When I first bought a steel guitar in late 2007 I was searching for lessons in Oklahoma City. Some search results led me to an email address to a guy in Prague, OK. I emailed, James responded quite quickly, very excited to provide me with lessons. I drove out on a January Saturday afternoon, went down a long gravel road, then a winding left turn brought me to James and Trees' place. I unloaded my Carter Starter and went in and introduced myself and shook hands, started setting up. As I was setting up, I thought, "something isn't right here". I was new to pedal steel so I looked the guitar over and thought to myself, "You idiot, you forgot your pedal board". I felt pretty stupid looking up to this guy I just met and had to tell him I had forgotten a pretty important part of the guitar. He and Tree kinda laughed, James said that was ok and let me play his daughters beautiful Sho Bud. He proceeded to explain how the E9 neck works and I felt like I was finally going to learn how to make honky tonk music.
Over the next few years James taught me a lot and helped a ton with guitar issues. I eventually bought a beautiful 73 sho bud with the help of James and he got that guitar into amazing playing condition. I eventually made another bad decision and sold it, I fooled around with Fender 1000s and non pedal guitars for a couple years and James and I didn't see each other quite as much. Then, James met Ed Rhea who had a 59 or 60 Sho Bud. It was/is kinda the perfect guitar for me and he worked his tail off getting it to play the way I needed it to. James was so good with Sho Buds.....I knew at the time I wasn't taking advantage of his knowledge and should've been learning all I could from him about these guitars and getting them to play perfect!
I said in another thread I'd give anything to drive down that gravel road again and pick on the steel with James and watch him work. And his amps! The best sounding amps ever. Hazelnut coffee will always make me think of James. He is a very important loss to the steel guitar world, especially us Sho Bud guys. I know James fought hard and I'm very sad. Tree let me know if there's anything I can do.
I always loved James Cowboy proverb in his sig tag here on the forum. I think it was, 'Good judgment comes from experience, and a lotta that comes from bad judgment'.
I love you James, I'll miss you. RIP my friend:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiEoAoUN-Kc
