Six-string legacy

Guitar hero: James Burton does his thing at the James Burton International Guitar Festival in Shreveport, La. (John Rowlands).

The halls and walls of Shreveport’s Municipal Auditorium are so saturated with music that if they ever tore the building down, the rubble would continue to sing of Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and the dozens of others who got their first taste of fame on its stage and their first sip of liquor on its back steps.

One man has outlived them all. James Burton, guitarist to the stars, was on the Auditorium stage on the last day of March, playing just as hard as he did 53 years ago, when he debuted as staff guitarist for the famous Louisiana Hayride radio show — the Grand Ole Opry of the deep south — which broadcast from the building between 1948 and 1960.

Burton, now 67, was born just down the road in Minden, La., and came to the Hayride as a 14-year-old prodigy. If he didn’t become a household name like those he backed up, it’s because he wanted nothing more than to play his guitar — let somebody else be the star and take the heat. His playing was so imaginative and so passionate from the start that he has worked continuously since that day, an iron-man streak matched by no other guitarist in the business.

Fifty years ago, he invented the much-copied lick for Susie Q, the success of which gave Louisiana singer Dale Hawkins his only taste of fame. Burton went much further than Hawkins from that session, to four decades worth of staff guitarist jobs for Ricky Nelson, Elvis Presley, Emmylou Harris, Merle Haggard and John Denver. As well, he played on so many thousands of other sessions that simply listing them would constitute a history of pop music. He played rock and roll’s first signature guitar, the Fender Telecaster, and if he wasn’t the first to play it, he was the first to explore just what a solid-body guitar could do.

On March 31 it was payback time. He was hosting the second James Burton International Guitar Festival, which generates money to buy guitars and music lessons for Louisiana kids who might otherwise have neither. The first festival bought 600 guitars; this year they think they’ll double that.

“Listen, I’m a very lucky man,” he said. “God gave me this talent that allowed me to spend my life playing music, and now I get the chance to give back, maybe start some other kid on the road that I took. It kind of completes the whole thing.” He leans back and smiles like he does when something new and beautiful jumps out of his guitar.

A life-size statue of Burton is one of two — Elvis is the other — that stand in front of the auditorium. On Burton’s, the plaque says “Play it, James.” Those are Elvis’s words. Burton was called in to lead the band for Presley’s 1968 Las Vegas comeback, and his snappy playing was a large part of the success of that now-legendary casino stand. “On the first day of rehearsal, in the middle of a song, Elvis turned to me said, ‘Play it, James,’ and I did my solo. He liked the sound of it, I guess, because he said it every time after that, basically up until the day he died.”  

For a man who spent time with some legendary substance abusers, Burton stayed clean and healthy and doesn’t like to gossip about those who didn’t. “To me, Elvis was just a great entertainer. People don’t really understand just how fine a musician he was. That’s what I like to remember, because that was my experience of him. As for the rest of it, well …”

Guitarists Dickie Betts (left) and Lee Roy Parnell, two of the many master guitar players at the festival. (John Rowlands).

Burton’s legend is a magnet that pulls some of the finest guitarists in the world to Shreveport every year. These guitar whizzes are customarily a cocky lot, but when Burton enters the room, they step back and quiet down. To most of the world, Elvis was king, but for the musicians who joined Burton on stage on the March 31 show — Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers Band, master slide guitarist Lee Roy Parnell, acoustic sensations Monte Montgomery and Muriel Anderson — James Burton is the real royalty, the man whose six-string legacy is as important as Presley’s singing.

“He’s a true original,” said Parnell, talking backstage while people shook his hand, whacked his back, and thanked him for his work. “I don’t think anybody in this building would be playing exactly the way they do if James hadn’t done it first. He was one of the first, and I’d do just about anything for him.”

Pretty much every picker in the place was saying the same thing: When James calls, they drop what they’re doing and haul their fingers to Shreveport. He has been a close friend to many, a mentor to many more, an example to all of them of a guitar player who kept his humility and his sanity, and always knew his proper place.

“It’s not about playing loud and standing out,” Burton says. “It’s about getting inside the music and imagining your part in the overall sound. Finding out how you can make this thing better without grabbing all the attention. You have to find your spot and stay there.”

Stay there, that is, until a man like Presley tells you to step into the light. But even when Burton did, it was always with a certain cool, smiling assurance — no grandstanding, no heroic gestures, just the solid, gutsy playing that still has him touring regularly through Europe and Asia with his TCB Band (that’s “Takin’ Care of Business”), which does an Elvis show without Elvis in places where Presley is as popular now as he was when he was alive.

“The travelling gets harder all the time,” he says. “I’m not getting any younger, but every time I start to play, all of the hassle just disappears. Nothing else brings me that feeling. It’s hard to stop.” So, when others might retire, he still hauls his axe from airport to airport. As long as the fingers can do the job, he’ll play.

Paul McGrath is a Toronto writer and documentary-maker.

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