Organized labor has shaped the music we love, and Nashville Musicians Association president Dave Pomeroy believes musicians still need a fair deal.
“There’s always something to do in Nashville,” grins Dave Pomeroy. For Pomeroy, this is especially true. He’s the president of the Nashville Musicians Association (NMA), the city’s branch, or “local,” of the American Federation of Musicians (also known as AFM Local 257). The AFM is the largest musicians’ union in North America, representing around 70,000 music workers through more than 240 locals across the continent.
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.
Behind every radio hit is a group of guitarists who've created ear-catching parts. Check out these tips and tricks used by some of Music City’s most in-demand sidemen.
Intermediate
Beginner
• Learn how to use "box" patterns to create licks in different keys.
• Understand how to use open-string drones to create signature parts.
• Hone your ability to play melodic slide-guitar textures.
I feel a little embarrassed when people ask me about my guitar influences. I can't claim expertise of Hendrix, I haven't spent hours woodshedding Eric Johnson, and I couldn't tell you the first thing about how to play like David Gilmour. My influences are more behind the scenes, lurking in the shadows of the music industry. They don't have big names, but they are monster players. I'm talking about the number one, most honest influence on my guitar playing: Nashville session guitarists.
In case you don't know, Nashville session guitarists are the cream of the crop—they have to be. Their job is to listen to a song once, write a chart for it during that single listen, step out onto the tracking room floor and simultaneously create, react, and execute a guitar part at a radio-perfect level in one take. I've figured out some tricks by studying the work of musical sharpshooters like J.T. Corenflos, Kenny Greenberg, and Tom Bukovac, and now I get to apply it in my own career when I'm called in for a session. Now, let's steal some tricks.
“Kiss You in the Morning" Box
An important thing to remember throughout this lesson is that the goal is to sound perfect. A dead note on your guitar solo should not be the reason that one of your fellow session players is late to pick up his daughter, so this is no time for finger tapping or seven-fret stretches. I call this the "Kiss You in the Morning" box because it's similar to the signature lick in Michael Ray's song of the same name.
You want the song to sound good, which means you need to sound comfortable. That's why this pattern (Ex. 1) is a great home base for your chord-based riffing. This is a segment of a diagonal major pentatonic scale that only uses your first and third fretting-hand fingers. You don't have to stretch or remember complicated patterns, and it's almost impossible to sound bad here. Place your first finger on the chord's root, which falls on either the low 6th or 5th string, and slide your third finger up two frets to access the rest of the pentatonic notes. It's a closed shape, so you can move it all over the fretboard to whatever key or chord you need, which comes in handy when you're scanning down a Nashville number-style chart in real time and having to come up with a hook or rhythmic motif.
The “All About Tonight" Box
This one is a little tougher, but more rewarding. I could do an entire session just using this box and rearranging the notes in different ways to make my melodies and textures fit the mood of the song. You can hear hints of this pattern in Blake Shelton's "All About Tonight." This is a natural extension to the previous example, but in Ex. 2 we start to introduce double-stops (playing two notes at a time). Low notes on the lower strings sound thick on their own, but as you move up the neck it's a good idea to start using double-stops if you want to keep the guitar sounding thick. In this box, your first finger is always in charge of the same fret, and your third finger oversees hammer-ons two frets higher. To play the double-stops I'm talking about, barre the 5th and 4th strings with your first finger and pick them. Then hammer on the 5th string with your third finger. Boom. You can do the same trick with different string sets.
Open for Business
You've got some lead chops built up, but somebody will be singing for 90 percent of the song, so what do you do? In keeping with our rule that we want our playing to sound comfortable, the answer is open chords. Full barre chords give you a lot of strings to keep track of, and if your dynamics, sustain, and muting aren't spot on, then the producer is going to have to hire someone to redo your parts after you leave, and that doesn't bode well for your session career.
Throw on a capo because only five keys are generally acceptable for playing guitar in a session: G, D, E, C, and A. Is the song in Db? Put a capo on the 1st fret and play in C. How about F#? Place a capo on the 2nd fret and play in E. Even if a song is in A, 95 percent of the time the acoustic guitar player will opt to play with a capo on the 2nd fret so he or she can move around comfortably in the key of G. Ex. 3 shows some of the special open chords that session players use all the time.
Palm-Muting Verses
Wide-open chords aren't everything, though. Songs need to have structure and flow, and the band members need to be on the same page about where the song is going. If you watch a session with guitarists Derek Wells and Jerry McPherson both playing guitar, they aren't clashing. They both know how energetic the song needs to be at any given moment. Chances are you'll nail it if you play the verses a little lower in energy and the choruses a little higher in energy. You can palm-mute the lowest two strings of an open chord, or you can palm-mute a power chord, or you can palm-mute thirds that fit inside of the chord. Check out Ex. 4 for an example. Any of those routes will work to get you from the intro to the chorus. And when it comes time to do a "fill" at the end of the measure or progression, all you really need to do is unmute what you're already doing! Fish in a barrel.
My Kinda Drones
"Box" playing is great, but I'm sure you want to have more than just boxes in your toolkit. One of the best tricks for coming up with melodies that don't sound boxy is by using what I call "My Kinda Party" drone lines. The signature lick in Jason Aldean's song, "My Kinda Party," is a wonderful example of this. Come up with a melody and play the whole thing on the 2nd string. Don't get too complicated, and don't make it too fast. Make it a nursery rhyme, a simple, hummable jingle that a drunk Bonnaroo crowd could sing back to you.
To allow the 1st string to ring out as you move along the neck, you need to fret the notes on the 2nd string using the very end of your fingertips. Now pick through both the top two strings while sliding from note to note (Ex. 5). This adds thickness and texture to the melody and helps make it sound like music, so someone like super-producer Justin Niebank doesn't have to spend time adding effects to your guitar to fill out the mix. As with the open chords, make sure you have the capo in the right spot so the open 1st string fits the song's key.
Get Low
The opposite of that approach is using a technique found in Luke Bryan's tune, "We Rode in Trucks." With this trick, you place the root of the chord on one of the lower three strings and build your melody on the string above it (Ex. 6). My favorite application of this is when you hammer-on to a 3, which puts your hand right in the "All About Tonight" box we talked about earlier if you need to launch into a solo. This trick can only be done if one or more of the low open strings works with the song's key, so you'll have to do some quick mental math and capo accordingly.
Swell into It
This technique is one of the physically easiest to perform, but requires some mental energy to get right. Sometimes the song needs an ambient volume swell to hold things together over chord changes, and this requires choosing your notes carefully. Let's say the progression is Em–C–G–D, with two chords per measure. Look for the notes that both chords share in each measure. Em and C both share E and G notes; G and D both share D notes.
That's the safe route, but you can also swell into notes or pairs of notes that challenge the chord a little bit and make an extension out of it. Swelling into a D over the Em and C turns them into Em7 and Cadd9, respectively, both very cool sounds. And G to D is a pretty strong chord change in this key, so you'll probably want to stick the landing and end up on chord tones here. To change things up from just a D note you can swell in a pre-bent G note and let it down to an F# when the D chord comes in. Or do the same thing, but pre-bend a B note and let it fall to an A (Ex. 7). You can nail this approach if you know your chord tones. Note: You'll need a good amount of delay and reverb to make the most of your swells. Most players do this with a volume pedal, but with the right guitar—a Strat, for example—you can also accomplish this manually.
High Extensions
Now that we're in the mindset of thinking about what our notes do to the chords we're playing over, adding higher extensions can introduce complexity and texture to a song. I have fond memories of sitting with a friend in high school, both of us holding acoustic guitars, and playing different triads and double-stops over each other's open chord strums—just to hear how one person's triad could affect the other person's chord.
The idea is that you'd pick notes that might not be within the basic triad and use these additions to alter the song's principle chords. If a bass player plays a C, and the acoustic guitar plays an open C chord, and the other electric guitarist plays a C power chord, but you play a B and D double-stop high on the fretboard you just made the entire band sound like a Cmaj9 chord, which is really pretty sounding. If you pick G and Bb, then you made the band sound like a C7 chord, which is bluesy and sarcastic sounding. Session players know what note extensions to add to chords, what these extensions will sound like, and when it's appropriate to use them. Ex. 8 illustrates how to use this trick over a basic progression.
Simple Slidin'
On most sessions, slide is used for texture and not for Derek Trucks- or Sonny Landreth-inspired shredding, so it's mostly limited to chord tones and a couple of simple lines. It is a very cool color, though, and it's well worth learning how to navigate a melody with a slide on your pinky. Slide sounds more like a human vocal than fretted notes, so this technique can really lend itself to making memorable, catchy, singable hooks. This is part of the reason guitarist Rob McNelley is on so many records—he's able to really make slide sing. Just be very careful about not letting strings ring unless you want them to. To come up with a simple, catchy, single-note slide line that soars over the arrangement, tap into the same melody-creating brain space you used for the "My Kinda Party" example, as well as the chord knowledge required for swells and extensions. Chord tones are always safe, extensions can be really cool, and make sure you stick the landing (Ex. 9).
Dot … Dot … Dot
You made it all the way to Ex. 10, so give your brain a break and let a pedal do all the work. Delay is a powerful effect, and when you sync that delay to the song tempo, the pedal can play notes for you. If you see guitarist Justin Ostrander doing something simple, chances are there's a timed delay happening to carry the simplicity. A dotted-eighth is equal to three 16th-notes, and a dotted-eighth delay means once you play a note, that note will come around again three 16th-notes later. And if the repeats are turned up, it'll keep repeating every three 16th-notes to create a cool syncopated feel (Ex. 10).
If you play something completely straight against the syncopated pattern the delay will be creating, the delay fills in the notes between what you're playing and makes an otherwise boring figure sound incredibly interesting. To make this trick work, you'll need a delay with programmable or tap tempo. For best results, tap the tempo for quarter-notes, play eighth-notes, and have the delay set for dotted-eighth-notes.
These guitarists stay mostly out of the spotlight, but with the growing world of media they are starting to get a little more exposure with great programs like Premier Guitar's Rig Rundown with Kenny Greenberg (shown below) or Zac Childs' Truetone Lounge episode with Derek Wells.
Videos like these let you inside the world of the pro session player, and are great resources for learning more from the best in the business. Next time you hear some tasty guitar on a radio hit, you'll know it's tasty for a reason and you're one step closer to being the guitarist who gets to play it.
Mr. Blues Power Jared James Nichols and John Bohlinger take the stage at the Gibson Garage in downtown Nashville to go over JJN's latest Epiphone Les Paul Custom that features a brand-new Seymour Duncan JJN P90 Silencer pickup. The duo talk shop, cover Nichols' other signature Epiphones and trade a few riffs.
Epiphone "Blues Power" Les Paul Custom
The Jared James Nichols “Blues Power” Les Paul Custom is the third signature model from the blues-rock powerhouse and Gibson Brand Ambassador who hails from Les Paul’s hometown of Waukesha, Wisconsin. The Jared James Nichols “Blues Power” Les Paul Custom pairs with the brushed nickel hardware, including Grover Locking Rotomatic tuners and a wraparound Lightning Bar bridge for rock-solid tuning stability. A single Seymour Duncan Jared James Nichols Signature JJN P90 Silencer in the bridge position ensures righteous tone and hum-free performance, and the included EpiLite soft guitar case helps keep this standout guitar safe and secure.
Learn more here.
Seymour Duncan JJN P90 Silencer
Jared James Nichols burst onto the scene as a throwback to the P90 playing power trio titans of the 70s. To deliver his signature sound, he needed a P90 that was voiced with limitless range that could cover everything from sparkling cleans to barking dirty tones. In his own words, he needed something “delicate and strong, like a grizzly bear and a paper airplane landing.”
After years on the road playing different venues coast to coast and abroad, he’s encountered a variety of unique hum inducing sources. Having a pickup that could retain the quintessential tone and appearance of the classic P90 pickup without hum was a must. The JJN P90 Silencer was custom voiced specifically to Jared’s unique tone without the hum. The pickups are drop-in replacements for any standard P90 route.
“Simply put, the Seymour Duncan Jared James Nichols P90 Silencer is my dream pickup.”
Learn more here.