Floyd Cramer – Last Date

When the piano became an integral part of Nashville arrangements in the early 1960s, the pianist who shouldered the load was Floyd Cramer. He popularized the “slip-note” technique on dozens of hits by a wide range of artists, but deserves to be just as famous for his unerring taste and his understanding of what not to play.

Cramer grew up in the small sawmill town of Huttig, Arkansas. He learned piano by ear, and, after graduation from high school in 1951, he moved to Shreveport and found a job on the Louisiana Hayride. He arrived just as Lefty Frizzell’s records were popularizing what Cramer termed “a plinking honky-tonk type piano.” He played in that style on Jim Reeves’s “Mexican Joe” and made his first record for Abbott Records in 1953.