In Sessions
Recommendations from Rainey and guitarist
Eric Gale—who would later become
Dupree’s bandmate in the jazz-funk band
Stuff—brought Dupree a steady stream of
session work in New York. More fortuitously,
Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler, who
had first met Dupree at a live recording date
at Harlem’s Apollo Theater in 1965, was soon
using the guitarist on sessions in New York,
Miami, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama. In the
liner notes to Dupree’s 1994 solo album,
Bop
’n’ Blues’, Wexler described what made him so
valuable in the studio: “It was our practice to
use three or even more guitarists on a record
session. Time and again what we would get
into was a hellacious mess as the three guitarists
got in each other’s way,’’ said Wexler.
“So when Dupree, the pride of Fort Worth,
came to our rescue, it was bye-bye to multiple
guitarists because—miraculously, it seemed
to me—one man playing rhythm and lead at
the same time took the place of three.’’
Dupree’s big breakthrough came in
1969, with a session he did for another
Atlantic producer, Arif Mardin, in 1969.
He backed Brook Benton on the Tony Joe
White tune “Rainy Night in Georgia,” and
the flowing, parallel-fourth double-stops
and sliding-sixth fills he’d played on the hit
had his phone ringing off the hook.
By 1971, videos show that Dupree had
started playing a Fender Telecaster to help him
cut through dense live and recorded mixes.
The pickguard had been removed, and the
screw holes had been filled with large metal
bolts that gave it a studded appearance. It
also had a Gretsch-style DeArmond pickup
between the neck and bridge pickups. An
additional control plate under the original
appears to have held an extra knob and switch,
no doubt to control the middle pickup.
Dupree eventually collaborated with
Yamaha and began playing a Tele-style
instrument that was marketed as the
Cornell Dupree model. And with a humbucker
in the neck position, a single-coil-sized
blade humbucker in the middle, and
a Tele-style bridge pickup it was a versatile
machine. Toward the end of his career,
Dupree was seen primarily with Yamaha
Pacifica Tele-style instruments.
The ’70s and ’80s saw two decades of
constant session work with some of the biggest
names in the business including Aretha
Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Donny Hathaway,
and Mariah Carey. But he wasn’t just playing
for commercially successful vocalists. He also
tracked sessions with heavyweight jazz artists
such as David “Fathead” Newman, Les
McCann, Eddie Harris, Herbie Mann, Grover
Washington Jr., Billy Cobham, and Sonny
Stitt. And his rock and pop gigs included stints
with Joe Cocker, Ian Hunter, and Carly Simon.
