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14. Making Music
- University Press of Mississippi
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120 makIngmuSIc During that first “He Stopped Loving Her Today” session at the Quonset Hut, Sherrill and the boys didn’t take long to rough out the song. That’s because there really wasn’t much to it. Guitar player Pete Wade kept charts in a notebook for all of the thousands of songs he cut over the years. A normal song would “take like half a page,” said Wade. Not “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” “There’s a little bitty chart up in the corner. Sixteen bars,” said Wade. “It’s all the same thing over and over. The smallest one in the book, but yet the biggest song.” “It’s not that complicated a song. Just a great song,” said drummer Jerry Carrigan. After Sherrill wrapped up the preliminary rundown in the studio, he said, “‘Well, let me go into the control room and listen,’” recalled McCoy. “As he walked by, he stopped and he looked at me and he said, ‘Get something on the second [half of the first] verse.’ That was it. And so that’s what I did.” Specifically, after George sang “He kept her picture on his wall,” Charlie answered with a plaintive harmonica wail. This continued after each of the three remaining lines. He kept her picture on his wall. Went half crazy now and then. He still loved her through it all, Hoping she’d come back again. Charlie wound up playing a three-note wail following the first, second, and fourth lines and a five-note wail following the third. Only fourteen notes in all. (Now is that the only place you played?) 14 Making Music 121 “Yeah,” replied McCoy, “four very short, small little pieces. I think it’s one of the best pieces of session work I’ve ever done.” This “call and response” kind of pattern was repeated throughout the song: the steel guitar, the Jordanaires, the violins, and even background singer Millie Kirkham reinforced (or in Millie’s case, foreshadowed) the sentiment of each line Jones sang. “I think you just let the music flow along with your story line and grow more intense as the lyric grows more intense. And then when you get reflective, like the recitation part, that’s when you mellow back down,” said Sherrill. “It’s just something you try to weave into the song. Make the song more believable. . . . That’s the only way I know how to do it.” As for this playing between the lines—literally—the technique was nothing new. “That’s pretty standard fare,” said McCoy. “It’s a fill: f-i-l-l, a fill. You know the secret to Nashville is that the fill guys play in between the words and not on top of ’em,” said McCoy. “It’s always been lyrics first.” “The song is the picture. Everything else is the frame,” continued McCoy. “The simplicity of production, and his [Sherrill’s] arrangements : he doesn’t clutter ’em up with an awful lot of fill instruments ,”saidKennyRogers’producerLarryButlerinHowNashville Became Music City U.S.A. “He lets the tone of each instrument stand on its own, and whenever there is a fill, it says something.” Summing up, class, “You don’t get in the way of a song,” said McCoy. “When you come here and you wanta be a session player, if you don’t learn that real quick, you’re done before you begin.” • • • Sherrill moved into the control room, where engineer Lou Bradley reigned over the hardware. “It was a sixteen-bus, twenty-four inch console, and we had seven echo sends and returns,” recalled Bradley. [Say what?] “I’d keep six E.M.T.’s and one live room, and I was probably one of the first guys there to quit printing reverb.” [44.221.46.132] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:00 GMT) Music Makers 122 [Moving along.] Once Sherrill got settled in, “We’d start off and we’d run it two or three times for them [engineers] to get their sound,” said Bob Moore, “and then he’d say, ‘Okay, let’s cut one.’ We’d cut one and then listen back to it. And alter. And cut another one and listen back to it and sometimes alter again.” “All I ever did was, instead of asking for ‘input,’” said Sherrill, “[was] just say, ‘Okay, do something,’ and say, ‘No, that’s not right, do something else. Play it this way.’ And they’ll all do it...