The Steel Guitar Forum

Here's a super rare clip of steel guitar genius, Vance Terry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LafBjBO3EXA

Great clip, thanks for posting. You can see that his approach to single notes is more akin to his non-pedal playing with more vertical movement and that his chordal stuff is what he used the pedals for. Wish there were more clips.

Yes, It definately looks like that. I wish there were more clips as well.

The most disturbing moments I have ever had on this Forum were reading the details about Vances demise. It just shook me to the core and left me still hurting for him. Just too much to bear...

He did live sort of a tragic life at the end, but the real tragedy would be to let that overshadow the huge contribution his playing made to the world of steel guitar.

Two great tunes with a ton of Vance Terry playing. He uses the 4th pedal a lot!



http://www.myspace.com/jimmieriversandvanceterry


Greg

I would have liked to met Vance before his tragic downfall. What a great talent. I lived around Sacramento from '61 to '98 but had little association with the music world at the time. I kept the Sacramento Bee coverage of his life. It was quite a big detailed spread with color pictures. I also picked up a real nice memorial booklet from the Sacramento Western Swing Society - lots of fine pictures & comments. About a month ago my wife accidentally met Vance's daughter at a store in Auburn, CA. Don

It's SUPER loud too, a warning should head the OP, but thanx for the clip, I thot I'd never see that. I'll always wonder if I was the last person he spoke to, if so, he was in good spirits when he went.

It IS super loud! a volume warning may have been appropriate in the heading That is cool you knew him, Ron. I wish I could've met him, he is one of my musical heroes.

You can hear about ten more minutes of Vance's laying here:

http://www.amazon.com/Brisbane-Bop-Jimm ... B0000009DN


Greg

Can somebody point me to the stories of Vance Terry's demise? I've been a fan of he and Jimmy Rivers' old recordings for a long time, but I know nothing about his last years.

I tried searching the forum, but had no luck.

Steve

I would have liked to met Vance before his tragic downfall.

On 3-30-97, the Radio Ranch Straight Shooters were setting up to do a set at DeMarco's 23 in Brisbane. There was an older gentleman at the front of the stage watching me get organized, and when I looked up, he introduced himself as Vance Terry. I said something like, oh man, I was already nervous and now I get to play in front of one of my heroes, at DeMarco's 23, no less, what a pleasure to meet you. He was absolutely delightful and we got to hang after the set. I also got his autograph on the underside of my guitar.

Steve Gorman wrote:Can somebody point me to the stories of Vance Terry's demise? I've been a fan of he and Jimmy Rivers' old recordings for a long time, but I know nothing about his last years.

I tried searching the forum, but had no luck.

Steve

He knew steel strings of fame -- and iron grip of addiction
By Blair Anthony Robertson
Bee Staff Writer
(Published March 10, 2001)

He checked in at the Marshall Hotel, as many seem to do, because he had run out of hope and had outrun everyone who tried to set him straight, because in the end all this once great man wanted was to hole up in a dingy room and be with the bottle of booze he craved. It was a choice only he and his demons could comprehend.

A handwritten sign at the front desk of the hotel at Seventh and L streets in Sacramento states, "Sorry we don't have a can opener." Visitors are not allowed up to the rooms because management wants to control who's coming and going, who's stealing, fighting or freeloading. But that was OK by him.

In his final days, he was skin and bone and barely able to function, a sickly ghost of a man with sad, empty eyes. Through two decades of drug and alcohol addiction he squandered nearly everything -- his family, friends, prestigious banking job, beautiful Marin County home, his joy for life, his vast talent, his intellect and, especially, his dignity.

They found Vance Terry in Room 226, lying in bed. There was a stench to the room. In his last days, he was too weak to get out of bed even to use the bathroom. Terry had checked in Oct. 5, paid $350 a month for a 12-by-12-foot room with a bed, a dresser and sheets changed weekly.

On Feb. 2, two weeks after his 67th birthday, they carried him out. The cause of death was atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease -- his heart had given out.

Despite all appearances, Vance Terry was anything but a forgotten man at the time of his death. He was in two different music halls of fame. People worshiped him as a musical genius. They remembered the days when he brought joy to so many with his talent, when he would wail away at his steel guitar, playing a complex mix of jazz, blues and country known as Western swing. Eyebrows would rise. Mouths would drop. His stumpy legs would dance over the foot pedals as his fingers strummed across 22 strings on two separate necks.

In his prime, he was an artist with guitar picks on three fingers and a thumb. He never seemed to play it the same way twice. No one knew what was coming, what thrilling sound the great Vance Terry would create next.

"I hope people will realize," said Paul Warnik, a collector from Illinois who owns Terry's 1951 Bigsby pedal steel guitar, "that he was a somebody even though he died like a nobody."

To this day, steel players study Terry's technique, his sound, his chord progressions. They play his recordings over and over until his uncanny skills become clearer. The steel guitar, shaped somewhat like a keyboard and strummed by a player who is usually seated, is a major part of Western swing. Some players moved to Northern California just to be near Terry and study with a great innovator.

On the Internet they talk about Terry's music the world over, although there are only a few known recordings. His old steel guitars? They're collectors' items.

The deep respect people had for this musician is a startling contrast to what people may have seen in Terry's final years. To passers-by, he was indistinguishable from other misfits, drifters and street people.

Maybe you encountered this aging, rickety man on a downtown sidewalk and saw just another lost soul with an empty, disoriented gaze, stumbling, perhaps, as he reached to the ground for a cigarette butt. Maybe you saw him with his face black and blue and swollen, the aftermath of this or that beating when a drug buy went sour.

Maybe you saw him and thought, "How sad, how pathetic." More likely, as many seemed to do, you saw only what he had become, not what he was.

In his final years, Terry had burned most of his bridges. People who cared for him, bailed him out, sobered him up, fed him and lent him money eventually had to turn him away. He wouldn't change. He wouldn't get better. It seemed he didn't want to.

"It was a very ugly ending," said Rozlyn Terry, 41, one of six children. "I don't feel anyone has the kind of karma to deserve how he died. I prayed for almost the last year for him to die. I wanted him out of his pain. That wasn't him in the end. That was somebody else."

The trip from the good old days to his deathbed in Room 226 was a long one, complete with early success in music and business, then a long, self-destructive tumble.

Born in 1934, Terry's rise to the top began in the early 1950s, just as widely popular Western swing was about to be cast aside by something called rock 'n' roll. Accomplished at 17, he was already playing steel for Billy Jack Wills, a headliner at the lively Wills Point ballroom on Auburn Boulevard. After World War II, Sacramento was a Western swing hotbed. In 1955, Terry recorded 17 songs with Billy Jack's brother, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, the top Western swing act in the country. In 1956, Wills Point burned to the ground and was never rebuilt.

By the time he enrolled in then Chico State College to get a business degree, Terry was recognized as a musical prodigy with a distinctive sound. Looking back, many believe he was the best steel player in the nation for his time.

"I heard him play and was just knocked out cold," said Tom Morrell of Little Elm, Texas, who at 62 remains a top steel player.

Although the music Terry played had country roots, his heart was in jazz and his instincts compelled him to search for new sounds and combinations of notes.

"As young as he was, he was a genius. He was in a class by himself," said Loyd Jones, whose Western swing band plays regular gigs in Sacramento.

Terry's innovative jazz style reached new heights when he joined Jimmie Rivers and the Cherokees. The "Brisbane Bop" CD features live recordings at the Bay Area's 23 Club from 1961-64.

"When I heard it, it just knocked my socks off," said Billy Wilson, 49, a steel player in west Oakland. "It's just a party on wheels."

"He was like a surgeon," said musician Stogy Buckhorn. "He could reach in and extract a note that nobody else could. Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane -- put him in the same class, because that's where he belongs. They had the ability to make a statement with music that nobody else could make. Nobody could duplicate John Coltrane, and nobody could duplicate Vance Terry."

By then, his music was already a part-time endeavor. In 1958, Terry had graduated cum laude from Chico State with a business degree. He wanted a steady job.

Those who knew him say he was equally gifted with numbers. Terry worked his way up to vice president at Bank of America. Friends remember visiting his office on the 50th floor in San Francisco. Terry married for a second time and by the late 1960s had built a million-dollar home in Novato overlooking the Marin Country Club. Already the father of a young son and daughter, Terry had adopted his new wife's four children. By most accounts, these were happy times.

Then someone introduced him to cocaine -- not a musician, a stockbroker. Soon, Terry wanted to do nothing else but get high. He mortgaged the house to pay for more and more drugs, according to one of his daughters.

"He had an addictive personality," Rozlyn Terry said from her Stinson Beach home. "He and my mother were deeply in love. It was the drugs that tore their relationship apart and tore the family apart. He had been a wonderful father, but I saw him become very reclusive and paranoid. He would lock himself in his office for days at a time."

But he had good qualities, too, she said.

"My father was there for me in my formative years. He taught me to be confident. I was already an adult when he started to lose it."

It took years for Terry to lose it completely. In the last decade,

he was in and out of homeless shelters and dive hotels at least a dozen times. All the while, several people tried their best to help.

He went from snorting powder cocaine to smoking crack. He was in rehab clinics at least three times. And everywhere he went, his musical reputation preceded him. He was the great Vance Terry. Even when he was homeless, people would relish the chance to hear him play. His musical skills, it seems, were the last to go.

"The best music Vance ever played he played with my band (in the '60s)," said Rivers, 75, of Placerville. "He was like a son to me. I helped Vance get through college. I was so very proud of him. He was a very bright young man.

"He got a job at the Bank of America and climbed the ladder so fast. He was in charge of big, big money. When his stockbroker introduced him to cocaine, it was all downhill. He went down so fast that I tried to avoid him because it broke my goddamn heart every time I saw him."

Chuck Wright, 75, knew Terry from the early years. He built Terry's famous Sierra double-11, 19-pedal steel guitar. In the 1960s, Wright lost touch with Terry until 1993. By then, his old friend was on the skids.

"I had put him on a pedestal. I was proud that he played my merchandise," Wright said. "But when I saw him, I was devastated. I couldn't believe how a man could come down so far.

"He's in a better place right now. I don't care where it is -- he's in a better place than he was a few weeks ago."

Charlotte and Wendell Moore were among the last who tried to help. They met Terry in 1988 and hired him to do the books for their Fairfield construction business. Charlotte was struck that this broken man who couldn't manage his own life could easily set the company books straight in preparation for a complicated tax audit.

The Moores gave him work and support. They drove him around. They made him their friend. But they couldn't keep him away from drugs and booze.

"He was living day to day. He was a very kind and very generous person," said Charlotte Moore. "When he was on the street needing a place to stay, we put him up in a hotel. I had a friend in AA, and he said that the more you do for him and help him get out of his scrape, the longer it's going to take. Eventually, we had to say 'We can't help you.' It was a very difficult thing to say to somebody you knew didn't have a place to stay or a thing to eat."

As the drug habit worsened, Terry got beat up several times. Once, someone stomped on his hands so hard he was unable to play his steel guitar.

He bounced around in low-rent hotels until he ended up at the Marshall.

"The only time he left his room was to go to the liquor store," said a hotel employee who would not give his name. "There are a lot of people like him in this town. No one comes to see them until after they pass away."

On Christmas Day, Terry's only biological child, Brooke Diane Terry, called the front desk. Friends had cautioned her not to go to the hotel. The sight of her father would be too shocking, they told her.

"This is Vance Terry's daughter," she said. "Will you please tell him that I love him. Make sure he knows that I love him."

A hotel employee confirmed that Terry received the message. Five weeks later he was dead.

Terry's sad ending makes it difficult for those who loved him. How do you remember someone who destroyed himself? Whose final years were so awful but who left behind such beautiful music? How do you describe a man who was a somebody even though he died like a nobody?

The music, friends say, will live on. The awful memories may fade, though reminders will always be there of how drugs can bring a man to his knees.

"I refuse to keep any negative memories of Vance," said Jones. "I have a million great memories, and those are the ones I choose to keep with me."

The first step toward realigning the memory of Vance Terry will be at a tribute on March 18. A big crowd is expected. They will play all the old songs and reminisce. Then family and friends will make short speeches about a man and his music, about who he was, what he became, and that he was, after all, a somebody.

The Vance Terry tribute, sponsored by the Western Swing Society, will be from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 67, 2784 Stockton Blvd. There is no cover charge.

Mitch, thanks for putting that up.
Although I greatly admired his music, I had no idea of his addiction, and sad final years. May he rest in peace, finally free from his demons.

Mitch: Thanks from me as well and while I have never had the gumption to dig it up, I did read it word for word, one more time. It is almost memorized now. There are many stories in music like this but this one is so close to home for me and perhaps a few others. I keep thinking...if I could play like that I'd......

Regrets, Paul

"I keep thinking...if I could play like that I'd..."
......sell my soul, at the "crossroads"....

That is one of the saddest, most heartbreaking stories I've ever read on the forum. Wish I hadn't read it.

Where ever you went with Vance he would charm the pants off everyone there, and that was before he sat down at the steel!! If you think that clip is loud, on the first gig I did with Vance he showed up with a Webb amp with a 15 in speaker AND an 18 inch bottom cabinet!! He could rattle the ice cubes in a scotch and soda at the next table with that rig. I once saw Tom Morrell walk up to Vance after he played and bow down!! Vance was just about the nicest guy ever.

The last time I saw Vance was at the Sacramento Western Swing Society Hall of Fame week end in October of 1992. In the final Jam Session on Sunday night Bobby Black and Myself were set up on the Stage and Vance was sitting right in front of us in the Audience. He was not playing, just watching the Band. I wondered at the time why he wasn't playing in the Jam Session. Whatever I was playing, I felt like a beginner in front of him. I don't know if he was fighting his demons at this time, or not. He was one of my heroes and inspiration.

Shades of Joaquin Murphy... I just happen to be reading "Go, Cat, Go!" - the biography of Carl Perkins. The fact that somewhere between 7% and 10% of America adults are born alcoholics is considered to be quite accurate. But when you consider the lives of jazz, country & rock musicians - wow. Something's askew.

Tony-
Thanks so much for posting this inspiring, rare clip. I'm a huge Vance Terry fan and have listened to the Brisbane Bop record hundreds of times. I wonder if there's more footage out there somewhere?

In Oct 1960, I and Jerry Rowe attended a Chet Atkins concert at the St Francis Hotel in San Francisco for Gretsch Guitar. Along with Chet was the late Great Bassist, Junior Husky. Vance Terry was there in attendance with Norm Hamlet, Gene Breeden and others. Vance invited us down to Brisbane to the club he was working. His unaccompanied solo work knocked me and I knew i was witnessing an amazing underrated steel master that the music world was being deprived of. I also got to witness Chuck Wright work on the fabled 19 pedal guitar in Sacramento area. What a moment in time.

great clip, makes me happy to see Vance being talked about, he was such a Great player, I knew him most all my life, he left us with some great music...RIP Vance...

A wee bit of history: Norm Hamlett told me that it was Vance Terry who taught him how to pick block back in the mid 50's.

The fact that someone so gifted could drink himself to death scares the bejeezus outta me...