Pribek

I’m not sure who was the first electric guitar player. There is some debate about it. One guy I have heard about, less known than a lot of the names that get thrown around, is Junior Barnard who played at various times with Bob Wills.

This, found at TexasPlayboys.net, is from a 1983 GP Mag article by Buddy McPeters.

Barnard was a loud guitarist who had an overdriven tube sound decades before it became widely popular with rock guitarists. His main guitar, a blond Epiphone Emperor arch-top (occasionally Junior used a Gibson ES-150), was dubbed “*my young radio station,” because it had so many wires and controls added on. Although Barnard first electrified his instrument with a DeArmond pickup, he later added another unit from a steel guitar. The two pickups were wired out of phase, and each was amplified through a separate channel. (Junior used both a Fender Pro with a 15″ speaker and an Epiphone amplifier.) In addition, Barnard employed a volume pedal, for which he probably got the idea from steel guitarists such as McAuliffe and Boggs. “In those days in the Wills band,” Shamblin remembers, “you never knew when you’d get a solo. Bob would just point his fiddle bow at you and say, ‘Take it away.’ Junior didn’t have time to turn the volume up, so you can see that the pedal was a time-saving device.”

heh heh..”Barnard was a loud guitarist who had an overdriven tube sound”. If Junior wasn’t the first electric player, he was certainly one of the first and it sounds like he got the hang of it pretty quick.

Here are the Texas Playboys doing “Goodbye Liza Jane” and featuring a neat solo by Junior.

As always, swing over to the side bar and press pause on the music player before playing the YouTube.