Gloriously Profound Clank
Published: Fri, 09/09/22
On one such occasion, I found myself chatting with Roy Book Binder and a few other folks from the half-listening demographic while Ronnie Earl and his band held forth inside. "I have never played a Stratocaster," Roy observed in his inimitably dry showbiz drawl, "but I believe if I ever did play a Stratocaster, I'd want to play it like that."
Clearly, he was not alone, as Ronnie Earl, like Roy, was a fixture at the NGW for several years. Part of the appeal, I always thought, was that Ronnie had cracked the code on how to deliver a night of electric blues without opening his mouth to sing, or even hiring someone else to do so for him. He said one time that he'd been to see organist Jimmy McGriff play, and decided if a jazz organ combo could play instrumental music all night, so could he. You could almost feel the non-singing Stratocaster owners in the room taking inspiration from this, the simple revelation of a late-blooming former special-ed teacher from Queens.
Whenever he came to teach, Earl would give a concert as well, and I have to say, if anyone had the goods to stand up there for an hour and a half and play instrumental blues, it was Ronnie. I've never heard anybody else get such gloriously profound clank out of the low end of a solidbody, and using nothing but the guitar itself and some kind of blackface Fender amp. And then there were the dynamics. The tenth or twelfth time it could start to feel a bit like schtick, but even then it was pretty compelling the way he could bring the whole band down to a whisper on a slow blues, and stay there for multiple choruses before building it up again. Most blues heroes go for the burn, churning their way up the neck into with ever-increasing density, velocity and volume. When Ronnie played a slow blues, the climax was the drop – the sheer drama of how suddenly the band could get so quiet and continue grooving.
In class, Ronnie claimed not to know any licks, much less play any. That was bullshit, of course; he had his pet moves and phrases like anyone else and had clearly done graduate-level homework on T-Bone Walker in particular. Ronnie didn't play the changes – that's what his longtime keyboard player, Bruce Katz, was there for. But he once explained that "T-Bone laid the table for us all to sit at," and his love for Walker provided some necessary swing, leavening Earl's native tendency towards a kind of emotional gravity.
Ronnie Earl has continued to make a lot of music since those summer workshop appearances, but since those are the shows I think of when it's still ninety degrees out at ten o'clock at night, I've made a playlist of a few favorites from Ronnie's turn-of-the-century repertoire, which you can find on my web site at the link below:
Mr. Horvath Plays
More Soon,
David