Hargus “Pig” Robbins

He was born Hargus Melvin Robbins in Rhea County, Tennessee, on 18 January 1938. He lost his sight in an accident at three, and from the age of seven he studied classical piano at the Tennessee School for the Blind in Nashville, while working out his own style from the pianists he heard on the radio and on records, among them Owen Bradley, Ray Charles, Floyd Cramer and Marvin Hughes. The nickname came from a supervisor at the school, who caught him slipping in by the fire escape to play when he was not supposed to and coming out as dirty as a pig.

After playing in Nashville clubs he got his start in the studios in 1959 with George Jones’s “White Lightning,” which went to No. 1. His calls multiplied as Floyd Cramer spent more of his time touring, and over the following decades Robbins often played hundreds of sessions a year, on hits by Patsy Cline (“I Fall to Pieces,” 1961), Loretta Lynn, Connie Smith, the Statler Brothers and many others. His introductions to Charlie Rich’s “Behind Closed Doors” (1973) and Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” (1977) are among his best-known parts, and he played on Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors (1971). His work on Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde (1966), including the piano on “Pledging My Time,” brought him calls from folk, rock and pop singers as well, from Cliff Richard to Leon Russell.

He was a regular on the Osborne Brothers’ Decca sessions. Producer Harry Silverstein used him at Columbia’s Nashville studio in October and November 1965, on dates that produced “Up This Hill and Down” and “Big Spike Hammer,” and then at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet from 1967 to 1974, where on 16 November 1967 he played on “Rocky Top” with Ray Edenton, Grady Martin and the steel guitarist Hal Rugg. He was on the Osbornes’ “How Great Thou Art” and “Son of a Sawmill Man” (1968), “Georgia Piney Woods” and “Tennessee Stud” (1970), and “Eight More Miles to Louisville,” “Fireball Mail” and “Midnight Flyer” (1971–72). With Owen Bradley producing, he also played on Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” recorded at Bradley’s Barn on 1 October 1969.

Between sessions he made records of his own, albums for the Chart and Time labels in the 1960s and three for Elektra in the late 1970s: Country Instrumentalist of the Year (1977), which won a Grammy, Pig in a Poke (1978) and Unbreakable Hearts (1979). The CMA named him Instrumentalist of the Year in 1976 and again in 2000. He kept working in the studios into his eighties, with Alan Jackson, Marty Stuart, Sturgill Simpson and Miranda Lambert, on whose 2016 album The Weight of These Wings he played. He was inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame with the A-Team and into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2012, and he died on 30 January 2022, aged eighty-four.