Pedal steel master’s deep roots
iting the George Jones material with the band and other special guests at Armando’s in Martinez on March 17.
At 83, he’s contemplated retirement several times, but the calls keep coming for gigs and Black keeps saying yes. The caveat is that he doesn’t do rehearsals, figuring it’s too far a drive from his home in Manteca. “If I’ve ever heard a song, I can play it,” Black says.
Black not only heard Jones’ early material, he played on it. Their paths first crossed in 1951, when the teenage Black and his younger brother, the late guitarist Larry Black, landed a plum gig with the house band at San Jose’s Tracy Gardens. A soldier stationed at Moffett Field in Mountain View would come by regularly in uniform and sit in.
“We called him George the Singing Marine,” Black recalls. “We knew right away this guy is really good, that he should go to Nashville.”
Instead, Jones went back to Texas, which is where he met up again with Black, who had moved to Beaumont as a member of Blackie Crawford and his Western Cherokees. Black played on a series of recordings for a new label called Starday, including Arlie Duff ’s hit “Y’All Come” and the sessions that launched Jones’ sensational career.
An incurably curious musician, Black has taken pedal steel far beyond its usual contexts. Not to be mistaken for slide guitar, which is a technique, the pedal steel guitar is an instrument unto itself with two or three necks positioned horizontally in a box-like console. The strings are played with a metal slide (the “steel” in pedal steel). It’s a modern invention that emerged out of Hawaiian music but came into its own as a staple of Western swing in the 1930s. That’s the music that caught Black’s ear and with which he’s most closely associated.
He introduced a new generation to the inimitable pedal steel sound in the early 1970s when he joined the pioneering countryrock combo Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. Commander Cody (a.k.a. pianist George Frayne) had heard Black many times in the house band of the San Jose bar Cowtown and set out to recruit him for the Airmen.
A generation older and hailing from a different musical world, Black was reluctant, “but they talked me into it,” he recalls. “I played my first gig with them at a Nashville DJ convention, and I dressed like I always did at Cowtown: a French vest and high collar. I was really square. All the guys in the band looked like they always did — holes in their jeans, shirts inside out — but they didn’t put me down; they loved it.”
He crisscrossed the country with Commander Cody, while also touring with New Riders of the Purple Sage and Asleep at the Wheel, “my favorite band to play with,” Black notes. “They were so tight. They did a lot of ensemble stuff I used to do with my brother.”
These days he’s reaching another generation with young acts like San Jose singer-songwriter Ren Geisick, a jazz-tinged Americana artist who calls Black for all her big gigs, like this week’s Friday, Feb. 9, concert at San Jose’s Montgomery Theater, where she’s recording a live album.
“The pedal steel adds a certain color to everything,” Geisick says. “And everything Bobby plays fits perfectly.”