Nashville Cats by Travis D. Stimeling

Author:Travis D. Stimeling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Robbins’s interests in rock and roll also led him to pick up the saxophone, which he played onstage when “the piano wasn’t in good enough shape to really compete with the loud guitars and drums. . . .”128

Such broad musical interests undoubtedly helped him as he began to seek professional opportunities as a session musician, much as it had helped many other musicians in the Nashville A Team. Unfortunately for Robbins, though, the piano duties at most sessions were already covered, initially leaving him with demo sessions.129 But when Cramer scored a hit with “Last Date,” he serviced fewer accounts, leaving room for Robbins, who had learned Cramer’s slip-note approach. As he told Green: “Floyd Cramer had come out with ‘Last Date’ and then kind of retired from the recording scene after that . . . [,] and when he quit, I was really just about the only one around who could play in that pedal style that was so popular, and that didn’t hurt me any.”130 Robbins also pointed to the expansion of the Nashville studio scene as another factor that made space for him to work more regularly, noting that “the business was really growing, and that kind of made room for another band, because one or two bands had it more or less sewed up before. It was an exciting time for me. I couldn’t wait to get up out of bed in the morning to get at it.”131

Although Robbins could emulate the Cramer style, Green notes that Robbins “developed his own distinct style at the keyboard by featuring the melody in the left hand played against the chords in the right. Robbins calls this his ‘Maybelle Carter’ technique, because it echoes the famous guitar style pioneers in the 1920s by playing the melody on her bass strings and strumming the treble for rhythm.”132 It is particularly interesting that both Cramer and Robbins credited Carter as the source of their piano style, but that both of them developed their own interpretation of that style in their respective work. Cramer’s style seems to have focused primarily on Carter’s tendency to use hammer-ons (playing an open string and then striking the string on a fret) and pull-offs (playing a stopped string and pulling the finger away to let the open string ring), as revealed by his tendency to use approach the third of a chord from beneath (much as a guitarist might move from an open A string to a fretted B in a G major chord) and the sixth from above (much as a guitarist might play a fretted E on the D string before releasing the string in a G major chord). These hammer-ons and pull-offs are quite commonly heard in the broad string band tradition, particularly on the guitar and banjo, so Cramer’s efforts represent a rather broad interpretation of that approach.133 Robbins, on the other hand, reveals a more nuanced take on the Carter style, acknowledging that Carter played the melodies on the guitar’s bass strings, and working diligently to emulate that approach.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.