Charlie Christian

His brother Clarence remembered Christian's ambition in his own words, decades later: he "wanted his guitar to sound like a saxophone" — meaning the sound of Lester Young, the Basie tenor player who'd been floating through Oklahoma City with Walter Page's Blue Devils since Christian was a young teenager. A bandmate from the Goodman Sextet recalled something more concrete: Christian bought a portable Victrola and learned every Young solo on record note for note. The novelist Ralph Ellison, who knew them both in Oklahoma City, later called Young "perhaps the most stimulating influence upon Christian."

listen: upstream & heresource: Kevin Centlivre, "Revisiting Charlie Christian" (Lester Young influence and Ralph Hamilton anecdote, via Clarence Christian's 1978 interview) ↗share

1936

Lady Be GoodLester Young

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1939

Seven Come ElevenCharlie Christian

listen forYoung's solo on "Lady Be Good" floats behind the beat, long unbroken lines that breathe like a voice rather than snapping to the rhythm section. Put it next to Christian's "Seven Come Eleven" and the same loose, horn-like phrasing is there, just picked out note by note on an amplified guitar instead of blown through a reed, the runs unspooling in that same relaxed, unhurried way Young made his tenor sound.

Durham had been rigging pie pans and megaphones to his guitar since 1929, and by the time he crossed paths with Christian on an Oklahoma City tour stop, the younger man wasn't even playing guitar yet — just "a little piano," Durham recalled. Once Christian took up the instrument, he sought Durham out for technique, not equipment: "I said, don't ever use an upstroke... use a downstroke — it gives a staccato sound, with no legato, and you sound like a horn," Durham recalled telling him. Within a few years Durham was amplifying the Basie rhythm section himself; the idea he'd handed Christian became a career.

listen: upstream & heresource: Bob Burke, Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture — "Christian, Charles Henry" (biography, Eddie Durham teaching claim) ↗share

1938

Countless BluesEddie Durham

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1941

Air Mail SpecialCharlie Christian

listen forDurham's solo on "Countless Blues," recorded with Basie sidemen eight months before Christian joined Goodman, has exactly the attack he described: short, punched, staccato notes with no scoop or slur between them, a horn's tongued articulation rather than a strummed chord. Christian's "Air Mail Special" takes that same downstroke snap and multiplies it into faster, longer single-note lines, the amplified tone Durham pioneered now carrying an entire band's lead voice.

According to Christian's brother Clarence, in a 1978 interview relayed by biographers, it began as a practical joke: the trumpeter James Simpson, who had an uneasy relationship with Christian's older brother Edward, arranged for a local guitarist, Ralph "Bigfoot Chuck" Hamilton, to secretly teach the young Charles to solo on three songs behind the family's back, around 1931. When Simpson finally brought Charles to one of Edward's own Deep Deuce jam sessions, Edward was astonished his kid brother already knew every tune. One of them was "Rose Room" — the very song Christian would record, eight years later, as his first issued solo with Benny Goodman.

listen: upstream & hereshare

No known recordingRalph "Bigfoot Chuck" Hamilton

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1939

Rose RoomCharlie Christian

listen forNo recording of Hamilton survives to compare, but the throughline is the tune itself: "Rose Room" is the exact song he is remembered to have drilled into a hidden-away teenager at Deep Deuce jam sessions. Listen for how assured Christian's solo already sounds on that first issued take, clean single-note lines with no hesitation in them, the sound of a tune he'd apparently had under his fingers, secretly, for the better part of a decade.