You don’t hear many tempo changes in country music.  Because country has historically been music for dancing, it tends to stick to one speed.  Sure, occasionally a bass that’s hitting on the “one” and “three” in the verse will start walking on all 4 beats for the chorus, but you rarely hear the dramatic speed changes of, say “Magical Mystery Tour”.

The first song I can recall hearing that played with tempo in a significant way was Dwight Yoakam’s “Watch Out,” from his album Blame the Vain, which I am surprised to learn is now 8 years old.

When the song stops and picks up again at 1:18, now in 3/4, it has made a transformation from country-rocker to tear-jerker – two styles Yoakam has mastered.  After hearing it a hundred or so times in the last 8 years, it sounds like a very natural transition to me since I know it is coming, but I recall the first few times I heard it not thinking it was the same song.  It’s a bit jarring, but there is some precedent in classic country music for this move.

The earliest example I can find is Marvin Rainwater’s 1955 song, “I Gotta Go Get My Baby”.

Both songs start off upbeat, and then move to a slower section before returning to the faster part. Rainwater’s and Yoakam’s songs share another element in their arrangements: electric guitar dominates the fast section, and steel guitar is the focus in the slower section.  Incidentally, a young Roy Clark plays electric guitar on Rainwater’s tune.

In 1965, Buck Owens and the Buckaroos released Before You Go, a classic example of the Bakersfield Sound – trebly telecaster, trebly pedal steel guitar, trebly hi-hats, and tenor vocal harmonies on every chorus.

The title track follows the same model as Rainwater’s and Yoakam’s songs, starting on an uptempo section driven by Don Rich’s telecaster before moving into a tear-jerking waltz where Tom Brumley’s pedal steel is the focus.  I doubt Yoakam would disagree that “Watch Out” owes a lot to “Before You Go” – Yoakam has cited Buck Owens as an influence for decades, and helped revive Buck’s career by including duets with Buck on several of his albums.

I have tried to write similar songs, but they never seem to sound as natural as the three above.  I think you have to spend a lot of time listening to a song like this before it sounds “right”.  Let me know if you can think of any other examples of country songs with wild tempo shifts.

-Ryan

There is a sound that steel guitars make on old country records from the ’40′s and ’50′s that you rarely hear anymore, sometimes referred to by steel guitarists as “boo-wah”.  At its simplest, boo-wah is achieved by playing a major 6th chord and playing with the steel guitar’s tone control so that you are moving between a bassy sound and a more clear, trebly sound.  Listen to Jerry Byrd’s playing on Hank Williams’s 1949 “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” to hear what I’m talking about:

Jerry Byrd was a master of the using the tone know to get a boo-wah sound, making it another possibility for expression on the instrument.  Speedy West took that technique and used it with “bar slams” on the inside neck of his Fender 1000 to develop a signature style.  You can hear a classic Speedy West bar slam and boo-wah at the 56 second mark in “Caffeine Patrol”:

So, being the avid Speedy West fans that we are, Andy and I set out this morning to add some boo-wah to his Fender 500.  The Fender 500 started its life as a Fender 1000, which is a double-neck 8-string pedal steel, but at some point, someone decided to chop it in half, making it a single-neck 8-string pedal steel.  Fender made a single-neck 8-string pedal steel, the Fender 400, but we think it’s more appropriate to call Andy’s steel a Fender 500 to acknowledge its origins and status as a hacked-up guitar.  The frustrating thing about Andy’s Fender 500 is that, before it was cut in half, it actually had volume and tone controls between the two necks.  If those were still on the guitar, we could have just hit a few chords, cranked on the tone knob, and declared victory.  Instead, we decided to add an outboard tone control, and a couple other features.

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