The King and His Heirs
The following originally appeared in the GRAND JUNCTION FREE PRESS:
If popular music is a river, it is one without beginning or end.
On and on across the landscape of modern history it flows, its constant chug and churn fueled by new sounds supplanting old. Like the mythical worm Ouroboros — that tail-devouring snake that has represented infinity since the days of the Pharaohs — pop music has always eaten itself, forever propelled by the alchemical reactions that occur when young generations of musicians build upon — and then replace — their elders on the musical stage.
Today we look back at a man whose life embodies this principle… a man who forever changed the musical landscape by merging new technology with ancient acoustics… a king who married a King… and a man whose grandchildren seized the spotlight just as he made his final bow… guitar great Alvino Rey.
Rey was born Alvin McBurney in the San Francisco area, and in 2011, it’ll be a hundred years since he was born, and only seven since pneumonia and congestive heart failure put a period to his life’s long story in 2004. As a youngster in the early 1920s, Rey displayed a natural aptitude for electronics, and built his first radio set at the age of eight. Around the same time, he fell in love with the banjo, and it was as a banjoist that Rey got his start as a professional musician, when he joined Cleveland bandleader Ev Jones’ orchestra in 1927.
But within a few years, the soft-spoken prodigy was playing under his new name for San Francisco bandleader Horace Heidt. It was while working for Heidt that Rey was introduced to the two loves of his life: the steel guitar and Luise King. King was a knock-out blonde and one-fourth of the mellifluous King Sisters who, a couple generations before the Osmonds, proved that a talented Mormon brood from Utah could find mainstream musical success in California. When Rey left Heidt’s band in 1939, he took the King Sisters with him, inaugurating a professional association with the sister act that would continue for the next five decades.
In 1935, while still playing with Heidt, Rey helped invent the electric guitar for Gibson. He also invented and popularized the so-called “talk box,” which future guitarists like Pete Drake and Joe Walsh would put to memorable use. As a bandleader, he scored hits with Johnny Mercer’s “The Strip Polka” and Slim Gaillard’s “Cement Mixer,” and years later, as a well-respected sessions player, he added unforgettable guitar zing to records by the likes of Esquivel and George Cates.
In the early 1990s, Rey and his wife moved back to Salt Lake City, where the guitarist continued to perform sporadic shows. In 2004, just months after his death, the Arcade Fire — an alternative rock band led by Rey’s grandchildren, Win and Will Butler — released their critically lauded debut album FUNERAL. The album’s lyric sheet was designed to look like the program handed out at Rey’s funeral, and when the band released the single “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels),” they paid homage to their beloved grandfather by including his orchestra’s “My Buddy” as the b-side… sending Alvino Rey’s guitar down the never-ending river of popular music one last time.