Elvis Presley Was in the Waiting Room When the Session Guitarist Canceld—Wht He Dd LEFT All in TEARS

The session guitarist called in sick at 9:00 in the morning. By 10:00, the producer had run out of options. By 10:15, he had walked into the waiting area and asked if anyone there played guitar, not expecting anyone to say yes. It was a Thursday morning in March of 1957, and the recording session at Bradley’s Barn, the studio complex that Owen Bradley had built in Nashville on 16th Avenue South, which was already becoming the center of gravity for country and pop recording in the South, was scheduled to begin at 10:00 and had not begun at 10:00 because the session guitarist, a man named Ray Colburn, who had been a reliable presence in Nashville recording studios for 6 years, had called that morning to report that he had a fever of 102 and could not come in. The producer’s name was Hank Delvecchio. He was 41 years old, a New York transplant who had come South 7 years earlier, following the recording business as it moved, and who had built a reputation in Nashville for sessions

that ran on time and on budget, and produced results that satisfied the label without requiring an excessive number of takes. He was not a patient man in the way of people who have made impatience into a professional virtue. It moved things, and things that moved produced records. He had been on the phone from 9:05 until approximately 10 minutes past 10:00, working through the list of Nashville session guitarists who might be available on short notice on a Thursday morning in March, and the list had been less productive than he had hoped. The first two names on it were unavailable. The third was available but had a previous commitment that morning he could be released from only after 11:00, which was not useful. The fourth name produced no answer. By 10:15, Hank Delvecchio had walked out of the control room, through the corridor, and into the small waiting area at the front of the building, which held three chairs, a table with a coffee pot, and whatever people happened to be there for reasons adjacent to the

session, a manager waiting for a client, a musician who had come early and was sitting with a cup of coffee, someone from the label who had wanted to observe. He stood in the doorway of the waiting area and said, without preamble, that he needed to know if anyone present played guitar well enough to sit in on a recording session.

He said it the way a man says things when he has run out of better options and has decided that the only remaining option is to ask everyone within earshot. He looked at three people. The first was a manager from a New York label who was there to observe the session on behalf of the act being recorded, and who said, accurately, that he did not play guitar.

The second was a woman from the building’s administrative office who had come to deliver some paperwork and who said the same. The third was a young man who had been sitting in the chair closest to the window with a cup of coffee, and who had been there for about 20 minutes before Hank walked in, and who had the particular quality of stillness of someone who is comfortable with waiting and does not require activity to feel the time is being used well.

He was 22 years old. He’d come to Bradley’s Barn that morning for a purpose that had nothing to do with this session, a meeting with a contact at a different label about an unrelated project, which had not yet happened and which he was content to wait for. He was the kind of person who waited well, which was not the same as being patient in the passive sense, but rather having the capacity to be present in a waiting room without requiring the waiting room to provide him with anything.

He had brought nothing to read. He had the coffee. He had the particular quality of alertness that belongs to people who are comfortable enough in a space to observe it without needing to participate in it. He was in Nashville for 2 days, had come up from Memphis the previous evening, and would return the following morning.

He had been to Bradley’s Barn before, knew its corridors and its coffee, and had the ease in the building of someone who had spent enough time in recording studios that any recording studio felt navigable. When [snorts] Hank Delvecchio asked if anyone played guitar, the young man looked at him and said he played some.

Hank looked at him. He was not a man who wasted time on assessment when action was available, but he was also not a man who put just anyone in a session and discovered the mistake in the playback. He said, “What do you mean by some?” The young man thought about this for a moment.

He said, “Rhythm, lead, a little of both. What does the session need?” Hank said the session needed someone who could read a chart, hold a groove, and not fall apart when the arrangement changed in the room. He said this with the specific directness of a producer who had sat through sessions where one of these three requirements had been absent and knew what each absence cost in time and money.

The young man considered this for a moment. Then he said he thought he could manage that. Hank said, “Have you done session work before?” The young man said he had done some recording. This was not the most complete answer he could have given, but it was accurate, and Hank Delvecchio, who had been in the music business long enough to know that the most complete answer and the most useful answer were often different things, accepted it as sufficient. He said, “Come on back.

” They walked through the corridor to the control room. The act being recorded that morning was a young country singer named Jimmy Voss, who had a deal with a mid-size Nashville label and whose second single was being cut that day, a straightforward arrangement, medium tempo, two guitar parts, rhythm and a lead figure that ran through the chorus.

Hank showed the young man the chart. The young man looked at it for about 40 seconds in the way that people look at charts when they are reading them rather than glancing at them, and then he said he understood the structure and asked one question about the chord in the bridge that Hank answered, and that was the extent of the preparation.

They went into the live room. Jimmy Voss was a decent singer and a professional in the way that young artists with new deals are professional, present, cooperative, aware of what the session cost and what it needed to produce. He shook hands with the young man and said he appreciated him stepping in, and the young man said it was no trouble, and they ran the chart once together at half tempo without recording, and then Hank’s voice came through the monitor from the control room and said they were going to go. They went through the song four times before Hank said they had what they needed. On the first take, the young man was finding the room, the specific acoustic and rhythmic relationship between his playing and the other musicians present, the drummer and the bass player and the pianist, who had all arrived on time and who were all professionals with session experience. The drummer’s name was Pete Aldridge, and he had been a first-call session player in Nashville for 4 years, and he had a particular sensitivity to whoever

was playing beside him that had made him valuable in rooms where the musician lineup changed from session to session. He noticed the young man’s playing on the first take with the lateral attention that good rhythm section players develop, not listening for flaws but listening for what was there, mapping the tendencies in the timing, building the internal model of a player that allows a rhythm section to lock in cleanly.

The first take was adequate. On the second take, something settled. The groove locked in the way grooves lock when the musicians in a room have found each other, which can take an hour or can take two takes and is unpredictable. The third take was the best of the four. The lead figure in the chorus had a quality that Hank, listening through the monitors in the control room, later described to a colleague as the thing the arrangement had been looking for without knowing it was looking for it.

The fourth take was insurance, and it was good, but it was not the third take. Hank said from the monitor, “That’s it.” Jimmy Voss stood in the live room and looked at the young man beside him and said, “Where have you been?” It was the question you ask when someone has played a session the way sessions are supposed to go and sometimes don’t.

The young man said he was usually in Memphis, and Jimmy Voss laughed in the way that people laugh when an answer is both obvious and surprising, and that was the moment Jimmy Voss understood who had been standing beside him with a guitar for the past hour and a half. He said the name quietly, not as a question, as a statement of what he was looking at, the belated arrival of recognition that had been assembling itself since the second take and had now completed.

The young man said, “Yeah.” Jimmy Voss stood in the live room for a moment with his guitar hanging from the strap around his neck, and he looked at the young man, and he looked at his own guitar, and he looked back at the young man. He said, “I’ve been playing with you for an hour and a half and I didn’t” He stopped. He shook his head.

He said, “You sound different in a room than on a record.” The young man said most things do. Jimmy Voss laughed. He said, “Does Hank know?” The young man said he wasn’t sure. Hank knew. He had known since approximately 40 seconds into the first take, which was when the young man’s right hand had moved across the strings in a way that had a signature that was not universal, but that Hank, who’d been listening carefully to the music coming out of Memphis for 2 years, recognized.

He had said nothing because there was nothing useful to say, and because the session was running, and what was required was for the session to keep running, and for it to keep running, what was required was for everyone in the room to focus on the chart rather than on the person holding one of the guitars.

He had focused on the chart. The session had produced the third take, which was the one they used. The single was released 6 weeks later and reached the lower half of the country charts, which was considered a solid outcome for a second single from a new act. After the session, the musicians filtered out of the live room in the unhurried way of people who have finished something and are transitioning to whatever comes next.

Pete Aldridge, the drummer, stopped beside the young man on his way to the door and said, in the direct, practical manner of a session musician assessing another session musician, “Good read on the bridge change.” The young man said, “Thank you.” Pete said, “You do a lot of session work?” The young man said, “Not a lot.

” Pete said he should, and then looked at him for a moment in the way of someone who has just caught up with something. And then said, “Never mind.” And walked out. The young man finished putting his guitar in its case with the unhurried attention of someone who treats instruments carefully as a matter of habit rather than performance.

Hank found him in the corridor putting on his jacket. He said he owed him a session fee and asked who to write the check to. The young man said he did not need a session fee. Hank said he was going to pay it anyway. The young man said he would rather Hank put the money toward the next time a session musician called in sick and someone needed to be covered.

He said it without performance, as a practical suggestion rather than a gesture. Hank looked at him for a moment. He said, “All right.” He held out his hand. The young man shook it. The meeting that had brought the young man to Bradley’s Barn that morning happened at noon, which was when his contact at the other label arrived.

It lasted 45 minutes and produced a conversation that was useful but not immediately actionable. He drove back to Memphis the following morning as planned. The single that used the third take was released 6 weeks after the session. Jimmy Voss’s second single reached the lower half of the country charts, which was considered a solid result for a new act.

The lead figure in the chorus, the figure that the third take had produced, was mentioned in one of the two trade reviews the single received, described as a guitar part that gave the song more character than the arrangement had seemed to promise. Neither review speculated about who had played it.

The credit on the released single listed the session musicians by name, as was standard practice. The young man’s name was not among them because he had not been formally contracted for the session. This was, in the end, the arrangement that suited everyone. Hank Delvecchio produced records in Nashville for another 23 years. He told the story of that Thursday morning selectively and carefully, as he told most of the better stories from his career, not at every opportunity, but at the right ones.

He told it at industry gatherings when the conversation turned to the randomness of sessions, to the way the best things that happened in a recording studio were often the things nobody had planned for. He told it as a story about session work, about what happens when a chart is put in front of someone who can read it and has the hands to play what they read, and about how you find out what a person can do not by asking about their credentials, but by putting a guitar in their hands and letting the room decide. He said, “I asked a waiting room if anyone played guitar, expecting no. I got yes. I put the yes in the session, and the session gave me the third take, and the third take was the record. That’s how it works when it works. That morning it worked.” He paused. He said, “The yes doesn’t always know what it’s saying yes to. That morning the yes knew exactly what it was saying yes to. That’s rarer. You notice it when it happens, and then you try not to make a big deal of it

because making a big deal of it is how you lose the thing you’re trying to hold on to.