This afternoon, I spent some time with a great human—Norman Hamlet! He’s the longest continuously employed steel guitar player in history. Norm played for forty-nine and a half years with Merle Haggard and the Strangers. Norm was the bandleader, drove the bus, and played pedal steel and dobro.
Norm started playing in the early 1950s with Gene Breeden in the Desert Stars. He played with HillBilly Barton, Skeets McDonald, The Farmer Boys (that’s Norm on “Flash, Crash and Thunder”), Rose Maddox, Dave Stogner, and many more.
Norm worked at Mosrite Guitars in Bakersfield for several years in the mid-1960s, before he started touring with Merle Haggard. I got some great quotes from Norm today for the Mosrite book:
“Semie put me to work shaping necks. There was a big drum sander, just constantly turning, no dust collection of any kind. You’d hold a neck blank up to this sander and take little swipes off it until you got something that felt right. I had no idea what I was doing, but Gene Moles was the quality control inspector, and he’d tell me if I was doing something wrong.”
“When we were getting ready to record the Jimmie Rodgers tribute album, I told Semie I needed a dobro to play on the recordings. Semie said, ‘I’ll whip you up one,’ and he built me this custom electric ‘MoBro’ that I used on many Haggard records. Semie had bought a bunch of dobro parts from one of the Dopyera Brothers, and he thought he had bought the dobro name. Turns out, the other Dopyera Brothers didn’t know about it, and it turned into a big problem. That was why Mosrite only made dobro instruments for a short time.”
“Semie was making so much money at that time. He was rarely at the factory. He showed up one day driving a big limousine that had a wireless mobile phone in it—in 1966! He was wearing a shiny new Italian suit. He came in the factory and grabbed a handful of guitars in the cases and loaded them in the trunk of his limousine and drove off in a hurry. After that, a bunch of employees just started stealing stuff. That was one of the big problems, why they went bankrupt. The employees thought Semie was rich, and so they just started stealing anything they could get their hands on.”
Norm is ninety now and still plays all the time with Mario Carboni, the Honky-Tonk Rebel. He still plays great!
“I’ll just keep on playing until my eyes go or until I just cam’t do it anymore.”
We went to a local diner in Oildale near his house. The restaurant had photos of various Bakersfield Sound stars on the wall. Nobody in the place knew that Norman Hamlet, genuine country music and Bakersfield Sound royalty, was sitting there at the counter, eating soup. To get to Norm’s house, I had to navigate from—what else—Merle Haggard Drive. Thanks for the visit, Norm!
See more photos and a video at Deke’s original Facebook post!
