> The string bender came into being due to Clarence hitting licks and
> getting Parsons to bend the string for him above the nut,that is between
> the tuner and the nut. Parsons', a skilled machinist, thought about it for
> awhile and put all the synapases in his big ole' head to work and invented
> the B-Bender.
You know, it's not completely and wholly impossible that there's no
connection whatsoever, but it is worth pointing out that someone who visited
the Los Angeles area regularly was using levers (cams, actually) to raise
the pitch of a string between tuner and nut from 1952 on - fella by the name
of Scruggs. A banjo's peghead easily accomodates an extra set of keys to
operate the cams, both because of its shape and because you're only dealing
with four strings (and Scruggs only used the lifters on two of them - the
ones with the regular tuning keys set furthest away from the nut). White,
in particular, would certainly have been aware of that, and the
between-tuner-and-nut bending described above is essentially a rough and
ready way of imitating the action of the original Scruggs pegs (Scruggs and
Bill Keith later invented a tuner that incorporated the ability to tune up
or down to a preset position within a single peg, eliminating the need for
extra "bending" pegs). The shape of a Telecaster headstock, the number of
strings and the size and shape of a guitar's tuning machines pretty well
rule out that solution for electric guitar, hence the need for Parsons'
innovation - putting the mechanism at the other end of the instrument, so to
speak.
Also relevant: string bending through "choking" - that is, pushing or
pulling the string on the fingerboard - seems to have been a "natural"
development (possibly an imitation of a slide guitar?) no later than the
late 40s and early 50s in both blues and bluegrass; James Burton, when asked
about it, told Country Guitar magazine that "back in the Fifties, I listened
to a lot of blues records and I heard a lot of string-bending," and you can
hear Scruggs choking strings back when he was with Monroe in 1946-48 - not
only on bluesy stuff like "Heavy Traffic Ahead," but also on things like
"Little Maggie" on Opry broadcasts.
BTW, "Bending The Strings" is the title of a wonderful - and well-known -
Allen Shelton instrumental that makes extensive use of Scruggs tuners;
Shelton originally recorded it with Jim Eanes back in 1957. Shelton was -
is - a master of using tuners to get licks that specifically and consciously
emulated the pedal steel, and he toured widely and recorded extensively with
Jim and Jesse in the early and mid-1960s.
Jon Weisberger Kenton County, KY [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://home.fuse.net/jonweisberger/
