Eddie Drake: A Quarter for Your Time

 

 

James “Eddie” Drake knew how it feels to be tired, neglected, and on the road. If that sounds like a song lyric, it probably is one. He worked in music most of his life, supplying licks behind some big-name artists in Nashville and Cincinnati. When he settled down in Hamilton, Ohio, a regional hub of pure country, bluegrass, and gospel, he discovered his niche. At Jewel Recording in Mount Healthy, Eddie played on many sessions with a studio band consisting of Junior Boyer, pedal steel; Bob Sanderson, bass; Jack Sanderson, rhythm guitar; and Denzil “Denny” Rice, piano. Eddie also played in a short-lived studio session band at Shad O’Shea’s Counterpart Recording. 

From the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, the Hamilton guitarist wrote all kinds of songs, toured the country, played on hundreds of recording sessions, and taught aspiring musicians and songwriters.

His musical diversity was encouraged by Chet Atkins, Eddie’s guitar hero. Many years ago, the men met before a concert. “Chet gave me two quarters and told me to get us two Cokes,” Eddie recalled. “I substituted a quarter for the one he gave me and glued his quarter to my guitar. I was such a huge fan.”

Eddie began playing music in Hazard County, Kentucky, when he was fifteen.

“The local radio station broadcast live shows then, and I won the 1959 Pet Milk-Grand Ole Opry music contest,” Eddie said. “On Saturdays I played guitar in a theater that offered live music thirty minutes before the shows. It was a great way to learn what an audience likes.”

In the early 1960s, he moved to Cincinnati and started playing music at the Wayside Inn, a honky-tonk near the village of Seven Mile in Butler County.

“It was there that I heard that down the road, at the Golden Key, they had an unbelievable piano player named Dumpy Rice,” Eddie said. “I went over to hear his group, and I wanted to play with them. They each made twenty-five dollars a week. I told the club owner that I’d play for $12.50 a week just for the opportunity to play with that band.”

A decade later, Eddie strummed an identifiable guitar lick on “Harlan,” a record by singer-songwriter Bobby Borchers on the regional Counterpart label of Cincinnati. The session started a short but intense career as a Cincinnati session musician at Counterpart Recording, Jewel Recording, and other studios. He took time to record his own instrumental album, The Sounds of Eddie Drake’s Guitar, and other records for the Cincinnati-based General American label and the Juke Records label based in Hamilton. Juke, owned by the owner of Club Miami, was the outlet owner’s label. He used his own records in many boxes in the Cincinnati and Hamilton area. The owner paired Eddie with Dumpy Rice, performing Eddie’s original instrumental “Duck Soup.”

By 1995, Eddie lived in a working-class neighborhood with his wife, Sharon, and their collie, Leo. Eddie played occasional gigs with friends. He taught guitar at Mehas Music store in Hamilton. He also worked with new songwriters, who came to his basement—also known as Duck Soup Studio—to record demos on a small Teac and Fostex recorders. He claimed he operated Duck Soup as a hobby, but clients lined up to cut their songs there, and Dumpy was a staff musician.

His interest in songwriting began grow over the years. In 1980, he won several Billboard songwriting contests. He began to branch out, writing country, jazz, and pop songs.

Sitting beneath steer horns mounted on a basement wall one afternoon in 1995, Eddie balanced an acoustic guitar while turning knobs on his recorder. Wires stretched around doors; a coal cellar masqueraded as a vocal booth. In this sonic wonderland he and Dumpy recorded a jazz-pop album. Dumpy, a Cincinnati and Hamilton music legend, wrote the hit “There’s a Honky-Tonk Angel (Who’ll Take Me Back In),” a big hit for Elvis Presley and Conway Twitty in the 1970s.

“Dumpy inspired me and showed me the ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ of songwriting,” Eddie said. “Now, I find myself helping other songwriters. I critique their songs.”

His publisher, Wendell Fowler of West Chester, Ohio, said he’d like to have 1,000 of Eddie’s songs.

“He hasn’t written a bad one,” Fowler said. “If I could only get a few record companies to open their doors and listen, they’d feel the same way about him.”

 

                Eddie Drake’s single “Guitar,” early 1970s. 

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