Very sad to wake up today to the news that the great Travis Wammack has passed away.
Travis Wammack was one of the greatest guitar players you never heard of. He was a Memphis guy, originally discovered as a child prodigy by Eddie Bond in the 1950s. Bond released Travis’s first record, a kiddie-rockabilly vocal 45, “Rock and Roll Blues,” on Scotty Moore’s Fernwood Records, and Travis’s career began.
In the early 1960s, Travis cut a really weird instrumental called “Scratchy” at Roland Janes’s Sonic Studios in Memphis, with Jerry Lee Lewis’s old drummer J. M. Van Eaton on drums. The record was made even weirder by a spoken-word break in the middle that was supposed to be spliced in and played normally, but when Roland accidentally spliced the piece of tape containing the spoken-word bit onto the musical tape backwards, everyone agreed that the backwards vocal was sufficiently weird that it might make the record unique enough to get played on the radio. This story is one of the reasons I love records from Memphis. Nothing was too weird for those guys. The record became a regional hit.
Travis then began issuing a series of demented and great instrumentals and then vocals. These records are wild and unique, and Travis’s guitar playing is some of the most unhinged ever committed to tape. When I finally met him and got to play with him, I found it incredible: He didn’t play the guitar, he ATTACKED the guitar. I’ve never seen anyone play the guitar like he did. You can hear it on those records. It was a violent assault on the instrument, like he was strangling it.
Travis eventually drifted into a Southern-rock-meets-soul career and became Little Richard’s bandleader and guitarist for twenty years. When I met him at the Ponderosa Stomp festival in 2006, he was in semi-retirement but still often playing with his family band.
His occupation (at least at this stage in his life) was one of the most unique I had ever heard of. He harvested snakeskins from rattlesnakes that he bred and raised at his house out in the country (he gave me his address; he lived on “Coondog Cemetery Road” in a small town in Alabama, an address that I can’t forget). When I asked him about his snakeskin business, he told me that he raised the snakes until it was time to harvest their skins, then he set them free in the woods outside his house and he gave them one hour to escape, just to have a “fair chance.” After one hour, he would go snake huntin’ in the woods, armed with a bow and arrow. Once the snake was discovered, he would quickly end the game with an expertly shot arrow, and harvest the skin to sell. I asked how many rattlesnakes ever successfully escaped. “Not many,” he said.
The last time I talked to Travis was more than ten years ago, when I tried to get him to come out to California for one of my Guitar Geek Festival shows. He declined, said he had no interest in traveling anymore. I always regretted not being able to showcase his incredibly unique guitar playing style and those incredibly weird instrumentals he cut back in the 1960s.
Rest in peace, Mr. Wammack. May they have bows and arrows in heaven.
