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Dave Pomeroy and a few of his best friends.
It’s no surprise that Music City’s local comes with a fair bit of history. Along with New York, Memphis, Chicago, and Los Angeles, Nashville is one of the most important cities in the trajectory of not only American music, but the business that shaped that music. As the recorded music and radio industries exploded in the 1940s and ’50s, musicians found themselves in uncharted waters. Suddenly, there were new and enormous revenue streams—royalties and record sales—and musicians weren’t getting their share. Record labels were getting fat off the surplus.
So, the AFM organized the biggest music workers’ direct action in history. For nearly two years between 1942 and 1944, the AFM’s roughly 136,000 members engaged in a recording ban: They refused to produce any new recordings for the record labels until they were guaranteed a fair cut of the new profits. Some top talents like Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman stood by the strikers. Others, like Frank Sinatra, scabbed, and used non-union musicians on their recordings when AFM musicians refused. (I guess that’s why it’s “My Way,” not “Our Way.”)
Dave Pomeroy & the All-Bass Orchestra: "Buckle Up"
The strikes were successful, though later challenges and divisions within the movement diminished the initial victories. Still, it showed that the collective power of organized labor could go toe-to-toe with corporations, and get what musicians are owed for the magic they create. Musicians nowadays, who are up “streaming creek” without a paddle, need as much help as they can get. “The music business doesn’t have to be a win-lose,” says Pomeroy. “It can be a win-win when everybody treats each other the right way.”
“The music business doesn’t have to be a win-lose. It can be a win-win when everybody treats each other the right way.”
Pomeroy was raised a military kid, born in Italy and later moving to England with his family in 1961. He got a head start on the Beatles, and stayed up late to watch them make their debut on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. The Rolling Stones caught his ear just before his family uprooted to northern Virginia, where Pomeroy took piano lessons and played clarinet in the school band. But he wanted to join the school’s string orchestra, too, so he sought out an instrument. After starting out on the cello, he was promptly bumped over to bass guitar, which suited him just fine; he could dance around and sing with a bass hung across his shoulders. His parents helped him acquire a Gibson EB-2 (his hero Jack Bruce played Gibson basses, so he had to, too).
Pomeroy hung around Charlottesville—under the pretense that he was attending the University of Virginia—just long enough to meet some musicians to play with. But he skipped town again to move to London, where he lived for a year and cut his teeth in five different bands. Following a short stint in Denmark (his Hamburg, he quips), his European sabbatical was over, and it was time to get back stateside. His old friends from Charlottesville got a publishing deal in Nashville, so Pomeroy decided to give it a go. That was 46 years ago.
Pomeroy hit the road with Don Williams in 1980, and quickly learned the value of mutual respect and fair working conditions.
Rockabilly icon Sleepy LaBeef gave Pomeroy his first gig. LaBeef was a human jukebox, and would switch up sets every night. The law of the band was simple: Follow, or die. It was a crash course in ear and style training for Pomeroy. He bounced around until he landed his big break: backing up Texas country slinger Don Williams. Pomeroy played in Williams’ band for 14 years, from 1980 to 1994, and that time would shape the rest of his life. It was an incredible musical education, and it bridged him to new worlds in the music industry.
But more than those things, it was the consideration that Williams showed his musicians that changed Pomeroy’s life. “He treated us with great respect,” he explains, “and I didn’t realize for some time that that was not the norm, and that it was a lot worse for a lot of my colleagues and friends.” At 24, Pomeroy cowrote a song with Williams, and Williams promptly marched them to his label, MCA, to get the terms of the song’s production on paper.
“He treated us with great respect, and I didn’t realize for some time that that was not the norm, and that it was a lot worse for a lot of my colleagues and friends.”
Working with Williams cemented the value of that piece of paper. On Sunday, June 1, 1980, Williams and his band played at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. A month later, Pomeroy’s friend called to tell him to turn his TV on. The gig had been recorded for Casey Kasem’s America’s Top 10 program, and was airing. Pomeroy was over the moon, but things got even better—a short time later, he got a $1,000 check for the airing. When it aired again, he got another $1,000.
Dave Pomeroy's Gear
Over his 46 years in Nashville, Pomeroy has worked with the biggest stars of country and folk music. Emmylou Harris, performing with Pomeroy here in December 2023, brought him along to her sessions with the Chieftains in 1992.
Photo by Mickey Dobó
Basses
- Fleishman Custom 5-string electric upright bass
- 1967 Gibson EB-2
- G&L Fretless L-2000 bass
- G&L Fretted L-2000 bass
- 1963 Fender Precision bass
Amps
- Genzler Magellan 800 Head with Genzler cabs
Effects
- Boss GT-10B
- Boss RC-50
- Boss RC-600
- SWR Mo’ Bass preamp
- Ampeg SVT preamp
- Line 6 Bass POD Pro
- Avalon U5 Class A Active Instrument DI and Preamp
- Trace Elliot V-Type preamp
- Morley wah pedal
- Morley volume pedal
Strings
- GHS Pressurewound
“I thought, ‘Holy moly, this is how this stuff works?’” remembers Pomeroy. “There were so many times that we’d find out about these things with other artists, and nobody bothered to say anything; nobody turned it into paperwork. [They would say,] ‘Oh, I didn’t know we were supposed to get paid.’ I didn’t know we were supposed to get paid, but somebody took care of it. That was just the way Don was.”
Over his years gigging in Nashville, Pomeroy would work with the most celebrated songwriters in American folk and country music, such as Earl Scruggs, Guy Clark, George Jones, Emmylou Harris, Chet Atkins, and Alison Krauss. He honed his voice on the instrument when he got an upright fretless electric bass, which he played on Keith Whitley’s 1988 record, Don’t Close Your Eyes. Pomeroy’s dramatic downward slide on “I’m No Stranger to the Rain” had his phone ringing off the hook. Harris then invited him to join her playing with the Chieftains in 1992, and told him to bring along “the bass from space.” Pomeroy’s outside-of-the-box streak continued on his performances and arrangements of his song “The Day the Bass Players Took Over the World,” and his All-Bass Orchestra.
“They basically said, ‘Hey, these are our friends, and we’re not going to screw them over … We’re going to do this right.’”
Eventually, his path curved toward the studio world, where he started to take more notice of the local union’s role in making music. In the early 2000s, Pomeroy gravitated towards a subgroup of the AFM called the Recording Musicians Association, where he revived a sense of participation and engagement in negotiations. In 2008, he ran against the NMA’s incumbent president, Harold Bradley, who had held the post for 18 years. Pomeroy won the election, and has held the seat ever since.
Pomeroy has advocated for better working conditions for artists for decades, including supporting the Fair Play Fair Pay Act in 2017, which addressed issues with terrestrial radio.
Photo courtesy of the Music First Coalition
The Nashville local has grown from the “hillbilly cousin,” Pomeroy says, into an organization that develops and implements original policy. The AFM’s single-song overdub scale came out of the NMA, and it wasn’t an easy process. There were drawn-out debates over where the pay floor should be, depending on the song. “Are we talking about ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ or are we talking about Mahler’s Symphony No. 6?” says Pomeroy. The minimum, they decided, was $100. But, instead of simply being handed a crisp Benjamin, you would sign a piece of paper alongside it. “Then you could pay into your pension for years,” says Pomeroy.
The home studio overdub scale, too, was an NMA creation. And when Dolly Parton and Jason Aldean wanted to use recorded tracks onstage as part of their shows, they went to the NMA to work out how to do it right.
“I’m nice, but I’m also very persistent. I’m a Taurus. I’m not going to let things go. We’re going to work this out.”
Parton wanted a saxophone part in one of her songs without touring with a saxophonist, and Aldean wanted to use the acoustic guitar and piano from his hit ballad with Kelly Carson, “Don’t You Wanna Stay.” So, the NMA studied a Broadway touring show’s pay rates to come up with a scale for that situation, and the performers whose recorded work was being played earned up to $12,000 extra in a year, thanks to the formula. Some artists, says Pomeroy, can scheme their way around the scales by getting their road band to rerecord the parts for less money. “But a lot of artists are willing to pay to have the good stuff,” he says.
Pomeroy explains that at the start of its golden era, Nashville’s recording music business was a little fairer toward its artists. The labels like Decca and RCA Victor were run by Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins, respectively, and even though the labels wanted to turn a profit on “hillbilly music,” Bradley and Atkins were wise enough to know that they ought to give their artists a fair deal. “They basically said, ‘Hey, these are our friends, and we’re not going to screw them over. We got to play with them Saturday night at the country club, so we’re going to do this right, and do it on a union contract,’’ Pomeroy shares.
Pomeroy’s music and union work aren’t separate—they’re both part of a single vision, where artists can create and perform with dignity.
Photo by Jim McGuire
Sometimes, the dividends for doing this “right” are immediate and obvious. But other times, like Pomeroy experienced, they might take a little while to manifest. In 1990, Mazda used Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces” in a commercial for their new RX-7 car. One day, a 90-year-old man came into the NMA offices to pick up a royalties check for $2,000. He had played violin in the song’s string section. He told Pomeroy he’d been paid $57 to record his parts back in 1960. “To me, that makes it all worthwhile,” says Pomeroy.
A decent chunk of his work, says Pomeroy, falls into dealing with well-meaning people who might not have known they were shortchanging a musician, but need some reminding, all the same, to pony up. Other times, he and the AFM have to push a little harder to get musicians what they’re owed. “I chase people down,” says Pomeroy. “I’m nice, but I’m also very persistent. I’m a Taurus. I’m not going to let things go; we’re going to work this out.” Pomeroy says they’ve successfully sued for nearly a million dollars from employers who “didn’t want to do the right thing, and got to do the right thing the hard way.” Some of those people end up on Music City’s “Most Wanted”: the Nashville Musicians Association’s “Do Not Work For” list. It exists to warn both performers and the public about employers who are known to either break union contracts, or solicit union musicians to work outside a union contract.
All of this might seem separate or secondary to the actual creation and performance of music. But that belief, whether held subconsciously or expressed explicitly, is what has allowed musicians to remain overworked and underpaid for the past century, or more. If we really believe that music brings value to our lives, why shouldn’t the labor that enables its creation be supported fairly? And besides, musicians are workers like any other. If you saw a boss raking in stacks of cash while their employees struggled to make rent, you’d be pissed off, right? Well, that’s the situation a lot of music workers find themselves in these days. Pomeroy and the AFM have their work cut out for them.
But, it’s easier for Pomeroy when he sees a common ground between his music work and his union work. Sometimes, they collide, like on his song, “What Unions Did for You.” Each feeds and emboldens the other. “I have to have the creative stuff to balance out the administrative stuff,” says Pomeroy. “But in a lot of ways, the admin stuff that I do is a lot like being a bass player. You’re rushing, you’re dragging, it’s right here in the middle; let’s see if we can find that place where everybody’s gonna feel good.”
YouTube It
Dave Pomeroy bops through a solo performance of the riotous, bassman’s-rights tune “The Day the Bass Players Took Over the World” at the Country Music Hall of Fame.
The $499 Indonesia-built PRS SE CE 24 Standard Satin does not have the advantage of a flame-maple top to give an upscale aura, like its bolt-on cousin the SE CE 24, but doesn’t need it. Because it takes about a minute of playing the SE CE 24 Standard Satin to feel and hear that it’s guided by the same playability-first design philosophies that make top-shelf PRS instruments coveted. There’s a lot of classic PRS essence in the SE CE 24 Standard Satin, and at 500 bucks in the year 2024, that is no mean feat.
The Best Deal Yet? PRS SE CE 24 Demo
Stirring Up Trouble
One really cool thing about a satin finish PRS is that, rather than compelling you to don kid gloves, it invites you play it hard, like a battered old Les Paul Jr. or Telecaster might. Like those guitars, the SE CE 24 Standard Satin is an elemental instrument. There is little in the way of bells and whistles to distract you from picking. Instead, the straight-ahead nature of the design tends to reinforce the sense of how well-made the SE CE 24 Standard Satin is.
Even with the $499 price in mind, I will surprise exactly no one by mentioning that this PRS is, more or less, flawlessly put together. Look all you want—you won’t find anything misaligned, sloppily cut, or improperly glued anywhere. The bolt-on maple neck sits snugly in its pocket and the fretwork is every bit as nice as what you see on guitars much further up the food chain. There’s no fret buzz, and yet the action is low and slinky. The guitar rings like it’s a living thing, too. Strum a first-position E chord and you’ll feel the resonance in your ribs.
When you examine the SE CE 24 Standard Satin at even closer range, you find details that charm and impress. Where an expensive U.S.-built PRS wouldn’t leave the factory with anything other than a perfectly bookmatched mahogany body, the SE CE 24 Standard Satin’s all-mahogany body is made up of at least three sections which look fairly asymmetric in size. The grain looks pretty different at the joins, too. But that does nothing to detract from the pervading sense of craft. In fact, it heightens the SE CE 24 Standard Satin’s all-business, proletarian essence—a nice thing to see in a guitar from a brand which, historically, is associated with fancy appointments.
Other construction details leave you appreciative of PRS’ commitment to advancing electric guitar design rather than being bound to tradition. The PRS Patented Tremolo vibrato system is as smooth as molasses and stable even under vicious handling (a specialty of mine). Among guitars in this price class, I’ve grown to expect vibratos that fly wildly out of tune if you sneeze, with arms that constantly flop and dangle out of reach. Even on this import version of the system, the ridiculously simple solution of a non-threaded arm that sits in a plastic sleeve works without fail. You can situate it at various heights and swing it into any position that feels comfortable, and it will stay there. It’s a fix for the inexpensive vibrato blues that many manufacturers would be wise to study. The dark-hued rosewood fretboard, too, seems luxurious for a $500 guitar. Most guitars in this price zone pivoted to paler Indian Laurel for fretboards some time ago.
Rowdy, Raw, and Refined
I instinctively get apprehensive when I see uncovered humbuckers in an affordable guitar. Something about encountering decades worth of ghastly, harsh, thin, and nasty entry-level humbuckers will do that to you. The 85/15 “S” pickups in our review guitar go a long way toward alleviating this paranoia. In humbucker mode, the bridge pickup is balanced. There is a midrange bump that can lend just a touch of harmonic clutter and some stridency when you play chords at full volume. But lead lines sing with a heated energy that has a nice touch of silkiness around the edges. Volume and tone attenuation are effective cures, too, if the midrange is too hot for your taste. That midrange emphasis is less flattering in the neck pickup, at least when you play big rock chords. But melodic fingerpicking and a dynamic touch summon a sweet side, and, as with the bridge pickup, single notes from the 1st through 3rd strings in particular have a satisfying, ringing presence that is not at all harsh. Combined pickup tones are especially nice. They’re springy, airy, and at times have an almost-Stratocaster-but-fatter ring.
Speaking of Stratocaster tones, there’s more than a little taste of Straty-ness in the split-coil voices. In the bridge position, the fundamental split-coil tone rings a lot like a hot Strat pickup, but with less bite and muscle than a Telecaster bridge. The neck pickup comes off as a bit rowdy and exhibits more overdrive characteristics than a Strat neck pickup, but is very responsive to a nudge to the volume control if you want clear, less-driven tones. The middle position in split-coil mode, which combines the centermost coils of the two pickups, is the most interesting twist on the instrument’s inner Stratocaster spirit. It generates a thick and muscular but clear and snappy version of a Strat’s out-of-phase tones. That’s not a sound I use a lot, but I love the PRS’s take on that tonality. Each split-coil position, by the way, exhibits very little volume loss when compared to humbucker mode.
The Verdict
We probably sound like a busted record at this point—going on about how PRS tends to overachieve in the affordable price category. But, hey, don’t look at us. It’s PRS’s fault. And until they start building junk we’ll keep on raving. The careful construction, useful and flexible coil-splitting capacity, reliable, smart vibrato, and all-around stability make this instrument an uncommon value. And you could very easily spend a lot more money and fail to get a guitar that does as much, and does it as well, as this straight-ahead, no-frills machine.
