SGR: What a great show you put on tonight!
Bobby: Thank you, Gib. I try to play what I feel and what God put’s inside of me to play. I hope I came a little
close.
SGR: It was a pleasure watching you work with those great Nashville musicians. The sound was great
coming from the stage.
Bobby: Living in Houston, I don’t have the chance to pick with Nashville people all the time. When I do get the chance,
I’m thrilled and honored to take it.
SGR: Born in Texas?
Bobby: I was born in St. Joe Infirmary in Houston, Texas. Back in those days, they called it an infirmary, not a hospital.
Where I grew up was more farm type. Now it’s part of the city of Houston. As a kid growing up in the late 30’s,
early 40’s, we were about thirty miles out of town, but now that’s part of Houston.
SGR: When did you get your first steel?
Bobby: If you want to call it a steel, it was really a guitar that my daddy put a raised nut on to get the strings off
the neck, when I was four years old.
SGR: Did you bar it or fingerpick it?
Bobby: It was more like rhythm. My daddy was an old time fiddler, what they called a breakdown fiddler. My oldest brother
played rhythm guitar for him. That’s really what I wanted to be, but my fingers were too small at four years old to
reach around a guitar neck. So daddy just tuned it in E, raised the strings up for me and gave me a Barlow knife, I mean a
real Barlow knife and a flat pick. I learned to play rhythm with them and moved the bar up and down according to the chord
changes.
SGR: When did you start using pedals?
Bobby: Really, pretty late. Thanks to a fellow named Bert Reveria, at the time was playing with Hank Thompson. I was in
the service. This would be around 1960. I went to see them, and I saw this thing up there that was a little different. It
was a pedal steel. I had seen some of the old Gibson Electra-Harps, the Multi-Kords, but we didn’t think of them back
in those days as we do now. In 1960 was when I started playing modern day’s pedal steel guitar.
SGR: Would you call yourself predominately an E9 or C6 guy?
Bobby: I certainly have more request and opportunity to play E9, but I really enjoy a lot of C6 and that type of stuff.
SGR: Bobby, thanks for your time.
Bobby: You’re welcome my friend.
