Jimmy Bryant was among the first country-jazz guitarists, known for his fluent lines and dizzying technique. His solo records and duets with West were classics. As with the music of Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian, and Jimi Hendrix, any guitarist can draw inspiration from Bryant. And, like the other guitar pioneers, his recordings still sound years ahead of their time, and probably always will.

When Jimmy Bryant died of lung cancer in 1980, the incredible loss was barely noticed nationally. There were no lengthy obituaries, retrospectives, or deep analyses of his contributions, despite his pervasive influence on both country guitar and instrumental styles.

Jimmy was bom John Ivy Bryant, Jr., in Moultrie, Georgia, on March 5, 1925 (his longtime nickname was “Ivy”). The oldest of 12 children, he learned fiddle from his dad, a sharecropper. Bryant's first shoes and overalls came from five dollars in tips he made from fiddling in town. The money also helped feed the family during the Depression, but it was a rough existence. “My grandfather used to lock him in the room or beat him if he didn't practice the fiddle,” says Jimmy's son, drummer John Bryant.

It was not much of a childhood, and hating the drudgery of the farm, Jimmy sometimes ran away. When World War II began, he saw his way out and joined the Army in 1943, serving in the infantry in Europe. “He was wounded in Germany,” his son remembers. “A grenade went off and wounded him in the hand and the head. They put him in Special Services.”

Transferred stateside, he convalesced in a Washington, D.C. hospital. Since a country fiddler was not needed in his Special Services unit, he had time to begin listening to jazz guitar seriously. Beginning on a Stella acoustic in the hospital, the 20-year-old progressed quickly, influenced by guitarist Tony McttDla and by the recordings of Django Reinhardt.

After meeting Speedy West, the two eventually sat down to play together. “I just knew that it was right, and he did, too,” West says of their first jam session. A local 250-watt radio remote hookup from the Fargo Club proved Bryant's redemption. West Coast western swing vocalist/bandleader Tex Williams heard him and phoned the club one night to invite Jimmy to record with him.

Jimmy and Speedy also began getting substantial session work. They were the nucleus of Capitol's West Coast country music “house band,” featured on numbers such as Tennessee Ernie Ford's rollicking 1950 hit “Shotgun Boogie,” sessions with singer Ella Mae Morse, and many more. They did scores of dates with other artists, and for several years were the busiest country sidemen on the West Coast, a point of intense pride for Jimmy.

The Bryants moved to Nashville November 1974, but Jimmy didn’t fit into Nashville's musical establishment, which then mistrusted outsiders. He openly defied their unwritten rules of etiquette. Patty Bryant explains: “They'd say, ‘You don’t go down on Broadway; you don't go down to all the bars and dives and sit and jam.’ And Jimmy would rather sit and play for nothing than play for money.”

On March 3, 1976, he organized an historic jam session LP in Nashville with nine legendary pedal steel players: Speedy West, Julian Tharpe, Buddy Emmons, Jimmy Day, Hal Rugg, Lloyd Green, Maurice Anderson, Curly Chalker, and Doug Jernigan. With backing from Bryant, bassist Henry Strzlecki, saxophonist John Gore, and jazz drummer Louis Bellson, It's The First Time consisted of three extended jam sessions two Bryant compositions and a 20-minute jam on the old standard “Lonesome Road.”

In the summer of 1977 Jimmy contracted the flu, and it stayed with him when he visited California and worsened into pneumonia back in Nashville. A heavy smoker who spent years in equally smoky clubs, Jimmy entered a Nashville VA hospital late in 1978. Exploratory surgery revealed a malignant tumor in one lung that had spread beyond.

In April 1980, he went back to Moultrie. “He wanted to go home to die,” Patty remembers. After a final trip to Nashville that June, he returned home in July. Time was running out. Jimmy entered the hospital, where he died on September 22; he was buried in the Bryant family plot. A guitar, his signature, and the slogan “Jesus' Guitar Man” (based on the title of a song he'd co-written) were engraved on his headstone.

From:

THE JIMMY BRYANT STORY

By Rich Kienzle

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