Biff Adam
Biff Adam was the drummer in Merle Haggard’s band the Strangers for four decades from 1970, and for several years he was also Haggard’s publicist and bus driver. Players knew him for the “double shuffle,” a way of playing the country shuffle with both hands rather than one.
He was born Clair Adam in Reading, Pennsylvania, in April 1936 and grew up at the Milton Hershey School in Hershey, where he played high-school football and was nicknamed “Beef” for his size. After graduating in 1954 he joined the Navy. In a Long Beach, California, nightclub he met Roger Miller and Bobby Bare and sat in with both, and while he was drumming around Long Beach his fellow musicians suggested a new name: “Biff.”
Before joining Haggard he was the session drummer on the soundtrack of Disney’s animated film The Jungle Book (1967) and worked with the Ventures, while playing six nights a week with Red Rhodes and the Detours at the Palomino Club in North Hollywood. He met Haggard there and in 1970 replaced Eddie Burris as the Strangers’ drummer. He was on the band’s live recordings at the Civic Center in Philadelphia on 14 February 1970, and the Strangers’ own album Introducing My Friends, the Strangers (1970) included an instrumental named after him, “Biff Bam Boom.”
Through the 1970s he played on Haggard’s albums and singles. On 16 September 1974, at the Columbia studio in Nashville with Ken Nelson producing, he drummed on “Kentucky Gambler,” with Johnny Gimble on fiddle and Dolly Parton singing harmony. After the 1973 album I Love Dixie Blues, Gene Krupa, one of his drumming idols, called to congratulate him. That same weekend he played drums for Bob Wills at Wills’s last show, in Fort Worth. With Haggard and the Strangers he also played the White House for President Richard Nixon and appeared in Clint Eastwood’s 1980 film Bronco Billy.
Explaining the double shuffle, Adam said that most country drummers played the shuffle with the right hand and the backbeat with the left, and he wondered how it would sound if he shuffled with both hands. Nashville players who came through the Palomino asked him to show it to them, and Willie Nelson’s drummer Paul English said of the technique, “I stole it from him.” Adam stayed on Haggard’s records into the 2000s, as late as a 2009 session at Tally Studio in Bakersfield on which he is credited on bass guitar and drums.
Biff Adam died on 7 March 2020, at the age of 83.
