ABSTRACT
Jimmie Tarlton was born the son of sharecropper parents in Orange County, South Carolina, in 1892. From his mother he learned to sing old ballads; from his father he learned to play the archaic fretless banjo. He also learned the guitar, and by the time he was twelve he was playing in the open tuning and slide style he had picked up from black musicians in North and South Carolina and Georgia. At seventeen he left home, determined to make his living as a musician. Like many early country musicians, he spent time in the textile mills of the Piedmont region of North Carolina, and then took off “busking”—traveling around the country playing on street corners, in bars, at county fairs, wherever he could find listeners willing to pitch a nickel into his
guitar case. By 1922 he had made it to the West Coast, and was hanging out with the famous Hawaiian guitarist Frank Ferrara. Ferrara taught Jimmie how to use a better slide, a piece of polished steel that helped him note with much greater precision. He also taught him how to adapt pop songs of the day to the steel guitar, and how to improve the instrument’s sound. By the mid-1920s the young man had returned to Columbus, Georgia, and set about synthesizing all these new ideas.
