Musings

Christmas and holiday shopping? It’s a yearly tradition—the Deke Christmas “Grab Bag o’ Goodies!”

Eddie Daniels made a bunch of great R&B and rock ’n’ roll records in Los Angeles in the 1950s, including a really good revamp of Professor Longhair’s “Goin’ to Mardi Gras,” and others, like “Hide Go Seek” and “Whoa Whoa Baby.”

And then, there it was. It was like a mirage. Was I seeing things? A freakin’ 78 rpm copy of Harmonica Frank Floyd’s “Swamp Root” on Chess Records. In case you don’t know, this record is RARE.

Norman Hamlet is the longest continuously employed steel guitar player in history. He played for forty-nine and a half years with Merle Haggard and the Strangers.

What most people don’t know is that Brian’s got an incredible history going back to the early 1960s, when he was a young teenage guitar phenomenon in Los Angeles.

My second meetup of the day was with my friend Johnny Barnett, longtime drummer with such groups as Harold Cox and the Sooners, and the Trout’s house band.

I just interviewed Ed Sanner, the legendary electronics guy who invented such iconic guitar effect pedals as the Mosrite Fuzzrite, the Rosac Nu-Fuzz, and the Fuzz Blender.

I was digging through some boxes of 45 rpm records today and was really happy to stumble across the autograph I got from Doug Sahm just a few years ago, back in (gulp!) 1998.

“Harmonica Frank,” as he was known, is one of those mysterious and elusive characters in musical history, known primarily for his association with Sun Records in Sam Phillips’s earliest phase of his iconic Memphis record label.

Been doing some much-needed maintenance and repairs on my Scully lathe. The first (long) video details the steps they used in the 1930s/1940s for reducing vibration, a crucial element of using electric motors to cut sound into a blank lacquer disc.