Ron Tutt
Ron Tutt was a Dallas-born drummer who played behind Elvis Presley in the TCB Band from 1969 until Presley’s death in 1977, while also working as a session and touring drummer for Jerry Garcia, Neil Diamond, Billy Joel and many others. His country and roots credits include Gram Parsons’s two solo albums, Emmylou Harris’s Pieces of the Sky and Elite Hotel, and Chris Hillman’s Desert Rose.
Ronnie Tutt was born in Dallas on 12 March 1938. At sixteen he played his first paying job with a western swing band, and after graduating from North Dallas High School in 1956 he studied music at the University of North Texas until 1959. He auditioned for Presley in 1969, when the singer was forming a band for his return to live performance, and he was the drummer in the TCB Band, short for “Taking Care of Business,” from its first shows that year until Presley’s death in 1977, a run that took in the 1973 concert broadcast by satellite from Hawaii.
From the early 1970s he also recorded widely for other artists. In 1973 alone he played on Billy Joel’s Piano Man, on the only Buckingham Nicks album and on Gram Parsons’s GP, and he went on to Parsons’s Grievous Angel (1974), Joel’s Streetlife Serenade (1974) and Emmylou Harris’s Pieces of the Sky and Elite Hotel (both 1975). In 1975 he, the guitarist James Burton and the pianist Larry Muhoberac backed Johnny Cash on John R. Cash. His work with Jerry Garcia began with sessions for Garcia’s solo albums Garcia in February 1974 and Reflections that fall; from December 1974 he toured with Garcia and Merl Saunders’s Legion of Mary, and he was the Jerry Garcia Band’s drummer from the fall of 1975 to the middle of 1977, playing on its studio album Cats Under the Stars (1978) and later on Garcia’s Run for the Roses (1982).
After his Garcia years Neil Diamond asked him to become his full-time drummer, on tour and in the studio, and Tutt played on Diamond’s albums from Heartlight (1982) to Three Chord Opera (2001). His credits also include the Carpenters’ Passage (1977) and several later Carpenters albums, and Elvis Costello’s King of America (1986).
On Chris Hillman’s Desert Rose (Sugar Hill, 1984), recorded at the Peace in the Valley studio, Tutt played drums throughout, with Herb Pedersen on rhythm guitar and banjo, the steel guitarist Jay Dee Maness, the pianist Glen D. Hardin and the bassist Jerry Scheff; James Burton and Bernie Leadon played electric guitar on some tracks, and Byron Berline (fiddle) and Al Perkins (Dobro) were among the guests.
The TCB Band came back together at times in the decades after Presley’s death, and Tutt was still playing with Burton and Hardin at the European Elvis Festival in 2013. He died in Franklin, Tennessee, on 16 October 2021, at 83.
