Roy Nichols
Roy Nichols (1932–2001) was a lead guitarist whose career ran through West Coast country music from the late 1940s to the 1980s, from the Maddox Brothers and Rose and Lefty Frizzell to twenty-two years in Merle Haggard’s band, the Strangers. He played a Fender Telecaster, and Haggard credited him with starting his career and with setting the pace of the records of his best years.
He was born on 21 October 1932 in Chandler, Arizona, the eldest of seven children, and grew up in the Fresno area of California, where his family ran a camp for migrant workers. His father played upright bass. Roy began learning guitar at eleven, and three years later he had his first paying job, playing weekend dances with Curly Roberts and the Rangers.
Two weeks short of his sixteenth birthday he was hired by Fred Maddox, who had heard him on the Fresno disc jockey Barney Lee’s Saturday-morning radio program. Because the band toured out of state for weeks at a time, Fred became his legal guardian and his brother Henry his tutor. Nichols spent about eighteen months with the Maddox Brothers and Rose, playing almost every night and recording more than a hundred songs. He is listed as their lead guitarist on the Prince Albert Show of the Grand Ole Opry on 19 February 1949 and on their sessions at Radio Recorders in Hollywood from about March 1949 into 1950. At a Maddox show in Mesa, Arizona, the teenaged Buck Owens stood at the front of the stage and watched him. Back in the San Joaquin Valley, Nichols played on Smiley Maxidon’s daily live hour on KNGS in Hanford and at dances three nights a week.
About a year later he went to work for Lefty Frizzell. He played lead guitar on Frizzell’s session at Jim Beck’s studio in Dallas on 7 February 1953, produced by Don Law, and on another on 9 March, probably at the same studio. That year the teenaged Merle Haggard watched him play with Frizzell at the Rainbow Gardens in Bakersfield, asked to meet the singer, and talked Frizzell into letting him open the show. In 1954 Nichols returned to Maxidon for another year, then joined Cousin Herb Henson’s “Trading Post,” a five-day-a-week show on Bakersfield’s KERO-TV, staying with it off and on until Henson’s death in November 1963. In the same years he played the Foothill Club in Long Beach with Billy Mize and Cliff Crofford, toured and recorded with Johnny Cash, and worked with Cliffie Stone. From 1960 to 1964 he played guitar on Rose Maddox’s Capitol sessions in Hollywood, alongside Cal Maddox and, at different times, Billy Strange, Joe Maphis, Glen Campbell and the steel guitarists Norm Hamlet and Ralph Mooney.
In 1960 he joined Wynn Stewart’s band in Las Vegas, where the bass player was Merle Haggard. Haggard later told how Nichols handed him his guitar on that stage one night, and how Stewart heard him sing and hired him on the spot. Nichols played guitar on Haggard’s earliest records for Fuzzy Owen’s Tally label, among them “Sing a Sad Song,” cut at Audio Arts in Hollywood around October 1963 with Stewart and Gene Moles on the other guitars and Mooney on steel, and on Haggard’s duets with Bonnie Owens, recorded in Las Vegas around August 1964 and in Hollywood that December. Early in 1965 Nichols moved back to Bakersfield, and when Haggard formed the Strangers that year, Nichols was his first hire. The band stayed largely intact until 1987.
Through those years Nichols and the steel guitarist Norm Hamlet carried the band’s instrumental sound, though Capitol also used Hollywood session players such as Glen Campbell and James Burton on many of Haggard’s records. Nichols is listed on guitar on the May 1968 sessions that produced “Mama Tried,” and from late 1968 on guitar and harmonica, as on the April 1969 session for “California Cotton Fields” and the sessions for “Workin’ Man Blues” in May and “Okie from Muskogee” in July 1969. He played on the live albums recorded at the Civic Center in Muskogee, Oklahoma, on 10 October 1969 and at the Civic Center in Philadelphia on 14 February 1970. A live 1966 recording at the Nugget in Reno, released in 2007 as Merle Haggard at the Golden Nugget, gives him two instrumental features, “Yakety Axe” and “Sugar Foot Rag.” He also wrote nineteen published songs, one of which, “Street Singer,” was nominated for a Grammy in 1970.
His solos were often improvised, and the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt was a major influence. With James Burton he popularized the “chicken pickin’” guitar style, and he was known for a string bend of his own: he bent the string first, struck it, and then let it down, so the note fell rather than rose. Haggard named Nichols and Chet Atkins as the two most influential guitar players of the century.
Nichols left the road in March 1987, and the following year he was inducted into the Western Swing Society Hall of Fame in Sacramento. In 1983 he was among the players, with Haggard and Eldon Shamblin, on a gospel album by Rose Maddox. He died at Mercy Hospital in Bakersfield on 3 July 2001, at the age of 68.
