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Californian staff writer Sometimes, right in the middle of a song, Merle Haggard would turn around on stage and call out Roy Nichols’ name. It was as much a warning to the audience as an introduction: A lead-guitar solo was coming, folks, so pay attention. And sometimes, right after Nichols’ subsequent excursion down the well-traveled neck of his Fender Telecaster, Haggard would burst out laughing in utter amazement. Nichols’ solos, as often as not, were unrehearsed, ad-libbed escapades that no one - not even Nichols himself - could have expected to hear. Nichols, a member for 22 years of Haggard’s renowned band, the Strangers, was notorious for such live musical meanderings. There has always been a little jazz - no, a lot of jazz - in Nichols’ style: It was his talent for right-brain-to-left-hand, stream-of-consciousness creativity that gave Haggard’s music a distinctive edge. French-Gypsy jazz guitar virtuoso Django Reinhardt was perhaps Nichols’ greatest influence, and that influence showed up in the most unlikely places. But as vast as his technical and creative skills might have been, Nichols’ most noteworthy role in the movement known as the Bakersfield Sound might have been that of musical Kilroy. Name most any prominent band in West Coast country music from the 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s or ‘70s, and the ubiquitous Nichols was there: the Maddox Brothers & Rose, Lefty Frizzell, Cousin Herb Henson, Wynn Stewart, and starting in 1965 or so, Haggard and the Strangers. “I guess you could say I did it all,” said Nichols, now 65 and retired in Bakersfield. Nichols, born in 1932 in Chandler, Ariz., and raised in Fresno, was two weeks shy of his 16th birthday when he met Fred Maddox, bass player and resident smart-aleck of the Maddox Brothers. Maddox, whose band was already a hillbilly icon in the country-music world of 1949, had heard Nichols playing guitar on the Saturday-morning radio program of Fresno DJ Barney Lee. Someone introduced Nichols and Maddox, and Maddox ushered the teen-ager out to the parking lot, where he explained the rules of employment. Just like that, Nichols was hired. During his 18-month association with the band, Nichols earned $90 a week, a staggering fortune for a 16-year-old. “He could play anything,” said Rose Maddox. “He was good at all of it. Every guitar picker in the country wanted to play like him, but none of them ever compared. He was one of a kind. But the music aside, he was like any 16-year-old kid - feisty, causing us trouble. But my mother brought him under.” One night in Mesa, Ariz., at a Maddox & Rose concert at the local high school gymnasium, a teen-age couple worked their way up to the very front of the crowd. Resting their elbows, hands and chins on the front of the stage, Buck Owens and Bonnie Campbell Owens studied every wiggle, every riff. “I never took my eyes off Rose
Maddox,” said Bonnie. “Buck never took his eyes
off Roy Nichols.” Fred had quite the opposite sort of influence. He taught Roy the fine art of sneaking out of and back into hotel rooms without being caught by colorfully domineering Lula Maddox, the family matriarch and band manager. Nichols got pretty good at it. During intermissions he would canvass the dance hall, line up dates with attractive young females and hustle back up to the stage. He did pretty well for himself, by most accounts. But Las Vegas was the beginning of the end. “I’d sneak out at night playing the slots,” Nichols said. “Lula caught me one night and told me never to do it again. But I did it anyway, the next night. So she fired me.” During his brief stay with the band, Nichols recorded more than 100 songs, even while performing seven nights a week almost year-round. Nichols already had another job waiting for him back in the valley with Smiley Maxidon, whose daily one-hour radio show was broadcast live on Hanford’s KNGS. Nichols also played at dances three nights a week, staying up all night on those occasions until it was time for the 7 a.m. radio program. A year later, Nichols went to work for Lefty Frizzell, a Texan whose “If You’ve Got the Money, Honey, I’ve Got the Time” made him a legend in the eyes of many in Bakersfield. Haggard was one such devoted fan, but he came to admire Nichols as well after watching him play with Frizzell at the Rainbow Gardens in 1953. Haggard, 14, got up his courage and approached Nichols, 18. “What’s it like playing with Lefty Frizzell?” he asked him. Not worth a darn, Nichols answered. Nonetheless, Nichols obliged when Haggard asked to meet the star; Merle even convinced Frizzell to put him on stage as an impromptu opening act. In 1954, after making several recordings with Frizzell, Nichols returned to work for another year with Maxidon. He then joined Cousin Herb Henson’s “Trading Post” on Bakersfield’s KERO-TV, a five-days-a-week, 45-minute show that ran for nearly 11 years. Nichols stayed with the show, off and on, until Henson suffered a fatal heart attack in November 1963. During that time he also played at the Foothill Club in Long Beach with Billy Mize and Cliff Crofford, toured and recorded with Johnny Cash and, in 1960, joined Wynn Stewart’s band in Las Vegas. He came to be good friends with that band’s bass player, Merle Haggard. It was the beginning of a professional and personal relationship that would span another four decades. In early 1965, Nichols, his wife and
1-year-old daughter moved back to Bakersfield (a son came
along later) and Nichols worked for a time at Tex’s
Barrel House. He soon met up again with Haggard, whose
monetary disasters in the card rooms of Vegas had
hastened his departure from Nevada. In August 1966, when
Haggard officially formed the first incarnation of the
Strangers, Nichols was his first hire. Nichols, whose aggressive but eloquent style foreshadowed the emergence of rockabilly by a half-decade, developed techniques later embraced and absorbed by three generations of rock and country guitarists. Along with James Burton, who has played lead guitar for Haggard, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and others, he popularized the “chicken pickin’” guitar technique. Nichols also worked out a distinctive descending-note move that Lula Maddox once likened to the sound of “a horsey fartin’.” But Nichols became best known for a string-bending technique that was all his: While many guitar players hit a note and then proceed to stretch the string into a sharp, Nichols preferred to bend it first, strike the string, and then relax it, lowering the note. Between 1966 and 1987, Haggard and his band, driven instrumentally by the formidable combination of Nichols and Farmersville-bred steel guitarist Norm Hamlet, recorded 38 songs that reached No. 1 on the Billboard country charts and another 33 that reached the top 10. Nichols wrote 19 published songs of his own, including one, “Street Singer,” that was nominated for a Grammy award in 1970. In March 1987 he quit the road and
retired from the band. The following year he was inducted
into the Western Swing Society Hall of Fame in
Sacramento. Friends and colleagues aren’t inclined to let Nichols get away with that. “I have not seen his equal in country music among people playing lead guitar,” said Tommy Collins, a former Bakersfield honky-tonk star who went on to write 300 songs, including Haggard’s “Sam Hill” and “Go Home.” “He would play so tasty, so skillfully, and with class.” In February 1996, Nichols suffered a stroke that put him in a wheelchair and cost him the use of his left hand. He attends therapy sessions twice a week. These days, 10 years into retirement, he is generally known only to fans of Haggard’s music, and to guitar players interested in the culture and tradition of their instrument. Sometimes, however, the general public gets a glimpse of the man who helped make Haggard the star he eventually became. One such occasion was a May 1997 performance by Big House at Owens’ Crystal Palace. Monty Byrom, rhythm guitarist and lead singer for the Bakersfield-bred band, looked out into the packed house, toward Nichols’ place in the crowd. “We hope Roy Nichols is likin’ this,” Byrom said, “‘cause he was the man.”
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