Saturday Night Guitar Madness

Hank Garland Visits Eddy Arnold

Rare stuff, the video at least, but Hank Garland's pickin' is cooked just right and seasoned just right. Had his first hit after he composed "Sugarfoot Rag" at the tender age of 19 (which Aristocrats regulars know as the same number as the percentage of Americans who approve of George W. Bush).

Like many guitar pickers, Hank quit school at age 16 to seriously pursue music as a career but, unlike most, he continued to be successful.

You probably know him best from the guitar work on Bobby Helms' "Jingle Bell Rock," and - if you're like me - you probably thought that was just the way guitars sounded because you heard stuff like it all time. Trouble with that generalization is that most of the time you heard a guitar sound like that, it was just Hank Garland doing another gig. He backed Roy Orbison, the Everly Brothers, Brenda Lee, Hank Williams, Elvis, Patsy Cline, and then he went to the city, New York City, to become a serious jazzman and worked with such jazz notables as Oscar Peterson and Charlie "Bird" Parker.

A tragedy in 1961. He was in an auto accident that left him crippled. Worse, after that, the doctors decided he was meshuganah in the worst sense, the type that requires multiple applications of high voltages to the frontal lobes, about 100 for Hank. He survived the medical treatment too, but was basically useless for anything but a salad ingredient for quite a while. Somewhere, however, inside himself, he found the will to carry on and re-learned to walk and even play his incredibly intricate "Sugarfoot Rag" again.

His life has been made into an Indy biopic called "Crazy," but good luck trying to find it.