The First Amplified Jazz Guitar Solos
How Eddie Durham, Leonard Ware, and Floyd Smith Set the Stage for Charlie Christian
While honored today as the first influential electric guitarist in jazz, Charlie Christian was not the first to feature the instrument on a jazz record. During our 1981 interview, Columbia Records producer John Hammond remembered that two other jazz musicians were playing electric guitar before Christian: “One was Leonard Ware in New York. He was very good, but he was not in Charlie’s class. The other jazz guitar player was Floyd Smith, but he played a Hawaiian guitar.” Ware, who didn’t do much recording, used an electric guitar on several 78s cut with Sidney Bechet and His Orchestra on November 16, 1938. The ever-hip "Hold Tight (Want Some Sea Food, Mama)" provides a good example.
Floyd Smith soloed on electric guitar in a jazz setting for the first time during August 1937, when he played on the Jeter-Pillars Club Plantation Orchestra’s “Lazy Rhythm”. He achieved more widespread fame with "Floyd's Guitar Blues", cut on March 6, 1939, with Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy. Jazz historian Leonard Feather wrote of this record, “A minor sensation, it was the trigger for the whole fusillade of new guitar styles to be issued only months later by Charlie Christian’s arrival in New York. With the advent of Christian, the guitar came of age in jazz.”
Credit where credit is due: Two other electric guitarists of note appeared on jazz and blues records before Ware, Smith, and Christian. In Chicago, a white teenager named George Barnes, later a mainstream jazzer, soloed on a stack of 1938 blues 78s featuring Big Bill Broonzy, Hattie Bolton, Blind John Davis, Jazz Gillum, Louis Powell, and Washboard Sam. In the pure jazz vein, Eddie Durham was likely the first to play an amplified guitar solo on a jazz 78. He exerted a direct influence on Charlie Christian and Floyd Smith, both of whom met him in 1937.
Also a renowned trombonist and arranger, Durham had credits that extended back to Walter Page’s Blue Devils of the 1920s. Leonard Feather wrote that Eddie Durham’s solo on Jimmie Lunceford's "Hittin' the Bottle", recorded in September 1935, was “probably the first recorded example of any form of guitar amplification.” Aural evidence suggests that this was likely recorded with an acoustic guitar equipped with a resonator. There is no doubt, though, that Durham used an electric guitar to solo on Count Basie and His Orchestra’s August 9, 1937, recording of "Time Out", as well as on his 1938 discs with the Kansas City Six. During this time, Durham was photographed playing a National electric guitar.
In the Eddie Durham article I co-wrote with Joel Siegel for the August 1979 issue of Guitar Player, Durham explained that he began his experiments with amplification in 1929, while a member of Benny Moten’s Kansas City Band: “I got one of those tin pie pans and carved out my acoustic guitar’s top and put it down in there. It was the size of a breakfast plate. When you’d hit those strings, the pie pan would ring and shoot out the sound. I’d use a megaphone with it. I didn’t have that for too long, though, because I got a National steel guitar. It had a resonator in it, and it was usually played with a bar. I removed the bridge and put an acoustic-guitar type bridge on it so the action was lower. I fooled around with that for a long time, and nobody else was playing a guitar like that back then.”
With Lunceford, Durham said, “I went back to using a wooden guitar with a resonator. I used to let Lunceford put the microphone up to the soundhole. Then later on DeArmond came out with a pickup, which I got, but they didn’t have sound amplifiers. So I’d get any kind of amp I could find and sit in the corner of the stage and run the cord to the guitar, and that was it. And if we were in an auditorium, I’d go directly into the sound system. You couldn’t play rhythm like that because it was too loud. I used to blow out the lights in a lot of places. I’d just play solo work, and I think that at the time I was the only guy playing that kind of guitar in a jazz band.”
In 1937 Durham joined Count Basie’s band. During a stop in Oklahoma City, he was approached by Charlie Christian. “Charlie was only playing a little piano then – he wasn’t playing guitar,” Durham remembered. “He 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 up-stroke, which makes a tag-a-tag-a-tag sound. Use a downstroke – it gives a staccato sound, with no legato, and you sound like a horn.’” Durham described how Christian obtained an “old, beat-up five-dollar acoustic guitar” and began taking lessons from him in a pool hall. “I never saw a fellow learn so fast, nor have I seen anyone rise to the top so quickly. The next thing I knew, Charlie Christian was a star with the Benny Goodman band. If he were here now, nobody would be able to touch him with that style.”
At another stop during Basie’s 1937 tour, Durham encountered Floyd Smith. Durham remembered that this happened in Omaha, Nebraska. He went on to say, “Floyd wanted to play like me, but he said he didn’t have a guitar, and his mama wouldn’t buy him one. I was always being written up in the paper, and he came to me and asked me to say to his mother, ‘Mrs. Smith, this boy could be a genius on the guitar if you’d just buy him one.’ After I did that he got his first guitar. Before he left town, I made sure he tuned it up right.” Among his many accomplishments, Eddie Durham arranged Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood,” co-wrote Count Basie’s “Topsy,” and made enduring recordings with Harry James, Artie Shaw, Earl Hines, Wynonie Harris, and others. He was close friends with Lester Young, who nicknamed him “Pound Cake.” Durham, 73 at the time of our 1979 interview, survived another six years.
Soon after the August 1979 Guitar Player hit the newsstands, I received a handwritten letter from Indianapolis. Its author was none other than Floyd Smith, responding to some of what Durham had said. As soon as I read it, I called the musicians’ union in Indianapolis and got his phone number. Floyd was happy to hear from me, and six days later we did an in-depth interview about his role in jazz guitar history. (A complete transcription of this interview will be the subject of an upcoming post.) Until then, here’s a scan of Floyd’s letter, in which he clarifies his background, points to his 1937 recording of “Lazy Rhythm” with the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra as another early electric guitar solo, and describes his role in getting Charlie Christian into Benny Goodman’s band.
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