An Interview with Jim Byrnes

Excerpted from the PWFC magazine LFT issue #26, written by Lee

Lee: Many musicians like Chuck Berry came from St. Louis and the Chicago area near by. What are some of your earliest musical memories?

Jim: Well, really, my very earliest musical memory was a couple of them. One of them was listening to Roy Acuff on the radio ‘cause I’m a big country fan, too. I mean, real old. This stuff they call country now is for the birds. I’m talking hillbilly music, you know. But there used to be when I was a kid, to give you an idea how long ago—there used to actually be fruit vendors that would come up and walk up and down your street. They’d park down at the corner and these guys would come up from these truck farms in Arkansas, and Mississippi and Southern Missouri and these cats would be wearing like do-rags on and gold teeth and they would go down the street and they would have these big buckets of strawberries and watermelon and they would sing. And it was fascinating—Wow, these guys were like out of the Arabian Nights or something. To a kid. These exotic looking guys (sings) Strawberries, four quarts for a dollar. . . Gives you an idea of how long ago it was. And that was, like wow. And then in church, even Gregorian chants. It was much later that I discovered gospel music. But I loved to go. Back in the old days when they really had solemn High Mass. . .

Lee: In Latin

Jim: Lingua Latino lingue quesno. . . And my mother walking around the house singing. Those are really my earliest musical memories. And then later once I got out in the world and started in music. My neighborhood where I grew up, was like by the time I started playing piano when I started school. . . It was part of the drill. . . you took piano lessons from the nuns. Which was part of the drill in the family. Really, I remember the first concert that I played. Oddly enough the two pieces that I had been given to play by Sister Rose Alma were time taps boogie woogie and a thing called “Pipes and Drums” which was a raaang raang—it was like sort of a piano approximation of Scottish pipe music. And the other piece was “Flow Gently Sweet Afton”— Robert Burns. I was like eight years old and its still there. . .

Lee: A musical hodge podge. . .. No, it’s great. You made the transition from piano because . . . you studied piano to guitar in the late 1950’s. Was it around the same time everyone had seen Elvis on Ed Sullivan?

Jim: Oddly enough, the first concert. . . the first concert I ever went to was in 1955. . . I would have been. . . what? 7 or 8 years old. It was Memorial Day weekend and I was with my sister and we were at this state fair in Arkansas. . .Batesville, Arkansas and the headliner was Webb Pierce, Kitty Wells, Justin Tubb—who was Ernest Tubb’s son, and the opening act was Elvis the Hillbilly Cat with Scotty and Bill. This was May of 1955. I was with my sister and all these girls. . .we’re at Batesville, Arkansas at a State Fair. You can imagine. Just like you see on the side of a flatbed truck. And all that stuff. And then I became really fascinated by the guitar at that time. The only place you could really see people play guitar was on all these shows on TV like Louisiana Hayride, the Porter Wagner Show, the Wilburn Brothers Show, Ernest Tubb. . .walking the floor, pick it, butterball. I remember the first guitar I got. . . I was about 11 by the time I actually got a guitar. But I had a model railroad set—my pride and joy—but I had to have some money to get this guitar. It was at this place called Newbie music. They had music and it was also a hobby store. . . they had electric trains and model cars and model aircraft carriers and all that stuff. And I traded my HO railroad set for this guitar.

Lee: Are you still a railroad enthusiast to this day?

Jim: Oh yeah. . .