Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys: Rockabilly as a Trade

Ask Robert Williams for the high points of a career that began in 1988 and he does not reach for a record deal or a review. He reaches for two nights, and he keeps them separate.

"Of all the things we've done, that means the most to me," he told SLUG Magazine in 2015, "it was being able to perform onstage at the Grand Ole Opry. It was so surreal — I felt like everything was in slow motion, and I kept having flashes of all my country music heroes like George Jones and Hank Williams."

Then, in the same breath, the other one: "The other thing that I still can't believe happened to me is that I was backed by Scotty Moore, DJ Fontana and James Burton, who all played with Elvis, and I had this moment where I was this music-crazy kid who's been listening to these guys his whole life."

Two separate occasions, two sets of heroes. That is the measure Big Sandy and his Fly-Rite Boys work by: a band from Anaheim, California, that has treated pre-rock American music as a trade to be practised rather than a period to be revived.

The kid with the records

Robert Williams grew up in Fullerton and, mostly, in Anaheim. His mother's side gave him doo-wop and R&B; his father, an Oklahoman, gave him country and the western swing of Bob Wills. Both parents are in the sound, and neither got edited out later.

The band's own site puts the appetite in one parenthesis. Rhythm and blues 45s, it says, led Williams to pursue singing as a teenager, and his record collection "continues to grow (75,000 and counting)" — the thing his songwriting keeps returning to.

1988: the trio

By the late eighties Williams had cycled through school bands and short-lived line-ups. The guitarist he found next was T.K. Smith, who played the older style without impersonating it.

The trio formed in 1988 — Smith on lead guitar, Wally Hersom on double bass, Bobby Trimble on drums — and worked as Big Sandy & The Fly-Rite Trio. It was a different group doing a different job: three pieces, no steel guitar, and a debut album, Fly Right, in 1990.

On the Go followed, and in 1993 the British independent No Hit issued the Down At Jake's Barbershop EP: a London label putting out a Californian trio.

From Trio to Boys

Between 1992 and 1993 the band grew into the name it still uses. Lee Jeffriess brought steel guitar; the Englishman Ashley Kingman took over on guitar and has been there ever since, which is more than three decades in the same band.

Jumping from 6 to 6 (HighTone, 1994) was the first album by the expanded group. What followed, year by year: Swingin' West in 1995, Feelin' Kinda Lucky in 1997, an instrumental album credited to the Fly-Rite Boys themselves in 1998, a Radio Favorites release in 1999, and Night Tide in 2000. The discographies disagree over two of the dates in that run: Dedicated to You is sometimes given as 1998, and On the Go is dated 1992 by Discogs and 1993 elsewhere. Carl Sonny Leyland sat at the piano between 1997 and 2000.

Williams put the approach to SLUG in his own terms: "We were just more of the mindset that we couldn't improve on what came before, but with energy and feeling, we could make it vital and exciting." Later in the same interview, on how the range widened: "Later on, we'd expand the influences, and that would make things more interesting and allow us to be more creative. We love all kinds of music, but it took a while for things to loosen up."

The long middle

Nearly a decade with HighTone ended without drama. Williams explained it to Country Standard Time in 2003, when It's Time! had just come out on Yep Roc: "The original contract had run its course. They had done for us what they were going to do — and vice-versa — and we don't feel like it ended with any bad feelings. It was just time for a new start. We were talking to Yep Roc, and they were really excited about the possibility of working together." The new contract called for three albums. It's Time! was produced by Wally Hersom — the original bass player, back behind the desk — and cut live in the studio to chase the spontaneity of the early records. Turntable Matinee followed in 2006.

The steel chair kept turning through those years. Jimmy Roy, previously with Ray Condo's Ricochets, took it over from Jeffriess in the 2000s, and for a stretch the band used whichever of its steel players was free. Joe Perez held the drum stool from the late nineties.

For the twenty-fifth anniversary in 2013 they re-recorded songs from across the whole catalogue, from the 1990 debut to Turntable Matinee, rather than assembling a greatest-hits package, and released the result as What a Dream It's Been on Cow Island Music.

Where that leaves them

The Rockabilly Hall of Fame and Museum lists Big Sandy & his Fly-Rite Boys among its inductees. Country Standard Time, writing in 2003, put them among the revivalist acts that had "come the closest to some measure of national awareness", with the HighTone years, television appearances and "occasional performances on the Grand Ole Opry" behind them — and noted that they were the only one of that group still performing regularly.

The catalogue kept going, out to a Freddy Fender tribute released at the start of the 2020 lockdown.

Selected recordings

The words to two of theirs: Hot Water from the Fly-Rite Trio days, and Let Her Know.

A note on sources

James Orme, "The Legend of Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys", SLUG Magazine, 2 April 2015 — `https://www.slugmag.com/music/interviews/music-interviews/the-legend-of-big-sandy-and-his-fly-rite-boys/`. Source for both quotations in the opening and for the two in "From Trio to Boys". The Opry and the Scotty Moore backing are given there as two separate recollections within one answer, and are kept separate here.
Country Standard Time, Big Sandy feature, 2003. The page is no longer served on the live site; the copy consulted is the Internet Archive capture of 6 August 2003 of `countrystandardtime.com/bigsandy2FEATURE.html`.
The band's official site, `https://www.bigsandy.net/the-band` — for the record collection, the founding year and the Freddy Fender release.
The Rockabilly Hall of Fame & Museum, inductee list, `https://www.rockabillyhalloffame.org/inductees-1`.
Discogs, artists 2145130 (Fly-Rite Trio) and 469020 (Fly-Rite Boys), for the release chronology.