Probably the most prevalent piece of film of Roy Clark – as it pertained to his guitar playing – is of the guitarist performing the ragtime standard "Twelfth Street Rag" on The Jimmy Dean Show. Clark, at the time not yet one of the two presenters for 1960s American television staple Hee Haw, stood planted before a farmhouse façade armed with a Fender Jaguar from what would have been one of its earliest production years. His rendition of the song has been swept up in online guitar circles more than once due to Clark's breakneck chicken pickin', his then-contemporary Fender instrument, and his vaudevillian facial acting. Clark was a showman in more ways than one, but what can we deduce about the electric guitar by studying his approach?
The Origin Story
It goes without saying, but Roy Clark's most known work comes from a different cultural era. In a time when just about everything needed a live studio audience and there were Coca-Cola and Marlboro sponsorships that needed pushin', Clark's clownish theatrics coupled with his evident musicality slipped seamlessly into a variety show segment such as his on Jimmy Dean. Everyone's getting a television, and just as your expressions on the stage needed to translate to the cheap seats, that seventeen-inch Westinghouse tube ain't doing you that many more favors. The tech isn't totally there yet and we haven't even considered the local station's reception yet, so your fretting and picking has to be big, fast, and theatrical as a necessity.
The Secret Sauce
Clark glides across the short-scale offset as light as a feather. Despite his imposing silhouette against the wooden backdrop and his beefy fingers against the Fender's rosewood, Clark zips across the scale as quickly as if it were a country fiddle's. Clark knows to bring the goods. Two minutes on national television doesn't come easy, after all.
Our Call
There is an inclination (call it a bias, perhaps) in electric guitar discourse to skip over the institution of country music. Like it or not, country music is a pretty ingrained American touchstone with generations of practice. We can all point to the Johnny Ramones, Kurt Cobains, or Jimi Hendrixs of history as the true movers in the United States' contribution to the electric guitar myth, but there is a reason we stop on clips like Clark's where he handles his black-and-white TV-friendly offset like an agitated chicken trying to take flight from his arms. Guitarists like Clark might not get their flowers as regularly as their more counterculture counterparts, but at the honkey-tonk, they've got the whole world in the palm of their hand.