anybody into Jimmie Rivers and Vance Terry here?
Vance Terry was the first steeler I ever heard. He was only a teenager playing on a Sacramento radio station in the Billy Jack Wills band, which I like even more than Bob's band. There are two Billy Jack CDs from those radio shows.
The first live music I ever heard (I was four years old) was at the swimming pool of Wills Point Plunge, a Sacramento club owned by the Wills boys. It was a trio. I don't know who, but I like to think it was Patsy Cline, John Entwhistle, and Buddy Rich. Tiny Moore, my first music teacher, was in that band--decades before he ended his career with Haggard's band.
Buddy Emmons wrote a song about Wills Point (when he wasn't busy breaking both legs by jumping off a roof and missing the pool, or shooting one leg when practicing his quick draw).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKD_YwktbLM
The only Jimmie Rivers CD I have is great except that Jimmie is playing a 12-string solidbody, which ruins it for me. Last I heard, he was living 50 miles east of Sacramento in Placerville, which used to be called Hangtown because executions in the 19th century were carried out there (before executions were moved to Folsom and done with the more progressive method--gas).
Vance Terry's absence from the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame is an atrocity, especially when considering some of the clowns who got in. Terry's long alcoholic disintegration and his death in a flop house across the street from the California legislature is too sad to go into.
Get those Billy Jack Wills CDs.