Buddy Harman born 23 December 1928

Murrey Mizell "Buddy" Harman, Jr. (December 23, 1928 – August 21, 2008) was one of Nashville's outstanding session drummers who has played his solid, driving beat on over 18,000 recording sessions during five decades. He is one of the most-recorded session drummers of all time.

Buddy Harman is probably the most recorded drummer in music history He is reputed to have played on some 18,000 Nashville sessions during five decades. The list of artists that he has recorded with reads like a Who’s Who of popular music. Harman is usually seen as a country musician, but he also made many contributions to rock ’n’ roll and to recordings by mainstream pop performers like Perry Como, Ann-Margret, Simon and Garfunkel, Nancy Sinatra, Connie Francis and many others. That says enough about his versatility as a drummer.

Harman’s parents had their own part-time band in Nashville, with his mother on drums. Jazz drummers Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich inspired him to become a professional drummer. Buddy worked in a cinema to save up the money for his first drum set, which was a Slingerland that he played in the band he set up when he was in High School. Eventually he joined the US Navy and played in Military Bands before he returned to Nashville to take up a place at University. His parents realised he was serious about playing drums and sent him to Roy C. Knapp’s School of Percussion in Chicago for three years. This was where Louie Bellson, Dave Tough, Baby Dodds, Bobby Christian, Gene Krupa, Hal Blaine, Freddie Below, and many others, studied.

Upon his return to Nashville in 1952, he learned that, contrary to protocol before his departure, country artists were now asking for drums on their record. Gradually, Harman worked his way into Nashville’s emerging recording scene and took up full-time studio work about 1955. Initially some country producers were reluctant to give him much leeway but his solid, tasteful playing on sessions with artists such as Ray Price, Moon Mullican and Martha Carson helped to expand the role of drums in country music.

The A-Team: Bob Moore - Grady Martin - Buddy Harman

By 1957 he had become the first-call drummer for Nashville sessions and Nashville’s first full-time studio session drummer. Thus Harman became a member of the famous Nashville A-Team, along with Grady Martin, Hank Garland, Ray Edenton, Bob Moore, Floyd Cramer, Boots Randolph and a few others. Buddy has played on some of the biggest hits of Grand Ole Opry performers, including Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Roy Acuff, Hank Snow, Marty Robbins, Ray Price, Billy Walker, Roy Clark, Don Gibson, Johnny Horton, Chet Atkins, Loretta Lynn and countless others.

                          

Buddy released only a handful of recordings under his own name: two singles and an EP for Warner Bros (1960-61), two singles for Mercury (1962-63)/

Apart from scores of number ones on the country charts, Harman can also be heard on at least eighteen # 1 hits on the pop charts, for instance “Wake Up Little Susie”, “Cathy’s Clown” (Everly Brothers), “The Battle Of New Orleans” (Johnny Horton), “Big Bad John” (Jimmy Dean), “The Three Bells” (The Browns), “Running Scared”, “Oh, Pretty Woman” (Roy Orbison), “I’m Sorry” (Brenda Lee). Also five chart toppers by Elvis Presley, who usually worked with two drummers, D.J. Fontana and Buddy Harman (at least in the first half of the 1960s). When Elvis recorded in Los Angeles, D.J. Fontana went along with him, but not Harman (with one or two exceptions). He was replaced by Hal Blaine on the West Coast sessions.

In 1959 Buddy became the Grand Ole Opry’s first staff drummer. By the mid-1960s, Harman was working some 600 sessions a year. This number declined by the late 1970s, as the influx of pickers from other cities and Nashville’s growing recording activity reduced the dominance he had once enjoyed. Harman remained active in the studio, however, and toured as a member of the Nashville Super Pickers in the late seventies and the early 1980s.

In 1991 he returned to the stool of house drummer at the Grand Ole Opry. He continued to play occasional sessions and served as a business agent for the Nashville local of the American Federation of Musicians .In 2001, Buddy recorded  a self-produced album, “Buddy Harman Plays the Classic Rock ’n’ Roll Hits Of Yesteryear”. Harman said: “One of the highlights of my career was having the privilege of performing for four of our nation’s presidents”. They were : John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

Harman died at the Hospice Center in Nashville from congestive heart failure on August 21st 2008, at the age of 79. (Edited from BlackCat Rockabilly, Moderndrummer, Drummerworld, AllMusic & Mikedolbear.)