Henry Strzelecki

Henry Pershing Strzelecki was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on 8 August 1939. In the 1950s he began recording with the singer and songwriter Baker Knight on Decca, and late in the decade he toured the South with the Four Flickers, who in 1959 made the first recording of his novelty song “Long Tall Texan.” Jerry Woodard, Murry Kellum, the Beach Boys, the Kingsmen and Lyle Lovett recorded it later, and Charlie Rich, Johnny Winter, Mundo Earwood and David Wills also recorded songs of his.

In the early 1960s he worked with the guitarist Hank Garland, and then Chet Atkins took him on as both a touring sideman and a session player. From the 1960s on he played bass on records by Eddy Arnold, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn and Willie Nelson, and beyond country on discs by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Gordon Lightfoot and Carl Perkins.

Several of his sessions were with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs in Columbia’s Studio A in Nashville, sharing the bass with Bob Moore and Norbert Putnam on Nashville Airplane (1968), which included Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” and playing bass on Final Fling (1969), with Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country,” “One More Night” and “Maggie’s Farm” and Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line.” In 1980 he played bass on Hazel Dickens’s Rounder album Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People, with Ray Edenton, Buddy Spicher, Lloyd Green and Hargus “Pig” Robbins, on songs such as “Out Among the Stars.”

On 22 December 2014 he was struck by a car while walking near his home in Nashville, and he died of his injuries on 30 December, at the age of seventy-five.