Grady Martin

Thomas Grady Martin was born on 17 January 1929 in Chapel Hill, in Marshall County, Tennessee, and grew up on the family farm. As a boy he listened to the Grand Ole Opry, at first on a radio a cousin built from a cigar box, and the harmonica of DeFord Bailey and the fiddle and singing of Roy Acuff made him want to play. In 1944, at fifteen, he left the farm to play fiddle with Big Jeff Bess, a star of WLAC radio in Nashville. Two years later he was on the Opry with the Bailes Brothers, and in February 1946 he made his first records, playing guitar behind Curly Fox and Texas Ruby. He then played twin guitars with Robert “Jabbo” Arrington in Paul Howard’s western swing band, the Arkansas Cotton Pickers, and in 1949 the two joined Little Jimmy Dickens’s new road band, the Country Boys.

That year, at Castle Studio, he played the bluesy guitar solo on Red Foley’s “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy,” which spent thirteen weeks at No. 1 on the country chart and eight weeks at No. 1 on the pop chart. Foley took him into his band, and Martin played fiddle and guitar for him for eight years. In 1951 Decca signed his own band, Grady Martin and the Slew Foot Five. Its first session, on 20 September 1951 at Castle Studio in the Tulane Hotel, produced “San Antonio Rose,” “Bully of the Town,” “Star Dust” and “Beer Barrel Polka,” and “Slewfoot Rag” followed that December. With Paul Cohen producing, the band also backed singers such as Burl Ives and Bing Crosby in 1952, and in the mid-1950s Martin, Hank Garland, Bob Moore, Tommy Jackson and Bud Isaacs appeared regularly on ABC-TV’s Ozark Jubilee. Some later records came out as Grady Martin and His Winging Strings, when he took up a twin-neck Bigsby guitar. The Slew Foot Five went on recording for Decca, with Owen Bradley producing from 1957, until 1967; its albums ran from Powerhouse Dance Party (1955) and Juke Box Jamboree (1956) through Big City Lights (1960) and Instrumentally Yours (1965) to A Touch of Country and Happy Sounds of the Slewfoot Five (both 1967). In 1964 he led and played guitar on a Sing-A-Long Orchestra album for Capitol, and in 1977 Monument issued Cowboy Classics, produced by Fred Foster and Martin, with Rex Allen narrating “Riders in the Sky.”

As Owen and Harold Bradley’s studios on Music Row and RCA’s new studio filled with country, pop and rock and roll sessions, Martin became a full-time studio musician, often leading a group of players that included Bob Moore, Harold Bradley, Hank Garland, Ray Edenton, Floyd Cramer, Hargus “Pig” Robbins and Buddy Harman, the core of what came to be called the Nashville A-Team. He was one of the few musicians to record with both Hank Williams and Elvis Presley. He played on Johnny Horton’s “Honky Tonk Man” (1956) and “The Battle of New Orleans” (1959), on Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio’s Nashville sessions of July 1956, on Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry,” on Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman” and Lefty Frizzell’s “Saginaw, Michigan” (both 1964), and on almost all of Patsy Cline’s Decca sessions from August 1961 to her last in February 1962. On “El Paso” (1959) he played the delicate Spanish-style acoustic guitar. During a Robbins session in 1960, a preamp in the mixing board at the Quonset Hut failed and turned his clean tone into a distorted fuzz; rather than wait for a repair he played the solo that way, and it became the solo on “Don’t Worry,” a hit in 1961. In January 1961 he cut a single of his own for Decca called “The Fuzz.” Five years later Keith Richards used a fuzz pedal for the same kind of sound on “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

Bluegrass bands used him too. On 23 April 1951 he played electric guitar, alongside a drummer, on Bill Monroe’s “Highway of Sorrow,” and on 14 January 1954 he played second guitar to Jimmy Martin on Monroe’s “I’m Working on a Building” and “A Voice From on High.” He played electric guitar and mandolin on Hylo Brown’s Capitol session of June 1956 and guitar on Brown’s session of May 1957, at which Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs sang with Brown. In January 1963 he played guitar, and bass on several numbers, on the Osborne Brothers’ MGM album Cuttin’ Grass Osborne Brothers Style, and that September he was the second guitarist on Jimmy Martin’s “Widow Maker.” From September 1965 to May 1967 he played guitar on Flatt & Scruggs’s Columbia sessions, among them the December 1966 sessions with Doc Watson and the February 1967 date that produced “Nashville Cats” and “Roust-a-bout,” and on 16 November 1967 he was one of three guitarists on the Osborne Brothers’ “Rocky Top.”

Martin stayed a mainstay of Nashville studios into the late 1970s. He played on Ray Price’s “For the Good Times,” Sammi Smith’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” (1971), Kris Kristofferson’s “Why Me,” Jeanne Pruett’s “Satin Sheets” and Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” recorded with Joan Baez and J. J. Cale, and produced the country-rock band Brush Arbor. In 1978 he went back on the road with Jerry Reed, and in 1979 he joined Willie Nelson’s band, appearing in Nelson’s 1980 film Honeysuckle Rose. He retired in 1994, and in 1995 he produced Nelson’s honky-tonk album Just One Love. Grady Martin died in Lewisburg, Tennessee, on 3 December 2001, aged 72, and is buried at Hopper Cemetery in Marshall County.

• 1983: Master’s Award, Nashville Entertainment Association (its first)
• 2000: “Chetty” award for instrumental achievement, presented at the Ryman Auditorium during the Chet Atkins Musician Days festival
• 2007: Musicians Hall of Fame, as one of the Nashville A-Team
• Rockabilly Hall of Fame (its 83rd inductee)
• 2015: Country Music Hall of Fame