After James Burton stopped being a member of the Wrecking Crew, a small cast of session musicians who played on a large number of recordings, he became a one-man crew, gracing too many songs to list. No other guitarist has played sessions with both Elvises (Costello and Presley), both Cash’s (Johnny and Roseanne), and one Von Schmidt (Eric). But before the Shreveport, LA native became a session man about town, he was a 15-year-old boy who provided some of the most memorable guitar licks in rock ‘n’ roll history to Dale Hawkins.
Hawkins took Burton’s powerhouse riffs, added some simplistic lyrics, and landed high on the charts with “Suzie Q,” a 2:13 ditty that Creedence Clearwater Revival turned into a psychedelicized 8:39 opus. Although Burton never got any co-writing credit or royalties for the 1957 hit (#27 on the Billboard charts), his guitar work got him a job offer from rockabilly star Bob Luman and an appearance in a Roger Corman-directed movie called Carnival Rock. As was often the case with a Corman flick, the titillating (for the time) flick was advertised with a tagline that was far better than the film itself: “It’s got a HEAT-BEAT!” Burton recalled: “After the movie wrapped, Luman’s manager, Horace Logan, got us a gig on Town Hall Party, which was the biggest local country music TV show in Southern California. We were rehearsing over at Imperial Records which was also Ricky Nelson’s label. He was in the other room and heard us tearing up Billy Lee Riley’s song ‘Red Hot’ which we’d also cut for Imperial. We wound up hanging out and playing music together for hours.”
Ricky invited the eighteen-year-old to be the lead guitarist in his band as well as invited him to live with Ozzie, Harriet, and David Nelson. Burton said: “I wound up living with the Nelson family for a couple of years and they treated me like I was their third son.” Burton also found a home in a TV studio, playing behind the teen idol on The Ozzie and Harriet Show. Ricky’s latest songs would appear at the end of each episode which meant it was time for adults watching the show to roll their eyes and their children to get introduced to a weekly dose of Burton’s amazing fretwork which contributed to Ricky racking up twelve songs in the top 40 between 1958 and 1959.
Rapt listeners included James’ future employer, Elvis Presley, and a couple of teens in England. Burton recalled, “Tom Jones’ guitarist for many years was Big Jim Sullivan and he said to me, ‘I used to teach guitar in England and do you know who my students were? I told him I had no idea. He said, ‘Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck and these guys wanted to play like you.’”
If musicians weren’t trying to play like James, they were trying to get Burton to play with them. He turned down an offer to join Bob Dylan’s first touring band in order to be a Shindog, the house band that backed rockers on the musical variety TV show Shindig. Once James’ “dog” days ended, session work followed, which included dates with Mama Cass (“Dream a Little Dream of Me”), Gram Parsons (on his cool Grievous Angel LP), and Judy Collins (“Who Knows Where the Time Goes”). On some Burton-backed songs, some singers could barely contain their enthusiasm for James’ playing. On the Monkees’ stellar “Papa Gene Blues,” Michael Nesmith belts out to Burton, “Play it magic fingers!” On John Phillips’ excellent “Mississippi” song, Burton plays a mean dobro after hearing Papa John plead: “Do it to me, James!”
Elvis Costello highly appreciated Burton’s playing on his King of America album and on Merle Haggard’s “Working Man Blues.” In the “Suit of Lights” song, Elvis subtly shouts out James’ past work by singing:
“And I thought I heard ‘The Working Man’s Blues,’
I went to work that night and wasted my breath.”
James deservedly has his admirers, but the biggest Burton fanboy might be Keith Richards who inducted James into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2001, calling him “Master of Telecaster” and proclaiming “I never bought a Ricky Nelson record. I bought a James Burton record.”
Twenty-three years later, Keith inducted his finger-picking pal into the Country Hall of Fame. The voters possibly took into consideration James sixteen years stint with the country-ish John Denver as well as Burton’s work on two oxymoronic albums: Henry Mancini and His Orchestra and Chorus –Country Gentleman and Tina Turner – Tina Turns The Country On, which featured Tina going country (and not making the charts) exactly 50 years before Beyonce’s smash 2024 hit, Cowboy Carter.
Sadly, in the last two years, James has broken his hip, fought off kidney cancer and almost never recovered from a broken ankle. He stated, “I only broke one ankle on my left foot. That was no problem. The only thing is when I was in the hospital – I don’t do any drugs. I don’t do anything to harm my body. But evidently, I got a little bit too much morphine when they put me to sleep and I had a bad reaction to it and it put me in a coma for 12 days. But the good Lord had me in a holding pattern and saved my life.”
Thankfully, Burton didn’t enter that holding pattern in 1969 while working on one of Elvis Presley’s 636 gigs at the International Hotel in Las Vegas. James and his bandmates learned that to get too close to the King on the stage was taking your life in your hands—and in Elvis’ feet. James remembered: “We couldn’t get too close because he was moving so fast and kicking and a little bit of karate there. We didn’t want to get our heads chopped off.”
-Mark Daponte
Photo: James Burton, 2009 (Scott Dudelson via Wikimedia Commons)
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