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From the Jacksonville Times -
THERE WAS MAGIC IN HIS MUSIC
By The Times-Union
,
Elvis Presley and his studio band had run through Little Sister twice, but it was not going well. Something was off. Something was missing.
Elvis stopped the recording and looked over at his guitar player. It was 2:30 in the morning.
"Hank," Elvis drawled. "Help me out of this one."
And Hank Garland did.
Vamping on a borrowed Fender Jazzmaster, he pounded on the low E-string, then bent it at the third fret -- a twangy, booming G note that spoke of the swamps, of the blues, of the rockabilly roots of this still-young thing called rock 'n' roll.
Elvis started singing: "Little sister, don't you . . ."
Then it came -- Hank Garland's magic riff over the high three strings, eight notes that gave Little Sister its pop, eight notes that guitar guru Wolf Marshall, author of The Guitars of Elvis, calls one of the greatest riffs in rock and roll: "If I put 10 riffs up there, that's one of them."
Hank Garland came up with the riff because that's what the song needed. He was a guitar-slinger -- perhaps the best in the business -- and that's what he did, adding riffs and solos and fills to hundreds of Nashville songs.
It was June 16, 1961, in the RCA studios in Nashville -- and Garland's days as a guitar-slinger were almost through.
BRUCE LIPSKY/The Times-Union
In less than three months from that session with Elvis, Hank would be in a coma, perilously near death, hospitalized after he was thrown out of his big station wagon on a Tennessee highway.
He would spend the next 43 years far from Nashville, in the constant care of his family -- the last 15 years in his brother's home in Orange Park.
And cruelly, Hank's genius -- evident as soon as he picked up a real guitar as a 6-year-old -- was gone.
After the crash, he had to struggle to re-learn guitar. It took years, and it really was a struggle. He never got close to the elite standard he once set -- though every once in a while flashes of his red-hot talent came back. Doyle Dykes, a nationally known guitarist from Jacksonville, met his longtime hero a few years ago, and swears he heard him play Moonlight in Vermont so beautifully that Dykes almost began to cry.
"It's like there's a great guitar player stuck in there," he says, "and every once in a while he sticks his head out."
Hank Garland's story is a tragic one -- spiced with whispers of more nefarious goings-on -- that's a natural for movies.
Back in the '70s, there was talk of a film on Hank called Sugarfoot Rag, starring Jerry Reed. The movie was never made, but Hank's family still has the poster.
Now it could really happen. Movie producer Rick Bieber (Flatliners, Radio Flyer, Made in America) confirmed in an e-mail that he's planning to make a movie, called Crazy, "loosely based on Hank's life."
For the first 30 years of his life, he did live a movie-worthy existence.
Before the crash, Garland was hot, blazing hot each time he picked up the guitar.
He turned heads at the Grand Ole Opry as a 15-year-old -- fast, raw, phenomenally talented, obsessed with guitar playing and with guitars themselves.
While still a teen, his speedy Sugarfoot Rag, which he wrote as a warm-up exercise for his fingers, became a big hit and gave him a nickname -- "Sugarfoot" -- that stuck with him forever.
He became part of Nashville's "A Team" of go-to studio musicians, playing with the top performers in town -- Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Roy Orbison, George Jones, Jim Reeves, Brenda Lee.
That's him with the echoing introduction on Cline's I Fall to Pieces. That's him with the blazing solo on Just Because, with Patti Page urging him on: "Go, Hank!" And that's him on guitar with the Everly Brothers on Bye Bye Love and Wake Up Little Susie.
He didn't stop at country and rock -- he threw himself into jazz, his true love. He played with jazz-minded musicians such as Chet Atkins, Floyd Cramer, Boots Randolph and others, releasing albums that stunned snobs who couldn't believe a Nashville cat could play like that.
The Gibson guitar company named one its best-known jazz guitars, the Byrdland, after friends Billy Byrd and Hank Garland, who helped design it.
Then of course there was Elvis -- Garland recorded sessions with the King, toured with him, played with him in Honolulu in Elvis' last concert before an eight-year break from performing.
For a guitar player from small-town Cowpens, S.C., it was heady stuff.
But it all came to an end with the crash on Sept. 21, 1961.
His younger brother, Billy, thinks the crash was no accident. He thinks Hank was getting too outspoken, and that some movers in Nashville wanted him out of the picture.
Billy wants the world to know to know that. But more than anything, he wants the world to know just who his brother was, before he's gone.
"There's a legend, been sittin' in Orange Park for 20 years, and no one knows," Billy drawls. "There's a time for everything. And this is time for closure for Hank."
On the top
Since his near-fatal auto accident in 1961, Hank Garland (left) has been cared for by his younger brother, Billy, (right). BRUCE LIPSKY/The Times-Union
The cover of Hank Garland's Jazz Winds From a New Direction is a classic picture of a hotshot at the top of his game. He's in the driver's seat of his topless MGA. Three big sunburst Gibson jazz guitars sit in the passenger seat, and another rests across the trunk. Hank's in a sports coat, looking up at the camera with a cocksure grin.
These days he uses a walker. He's had a number of strokes. He speaks haltingly. He's silent for long periods of time, and often dozes off on the couch.
He's 73 years old.
Back then, 45 and 50 and even 60 years ago, he was hot stuff. And cocky -- boy, was he cocky.
"Like a bantam chicken," says Billy. "He had a real quick temper."
And even though Hank is slowed now, the hotshot is still there, just under the surface.
Sitting in his brother's kitchen, munching on a sandwich assembled by his sister-in-law, Amy, Hank talks of Elvis:
"He was a very nice person to work with and work for."
But then he gets on the King's guitar playing. "He could never play that thing," Hank says, a little conspiratorial grin on his face. "I had to tune it 14 times for him one day."
Later, he reminisces about Paul Howard, an Opry performer who gave a teenage Hank his first big break. "He thought he was a musician," says Hank. "But he couldn't play."
Hank thinks that now, and he thought that almost 60 years ago. Here's Hank, describing himself at 14: "I thought I was smarter than anybody else."
And what about today's guitar players? Most of them, Hank says, are just the "metalheads" he sees on TV.
"Bunch o' nuts," he says.
And if you happen to ask him if he knew guitar legend Les Paul, he'll crack back, with a smile: "Ask Les Paul if he knows me."
Hank's self-assured attitude is not misplaced.
Elvis himself called him one of of the best players in the world. Modern jazz guitarists such as George Benson, Albert Lee, Pat Martino and Jimmy Bruno have said they were hugely influenced by his work.
"Hank is one of the reasons I play guitar," said Bruno in an e-mail. And Benson dedicated a 1992 show at the Florida Theatre to Hank.
And in 1997, Guitar Player magazine had a cover story on the "30 players who've changed the way we sound." Keeping company on that list with Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Charlie Christian?
Hank Garland, who now spends his days in a modest Orange Park house, a house with pictures on the wall of Hank with Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Maybelle Carter, Chet Atkins -- names from his bright, bright past.
Playing until his fingers bled
BRUCE LIPSKY/The Times-Union
Hank and guitars have had an understanding from the very beginning.
In Cowpens, his mother, Odessia, made him his first guitar when he was 3 or 4, out of a metal lid from a can of lard, attached to a stick with strings made out of screen wire.
When he was 6, he moved up to a $6.50 guitar his dad bought at a pawn shop, an old Encore he still has. He tried to play Wildwood Flower, just like Maybelle Carter, then ventured into increasingly more difficult tunes of his own making. The neck of the old guitar is worn out on the seventh, eighth and ninth frets, where young Hank spent hour after hour playing.
In those days, the strings of cheap guitars hovered high over the fretboard -- painful and difficult to play.
"The strings cut right across the ends of my fingers. They'd bleed," Hank says. "I'd keep on playing."
He had a trick: He'd put his hands in water, then put them to the side of the family's hot wood stove -- it built up calluses and let him play longer.
He'd play songs backward on the record player, then copy it on his guitar, note for note, as fast as he could go, learning -- or intuiting -- the geography, the mathematics, of the fretboard.
"It didn't make sense," says Billy Garland. "It sounded like something out of the devil's pit. But he knew what he was doing."
He began playing on a radio show in nearby Spartanburg, S.C., when he was 12. But he was truly discovered in a Spartanburg music store at 14, where he went to buy a string. Paul Howard of Paul Howard and the Arkansas Cotton Pickers, a Grand Ole Opry band, was passing through town and stopped at the store.
Billy says Howard was impressed.
"He said, 'Hey kid, you ever want a job, come and see me.' Hank thought that meant right now, so he went home, packed up . . ."
"I got no suitcase," said Hank.
"And went to Nashville," said Billy. "Can you believe that, at 14?"
Hank and his father, Jay, found Howard in Nashville, and talked him into letting Hank play a boogie-woogie tune at the Grand Ole Opry.
The audience loved him, and Howard invited him to join his band. He would be "The Baby Cotton Picker."
That only lasted a few weeks, though: Child-labor laws prevented him from working any more. So Hank went back to South Carolina, counting out the days until he could go back to Nashville again.
On his 16th birthday, he left Cowpens forever.
He played with the Arkansas Cotton Pickers and with Cowboy Copas for a few years, then left them to begin freelancing in the new music studios in Nashville.
While there, he recorded his signature song, Sugarfoot Rag, both as an instrumental and with lyrics sung by Red Foley. Hank had written the music as a practice tune, one designed to get his fingers flying up and down the fretboard. People loved it -- it became a huge hit and gave Hank the nickname that would stick with him for life.
Hank was still a teenager.
By his late teens and early 20s, he was one of Nashville's main guitarists. By the mid-'50s, he was touring with Eddy Arnold -- whom Hank called "The Chin," behind his back -- and playing live on his TV show, Eddy Arnold Time .
While playing with Arnold, he'd spent time in Chicago and New York, where he indulged his growing love for jazz, playing in clubs with the hottest names of that time.
The Garlands have a tape of one of those old black-and-white shows, with Eddy Arnold sitting back while baby-faced Hank picks through a mind-boggling solo, a flurry of notes, each one as perfect as the one before it.
In the '60s, John Sebastian would sing with good-natured envy about the Nashville Cats, guitar players who "play clean as country water, play wild as mountain dew."
Watching that Eddy Arnold tape, you can't help but think he had Hank in mind.
Billy Garland will show visitors in his house the log books that Hank kept so meticulously, listing all the sessions he played on. Check out the one from 1960, say, with day after day filled with sessions with the likes of Elvis Presley, Jim Reeves, Don Gibson, Eddy Arnold, George Jones and Conway Twitty.
"It was called the Sugarfoot magic," says David Ward Davis, a long-time assistant to Hank's friend, singer Bobby Helms. "Everyone wanted him. If you could get him in a session, you were all set."
Long years in the shadows
HEAR HANK GARLAND'S MUSIC
Check out these full-length songs from the legendary guitarist Hank Garland. We have five full-length songs from his Jazz Collection for you to listen to. We also have a sound clip from Elvis Presley's Little Sister which features Hank on guitar.
Hank Garland's A Foggy Day from Jazz in New York CD
Hank Garland's All the Things You Are from Jazz Wins CD.
Hank Garland's Always from Jazz Wins CD.
Hank Garland's Ed's Place from Velvet Guitar CD.
Hank Garland's Move from Jazz Wins CD.
Sound clip, Little Sister from Elvis Presley's Such A Night CD featuring Hank Garland on guitar.
In 1976, the phone rang rang in the Garlands' house.
"Hello, this is Johnny Cash," said the caller.
"Yeah, and this is Roy Rogers," said a skeptical Billy.
It turned out, though, that the caller was legitimate. It was Cash, and he wanted Hank to come up and play on his new album. So he went back to Nashville, back into the studio, and played.
It didn't work out: There was nothing from that session Cash could use. Hank simply didn't have it any more.
But there's a photo of Hank and Johnny and June Carter Cash in the studio, a bittersweet reminder of that time.
Think of it as a what-might-have-been moment, what life would have been like if it hadn't been for the crash in 1961.
Nothing was the same after that day.
What people said at the time was that, after an argument with his wife, Hank crashed his 1959 Chevy Nomad station wagon near Springfield, Tenn. He was thrown from the car as it flipped.
Billy came back to Nashville from Los Angeles, where he was living, to take care of his brother, who was in a coma for weeks afterward.
Billy says Hank was put in a sanitorium, where he had shock treatments that left him mentally scarred for life. "When my mom went to get him, he was like a hole, standing there. Black. He didn't know nothing."
Before the crash, Hank had had threats made against him. After the crash, Billy soon grew suspicious.
A farmer in a nearby cotton field told him he heard shots just before the crash, Billy says. And a trucker came to the hospital and said he saw a man in a ditch with a rifle, near where the crash took place.
Billy later found photos taken of the wrecked car in a junkyard. It had what looked like bullet holes in it, he says.
He argues that the crash was a hit on Hank.
"I think there was a group behind it," says Billy. "I can't say nothing about no names. I know who they are, of course I do, but I can't tell you."
Headstrong Hank had made enemies, his brother believes.
"Somewhere along the way, they wanted to get rid of him," Billy claims. "He was too big. He grew up in the business from the get-go and he was part of it. He was getting too powerful, too big. He was playing jazz music -- they did not like jazz music in Tennessee -- and he had publishing companies; that was another no-no."
Hank was also talking about taking musicians down to Miami to set up a recording industry there, away from Nashville.
Billy gets frustrated and angry talking about it.
"The music business is about as corrupt as anything on this planet," he says. "It's the most vicious business in the world,"
Over the years, he's tangled with Gibson Guitar Corp. over money he says is owed for helping to design the Byrdland guitar. And he's filed a suit against Warner-Chapell Music, Inc., claiming Hank is owed royalties from the popular Christmas song, Jingle Bell Rock, sung by Bobby Helms.
Before Helms died in 1997, the singer maintained that he and Hank deserved songwriting credit -- and royalties -- for the song, which they had reworked drastically in the studio.
It's a story that Helms' personal manager, David Ward Davis, later wrote about in a book on Helms called Jingle Bell Rock.
Davis says Helms, too, was suspicious about Hank's car crash. "He had no doubt about it. He was convinced about it," says David. "All the old-timers I talked to felt that way. There were things that happened, and no one would lay any blame on any particular person. But Bobby Helms always told me he thought that there was a set-up."
'Everyone's dying'
The story of Hank Garland is also the story of a family's devotion. Billy, eight years younger, leads a family that is fiercely protective and proud of the old guitar-slinger.
Lately, Hank's legacy has become even more important to the family -- Billy, his wife, Amy, and daughter Shelby.
Within the last three years, the Garlands have suffered the deaths of a grown daughter and a grown son, as well as that of Hank and Billy's mother.
Now Billy and Amy live with Hank in a '70s-era middle-class home in Orange Park, surrounded by memorabilia -- records, videos, CDs, photos -- of Hank's career.
He worries about Hank's health, which has declined after some recent strokes.
"I'm losing my family," says Billy. "Everyone's dying. Shelby's the only one I've got left."
That's why he's talking out. "People don't scare me any more," he says.
"What are they gonna do now, Dad?" says Shelby, Billy's daughter.
"They kill me now, they'd be doing me a favor," Billy jokes grimly. "I've been through so much I don't even want to live any more."
He and his family have been taking care of Hank since the early '60s, when Billy first moved to Florida to work as a subcontractor at the space center at Cape Canaveral. He took Hank with him, keeping him "hidden."
Hank had frequent seizures that required almost constant attention. He did not play guitar for years. Shelby would play Concentration with him, to help him, well, concentrate. Finally a specialist in New Orleans got Hank's seizures under control, which gave him a chance to rebound.
Billy pushed Hank to pick up the guitar again, but it was like starting from scratch.
Hank looks up at his little brother. "He taught me how to play again."
What might have been
Hank still plays some guitar, when coaxed, playing sweet jazzy chords on the forgiving nylon strings of an old guitar.
But it's far from the genius he used to show, every time he picked up the instrument.
Wolf Marshall, the author of the book on Presley's guitar players, is a prolific writer of historical and instructional books on guitars. If not for the crash, he says, Hank's career would have been "an amazing thing." .
"It's pretty rare that someone could play jazz at that level, play really effective rock 'n' roll, then play country like that. He would have made more jazz records, and since he was just at the beginning of his career, he would have been as big a legend as Wes Montgomery or Tal Farlow or even someone we look back at, like Django Reinhardt."
Billy Garland hesitates when asked where his brother's career might have gone.
"Oh, my goodness. He would have been an executive in the record business, and he would have been fair to everybody."
And of course he would have kept playing guitar, too, hours a day, better than almost anyone on the planet.
"That was his love, that was his life. It was like there was a secret to guitars," says Billy, "and he'd unlocked it."
THERE WAS MAGIC IN HIS MUSIC
By The Times-Union
,
Elvis Presley and his studio band had run through Little Sister twice, but it was not going well. Something was off. Something was missing.
Elvis stopped the recording and looked over at his guitar player. It was 2:30 in the morning.
"Hank," Elvis drawled. "Help me out of this one."
And Hank Garland did.
Vamping on a borrowed Fender Jazzmaster, he pounded on the low E-string, then bent it at the third fret -- a twangy, booming G note that spoke of the swamps, of the blues, of the rockabilly roots of this still-young thing called rock 'n' roll.
Elvis started singing: "Little sister, don't you . . ."
Then it came -- Hank Garland's magic riff over the high three strings, eight notes that gave Little Sister its pop, eight notes that guitar guru Wolf Marshall, author of The Guitars of Elvis, calls one of the greatest riffs in rock and roll: "If I put 10 riffs up there, that's one of them."
Hank Garland came up with the riff because that's what the song needed. He was a guitar-slinger -- perhaps the best in the business -- and that's what he did, adding riffs and solos and fills to hundreds of Nashville songs.
It was June 16, 1961, in the RCA studios in Nashville -- and Garland's days as a guitar-slinger were almost through.
BRUCE LIPSKY/The Times-Union
In less than three months from that session with Elvis, Hank would be in a coma, perilously near death, hospitalized after he was thrown out of his big station wagon on a Tennessee highway.
He would spend the next 43 years far from Nashville, in the constant care of his family -- the last 15 years in his brother's home in Orange Park.
And cruelly, Hank's genius -- evident as soon as he picked up a real guitar as a 6-year-old -- was gone.
After the crash, he had to struggle to re-learn guitar. It took years, and it really was a struggle. He never got close to the elite standard he once set -- though every once in a while flashes of his red-hot talent came back. Doyle Dykes, a nationally known guitarist from Jacksonville, met his longtime hero a few years ago, and swears he heard him play Moonlight in Vermont so beautifully that Dykes almost began to cry.
"It's like there's a great guitar player stuck in there," he says, "and every once in a while he sticks his head out."
Hank Garland's story is a tragic one -- spiced with whispers of more nefarious goings-on -- that's a natural for movies.
Back in the '70s, there was talk of a film on Hank called Sugarfoot Rag, starring Jerry Reed. The movie was never made, but Hank's family still has the poster.
Now it could really happen. Movie producer Rick Bieber (Flatliners, Radio Flyer, Made in America) confirmed in an e-mail that he's planning to make a movie, called Crazy, "loosely based on Hank's life."
For the first 30 years of his life, he did live a movie-worthy existence.
Before the crash, Garland was hot, blazing hot each time he picked up the guitar.
He turned heads at the Grand Ole Opry as a 15-year-old -- fast, raw, phenomenally talented, obsessed with guitar playing and with guitars themselves.
While still a teen, his speedy Sugarfoot Rag, which he wrote as a warm-up exercise for his fingers, became a big hit and gave him a nickname -- "Sugarfoot" -- that stuck with him forever.
He became part of Nashville's "A Team" of go-to studio musicians, playing with the top performers in town -- Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Roy Orbison, George Jones, Jim Reeves, Brenda Lee.
That's him with the echoing introduction on Cline's I Fall to Pieces. That's him with the blazing solo on Just Because, with Patti Page urging him on: "Go, Hank!" And that's him on guitar with the Everly Brothers on Bye Bye Love and Wake Up Little Susie.
He didn't stop at country and rock -- he threw himself into jazz, his true love. He played with jazz-minded musicians such as Chet Atkins, Floyd Cramer, Boots Randolph and others, releasing albums that stunned snobs who couldn't believe a Nashville cat could play like that.
The Gibson guitar company named one its best-known jazz guitars, the Byrdland, after friends Billy Byrd and Hank Garland, who helped design it.
Then of course there was Elvis -- Garland recorded sessions with the King, toured with him, played with him in Honolulu in Elvis' last concert before an eight-year break from performing.
For a guitar player from small-town Cowpens, S.C., it was heady stuff.
But it all came to an end with the crash on Sept. 21, 1961.
His younger brother, Billy, thinks the crash was no accident. He thinks Hank was getting too outspoken, and that some movers in Nashville wanted him out of the picture.
Billy wants the world to know to know that. But more than anything, he wants the world to know just who his brother was, before he's gone.
"There's a legend, been sittin' in Orange Park for 20 years, and no one knows," Billy drawls. "There's a time for everything. And this is time for closure for Hank."
On the top
Since his near-fatal auto accident in 1961, Hank Garland (left) has been cared for by his younger brother, Billy, (right). BRUCE LIPSKY/The Times-Union
The cover of Hank Garland's Jazz Winds From a New Direction is a classic picture of a hotshot at the top of his game. He's in the driver's seat of his topless MGA. Three big sunburst Gibson jazz guitars sit in the passenger seat, and another rests across the trunk. Hank's in a sports coat, looking up at the camera with a cocksure grin.
These days he uses a walker. He's had a number of strokes. He speaks haltingly. He's silent for long periods of time, and often dozes off on the couch.
He's 73 years old.
Back then, 45 and 50 and even 60 years ago, he was hot stuff. And cocky -- boy, was he cocky.
"Like a bantam chicken," says Billy. "He had a real quick temper."
And even though Hank is slowed now, the hotshot is still there, just under the surface.
Sitting in his brother's kitchen, munching on a sandwich assembled by his sister-in-law, Amy, Hank talks of Elvis:
"He was a very nice person to work with and work for."
But then he gets on the King's guitar playing. "He could never play that thing," Hank says, a little conspiratorial grin on his face. "I had to tune it 14 times for him one day."
Later, he reminisces about Paul Howard, an Opry performer who gave a teenage Hank his first big break. "He thought he was a musician," says Hank. "But he couldn't play."
Hank thinks that now, and he thought that almost 60 years ago. Here's Hank, describing himself at 14: "I thought I was smarter than anybody else."
And what about today's guitar players? Most of them, Hank says, are just the "metalheads" he sees on TV.
"Bunch o' nuts," he says.
And if you happen to ask him if he knew guitar legend Les Paul, he'll crack back, with a smile: "Ask Les Paul if he knows me."
Hank's self-assured attitude is not misplaced.
Elvis himself called him one of of the best players in the world. Modern jazz guitarists such as George Benson, Albert Lee, Pat Martino and Jimmy Bruno have said they were hugely influenced by his work.
"Hank is one of the reasons I play guitar," said Bruno in an e-mail. And Benson dedicated a 1992 show at the Florida Theatre to Hank.
And in 1997, Guitar Player magazine had a cover story on the "30 players who've changed the way we sound." Keeping company on that list with Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Charlie Christian?
Hank Garland, who now spends his days in a modest Orange Park house, a house with pictures on the wall of Hank with Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Maybelle Carter, Chet Atkins -- names from his bright, bright past.
Playing until his fingers bled
BRUCE LIPSKY/The Times-Union
Hank and guitars have had an understanding from the very beginning.
In Cowpens, his mother, Odessia, made him his first guitar when he was 3 or 4, out of a metal lid from a can of lard, attached to a stick with strings made out of screen wire.
When he was 6, he moved up to a $6.50 guitar his dad bought at a pawn shop, an old Encore he still has. He tried to play Wildwood Flower, just like Maybelle Carter, then ventured into increasingly more difficult tunes of his own making. The neck of the old guitar is worn out on the seventh, eighth and ninth frets, where young Hank spent hour after hour playing.
In those days, the strings of cheap guitars hovered high over the fretboard -- painful and difficult to play.
"The strings cut right across the ends of my fingers. They'd bleed," Hank says. "I'd keep on playing."
He had a trick: He'd put his hands in water, then put them to the side of the family's hot wood stove -- it built up calluses and let him play longer.
He'd play songs backward on the record player, then copy it on his guitar, note for note, as fast as he could go, learning -- or intuiting -- the geography, the mathematics, of the fretboard.
"It didn't make sense," says Billy Garland. "It sounded like something out of the devil's pit. But he knew what he was doing."
He began playing on a radio show in nearby Spartanburg, S.C., when he was 12. But he was truly discovered in a Spartanburg music store at 14, where he went to buy a string. Paul Howard of Paul Howard and the Arkansas Cotton Pickers, a Grand Ole Opry band, was passing through town and stopped at the store.
Billy says Howard was impressed.
"He said, 'Hey kid, you ever want a job, come and see me.' Hank thought that meant right now, so he went home, packed up . . ."
"I got no suitcase," said Hank.
"And went to Nashville," said Billy. "Can you believe that, at 14?"
Hank and his father, Jay, found Howard in Nashville, and talked him into letting Hank play a boogie-woogie tune at the Grand Ole Opry.
The audience loved him, and Howard invited him to join his band. He would be "The Baby Cotton Picker."
That only lasted a few weeks, though: Child-labor laws prevented him from working any more. So Hank went back to South Carolina, counting out the days until he could go back to Nashville again.
On his 16th birthday, he left Cowpens forever.
He played with the Arkansas Cotton Pickers and with Cowboy Copas for a few years, then left them to begin freelancing in the new music studios in Nashville.
While there, he recorded his signature song, Sugarfoot Rag, both as an instrumental and with lyrics sung by Red Foley. Hank had written the music as a practice tune, one designed to get his fingers flying up and down the fretboard. People loved it -- it became a huge hit and gave Hank the nickname that would stick with him for life.
Hank was still a teenager.
By his late teens and early 20s, he was one of Nashville's main guitarists. By the mid-'50s, he was touring with Eddy Arnold -- whom Hank called "The Chin," behind his back -- and playing live on his TV show, Eddy Arnold Time .
While playing with Arnold, he'd spent time in Chicago and New York, where he indulged his growing love for jazz, playing in clubs with the hottest names of that time.
The Garlands have a tape of one of those old black-and-white shows, with Eddy Arnold sitting back while baby-faced Hank picks through a mind-boggling solo, a flurry of notes, each one as perfect as the one before it.
In the '60s, John Sebastian would sing with good-natured envy about the Nashville Cats, guitar players who "play clean as country water, play wild as mountain dew."
Watching that Eddy Arnold tape, you can't help but think he had Hank in mind.
Billy Garland will show visitors in his house the log books that Hank kept so meticulously, listing all the sessions he played on. Check out the one from 1960, say, with day after day filled with sessions with the likes of Elvis Presley, Jim Reeves, Don Gibson, Eddy Arnold, George Jones and Conway Twitty.
"It was called the Sugarfoot magic," says David Ward Davis, a long-time assistant to Hank's friend, singer Bobby Helms. "Everyone wanted him. If you could get him in a session, you were all set."
Long years in the shadows
HEAR HANK GARLAND'S MUSIC
Check out these full-length songs from the legendary guitarist Hank Garland. We have five full-length songs from his Jazz Collection for you to listen to. We also have a sound clip from Elvis Presley's Little Sister which features Hank on guitar.
Hank Garland's A Foggy Day from Jazz in New York CD
Hank Garland's All the Things You Are from Jazz Wins CD.
Hank Garland's Always from Jazz Wins CD.
Hank Garland's Ed's Place from Velvet Guitar CD.
Hank Garland's Move from Jazz Wins CD.
Sound clip, Little Sister from Elvis Presley's Such A Night CD featuring Hank Garland on guitar.
In 1976, the phone rang rang in the Garlands' house.
"Hello, this is Johnny Cash," said the caller.
"Yeah, and this is Roy Rogers," said a skeptical Billy.
It turned out, though, that the caller was legitimate. It was Cash, and he wanted Hank to come up and play on his new album. So he went back to Nashville, back into the studio, and played.
It didn't work out: There was nothing from that session Cash could use. Hank simply didn't have it any more.
But there's a photo of Hank and Johnny and June Carter Cash in the studio, a bittersweet reminder of that time.
Think of it as a what-might-have-been moment, what life would have been like if it hadn't been for the crash in 1961.
Nothing was the same after that day.
What people said at the time was that, after an argument with his wife, Hank crashed his 1959 Chevy Nomad station wagon near Springfield, Tenn. He was thrown from the car as it flipped.
Billy came back to Nashville from Los Angeles, where he was living, to take care of his brother, who was in a coma for weeks afterward.
Billy says Hank was put in a sanitorium, where he had shock treatments that left him mentally scarred for life. "When my mom went to get him, he was like a hole, standing there. Black. He didn't know nothing."
Before the crash, Hank had had threats made against him. After the crash, Billy soon grew suspicious.
A farmer in a nearby cotton field told him he heard shots just before the crash, Billy says. And a trucker came to the hospital and said he saw a man in a ditch with a rifle, near where the crash took place.
Billy later found photos taken of the wrecked car in a junkyard. It had what looked like bullet holes in it, he says.
He argues that the crash was a hit on Hank.
"I think there was a group behind it," says Billy. "I can't say nothing about no names. I know who they are, of course I do, but I can't tell you."
Headstrong Hank had made enemies, his brother believes.
"Somewhere along the way, they wanted to get rid of him," Billy claims. "He was too big. He grew up in the business from the get-go and he was part of it. He was getting too powerful, too big. He was playing jazz music -- they did not like jazz music in Tennessee -- and he had publishing companies; that was another no-no."
Hank was also talking about taking musicians down to Miami to set up a recording industry there, away from Nashville.
Billy gets frustrated and angry talking about it.
"The music business is about as corrupt as anything on this planet," he says. "It's the most vicious business in the world,"
Over the years, he's tangled with Gibson Guitar Corp. over money he says is owed for helping to design the Byrdland guitar. And he's filed a suit against Warner-Chapell Music, Inc., claiming Hank is owed royalties from the popular Christmas song, Jingle Bell Rock, sung by Bobby Helms.
Before Helms died in 1997, the singer maintained that he and Hank deserved songwriting credit -- and royalties -- for the song, which they had reworked drastically in the studio.
It's a story that Helms' personal manager, David Ward Davis, later wrote about in a book on Helms called Jingle Bell Rock.
Davis says Helms, too, was suspicious about Hank's car crash. "He had no doubt about it. He was convinced about it," says David. "All the old-timers I talked to felt that way. There were things that happened, and no one would lay any blame on any particular person. But Bobby Helms always told me he thought that there was a set-up."
'Everyone's dying'
The story of Hank Garland is also the story of a family's devotion. Billy, eight years younger, leads a family that is fiercely protective and proud of the old guitar-slinger.
Lately, Hank's legacy has become even more important to the family -- Billy, his wife, Amy, and daughter Shelby.
Within the last three years, the Garlands have suffered the deaths of a grown daughter and a grown son, as well as that of Hank and Billy's mother.
Now Billy and Amy live with Hank in a '70s-era middle-class home in Orange Park, surrounded by memorabilia -- records, videos, CDs, photos -- of Hank's career.
He worries about Hank's health, which has declined after some recent strokes.
"I'm losing my family," says Billy. "Everyone's dying. Shelby's the only one I've got left."
That's why he's talking out. "People don't scare me any more," he says.
"What are they gonna do now, Dad?" says Shelby, Billy's daughter.
"They kill me now, they'd be doing me a favor," Billy jokes grimly. "I've been through so much I don't even want to live any more."
He and his family have been taking care of Hank since the early '60s, when Billy first moved to Florida to work as a subcontractor at the space center at Cape Canaveral. He took Hank with him, keeping him "hidden."
Hank had frequent seizures that required almost constant attention. He did not play guitar for years. Shelby would play Concentration with him, to help him, well, concentrate. Finally a specialist in New Orleans got Hank's seizures under control, which gave him a chance to rebound.
Billy pushed Hank to pick up the guitar again, but it was like starting from scratch.
Hank looks up at his little brother. "He taught me how to play again."
What might have been
Hank still plays some guitar, when coaxed, playing sweet jazzy chords on the forgiving nylon strings of an old guitar.
But it's far from the genius he used to show, every time he picked up the instrument.
Wolf Marshall, the author of the book on Presley's guitar players, is a prolific writer of historical and instructional books on guitars. If not for the crash, he says, Hank's career would have been "an amazing thing." .
"It's pretty rare that someone could play jazz at that level, play really effective rock 'n' roll, then play country like that. He would have made more jazz records, and since he was just at the beginning of his career, he would have been as big a legend as Wes Montgomery or Tal Farlow or even someone we look back at, like Django Reinhardt."
Billy Garland hesitates when asked where his brother's career might have gone.
"Oh, my goodness. He would have been an executive in the record business, and he would have been fair to everybody."
And of course he would have kept playing guitar, too, hours a day, better than almost anyone on the planet.
"That was his love, that was his life. It was like there was a secret to guitars," says Billy, "and he'd unlocked it."
I usually pay attention to that kinda thing, but, it's Friday night, and I got a buzz, and for some damn reason I'm listening to Quiet Riot
