting edge. It also had a clear influence on the work of blues, rockabilly, and early rock players. Think about Scotty Moore backing Elvis with his big Gibson jazz-box guitar (similar to what T-Bone played) — do you think Scotty listened to a little T-Bone? Check out Scotty’s rhythm lick about 4 seconds into “Hound Dog,” and then the lead about 18 seconds in — very T-Bone-y!

If you are already familiar with T-Bone Walker, I hope this overview provides some insight about how influential he was. If you haven’t heard (or heard of) T-Bone, I hope I’ve made a compelling case for why he’s worth checking out. The pebbles he threw in the guitar/blues/rock pond are still causing big ripples to this day.

---

Additional links:

• Wikipedia entry
• Great 2-CD set of T-Bone’s work
• Full version of “Strollin’ with Bone”

---

WordMan has been playing guitar for over 30 years (eek), in a variety of semi-pro (and now mid-life crisis) cover bands. Niels Bohr stated that “An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field” — in this regard, WordMan is surely holding up his end when it comes to becoming an expert in the area of guitar geekery.