The connection between the ragtime blues of the hugely underrated Blind Blake and the eerie alternative country of Sparklehorse might not be too obvious at first. But there is a straight line in the unique hands of the legendary Merle Travis between the 1920’s syncopation of Blake and Mark Linkous’s scratchy disharmony.
Inspired to play the guitar in his teens after hearing Blind Blake’s ragtime stylings, as well as witnessing the thumb picking technique of Kennedy Jones that inspired bluegrass, Merle Travis embarked on a career that would in turn touch the lives of Johnny Cash, Tennessee Ernie Ford who had a hit with his ‘Sixteen Tons’ composition, Townes Van Zandt, Stevie Wonder, Bo Diddley and Dolly Parton who would all cover the song plus the aforementioned Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse who looped a scratchy 78 and covered Travis’ remarkable tale of a hard grafting coal mining life on ‘Dark As A Dungeon’ for a MOJO cover mounted CD a few years back.
Merle Travis was guided in those early days by Ike Everly (father of the exceptional Everly Brothers) and Mose Rager. Hit writing skills weren’t Travis’ only attribute, his success as a radio celebrity, film cameo and musical stylist were underpinned by his prowess on the guitar that allowed him to merge different genres and make something that was his own. Indeed, his desire to stretch the instrument led him to be involved in the creation of one of the pioneering electric guitars for Fender in the late ‘50s, a solid body rival to Gibson’s Les Paul that forced the folk traditionalists to run for cover and made 1956’s ‘The Merle Travis Guitar’ album a truly unique collection, a tour de force for the instrument and the Travis guitar playing style.
As the original sleeve proclaimed: “The importance of Merle Travis as a guitarist has been obscured by his fame as a vocalist, and as a composer of such country and western favourites as ‘Smoke, Smoke, Smoke’, ‘No Vacancy’, ‘Cincinnati Lou’ and ‘So Round, So Firm, So Fully Packed’. Actually, his technique alone makes him outstanding among guitarists on the American scene. When Merle plays, every phrase is fluent, every note is clean. Even though the music in this album sometimes sounds as though several guitars were playing at the same time, no recording tricks of any sort were used.
“Although the “Travis style” cannot be called jazz, the jazz influence is apparent in Merle’s musical ideas. For one thing, his music has a feeling borrowed from what used to be called ‘Blues playing”, a quality which made his vocal and instrumental rendition of ‘Re-Enlistment Blues’ in the film From Here To Eternity so memorable. Merle’s ideas create music that is crisp, often intricate, but never dissonant. Sometimes the music wails, but it never whimpers.”
By the time Travis recorded ‘The Merle Travis Guitar’, he had been in the marines and turned up alongside Burt Lancaster in From Here To Eternity where he played a GI bemoaning his plight, starting an acting career that would span over 30 years and see him end up alongside Clint Eastwood in The Honky Tonk Man in 1982 playing himself.
A true renaissance man, it was the guitar playing of Merle Travis that proved to be truly inspirational as was recalled by another legendary country stylist Chet Atkins who heard him on Boone County’s WLW Country Jamboree radio show many moons ago.
“He made me see the light in my early teens,” Atkins, who would later tour with Travis, remembered. “In the 1940s when he started spreading his finger picking style there was no-one comparable. I’m lucky I only heard him a few times, otherwise I would have just become a perfect copy.”
The 12 tracks on ‘The Merle Travis Guitar’ were the perfect showcase for his solid body guitar, the original release providing an intriguing contrast to his acoustic-led earlier work, eight tracks of which complete this set. Taken from the original 78s where Travis explored traditional folk songs of the hills – as the 1947 compilation album of many of these sides from the late ‘40s would be titled – these are swing-led epics in the main. Hinting at his distinctive chiming style that appeared on the 1956 album, these tracks still feature some breathtaking salvo’s along with Travis’s earthy vocal, giving an insight into what was to come less than a decade later, his easy storytelling explaining why he quickly became, via radio, such a huge star in the US.
This collection closes with two mournful gems from those early 78s, the glorious ‘Dark As A Dungeon’ that was covered by Sparklehorse and the wailing religious soul-searcher ‘I Am A Pilgrim’ that was so brilliantly covered by the Gram Parsons’ era Byrds circa ‘Sweetheart Of The Rodeo’.
