WOMAN’S WORK

Bonnie Guitar cut hits as a session player, as a singer, as a producer, and as co-owner of a successful label.*

by Linda Ray

It’s a long, sometimes treacherous, often exhilarating road from Federal Way, just south of Seattle, to the tiny, century-old spa village of Soap Lake, Washington. Winding first through picture-book peaks and spectacular, open passes, then over fog-filled crevasses and past hilly, pine-dotted towns, the highway eventually opens out to a hundred miles of gently rolling, grass-covered hills and farmland, across what the Northwest calls a desert.

Near the end of the road, at a cottage overlooking the lake’s healing waters, the autumn grass of the surrounding hills, and their randomly jutting cliffs of black basalt, Bonnie Guitar sits contentedly in a porch swing and surveys her future. From here, it looks endless.

Stashed off to her right is history, to which she rarely gives a thought. It’s a garage full of the byproducts of a unique, trailblazing, 60-odd-year career as a session guitarist, songwriter, record producer, label owner and country star. Nudie outfits, old trade magazines, industry awards, stage props, antique gear, family memorabilia — ephemera accrued to fit the space available — inhabit a collection of cardboard boxes accumulated from every era, stacked as neatly as their jumble of shapes and sizes permit.

And then there’s the car.

A candy apple red 1957 Ford Fairlane 500 Skyliner hardtop convertible, it features the first production model retractable top and a wheelbase two inches longer than that of a 1956 station wagon. Bonnie ordered it in 1956 and had it personalized (as she does everything from her front gate to her weathervane). Red guitars are stitched to its white leather seats; musical notes were fashioned into its hubcaps by hotrod hotshot Dee Wescott.

Bonnie so loves that car, she wrote a song about it, “Candy Apple Red”, and she still believes it could be a hit. But she has retired from the business of music. She left her last steady gig at Soap Lake’s Notaras Lodge on New Year’s Eve 1996; since then, she’s played only scattered dates — at a friend’s lodge in Idaho, or at a gathering of cowboy poets eager to tap into her extensive repertoire of old western songs.

Occasionally, the phone rings and momentarily reminds her where she’s been. “I just had a call a couple months ago from Lari White, Toby Keith’s producer,” Bonnie says, still swinging. “She called and said, ‘I’ve been wanting to tell you that…’ — how she admired me for being the first woman producer. We had a chat for an hour.”

Most people who know of Bonnie Guitar remember her haunting hit “Dark Moon”, a top-10 single in 1957. Few are aware she was probably the first woman to be an on-staff session guitarist. By all accounts, she was definitely the first woman to take charge of a studio. She learned both crafts in the mid-’50s at Fabor Robison’s Abbott/Fabor Records, where Johnny Horton and Jim Reeves had earlier launched their careers. In 1959, she scored two #1 hits as a producer with the Fleetwoods: “Come Softly To Me” and “Mr. Blue”, brilliantly subtle-sounding recordings that maxed out the technology of the era. She then spent more than a decade producing mostly new talent for Dot Records, all the while pursuing her own recording career.

Even today, her like is rare. Women’s Audio Mission estimates that only 5 percent of producers and recording engineers now working are women.

With an unprecedented zest for recording technology, Bonnie not only seized the controls, she earned a reputation for driving them for all they were worth, getting all she could out of them in service to a sound. Friendly, funny, terminally cute in that ’50s way, and hot as a Hollywood starlet in her gold lamé pants, she was above all smart, and not a little commanding. If you had a hit in you, she would drive it out. If not, she would make the very best of what you had.

She was born Bonnie Buckingham on March 25, 1923 in Auburn, Washington, about a half-hour south of Seattle. Her father was a farmer, and a middling fiddler, with a taste for Irish tenors and a vast collection of old songs he’d learned mostly from traveling salesmen in Illinois pubs. Her two older brothers shared a guitar she yearned to play, but she contented herself with tuning it quicker than either of them. She was 13 when they handed it down to her, along with instructions for three chords. She worked tirelessly to learn her instrument.

“I took old records like Nick Lucas,” she says. (Known as “The Crooning Troubadour,” Lucas is also believed to have recorded the first solo jazz guitar instrumental, in 1922.) “I’d try to copy off those instrumentals. I also listened to a lot of folk, like Woody Guthrie, or Django Reinhardt and the Hot Club Of France. One of the things I used to like to do was to take a song and put as many chords to it as I could, and running bass lines. I studied all those things. I took lessons as often as I could.”

All the while, she was also singing. “I grew up around it, so learning songs was simple,” she says. “I could hear songs a couple times and know them.”

At age 16, she began to perform in — and win — talent shows from Seattle to Tacoma, and by 19 she was touring regional theaters with musical revues. Her deep brown, 20/20 eyes sparkle a smile as she tells the story. “I was…just out of school…and we toured and starved to death! It was in the Depression, but it was so much fun to play those little theaters!”

While Bonnie Buckingham was touring the countryside on training wheels, Paul Tutmarc was making a splash in Seattle. Known locally as “The Silver-Toned Tenor,” Tutmarc sang with the most prominent bands in the region and in two Hollywood movies. He was also a guitar teacher, music store owner and inventor who, with partner Arthur “Art” J. Stimson, developed a precursor to the first commercially marketed electric guitar. Later, on his own, he invented an innovative pickup, then founded the Audiovox Manufacturing Company to manufacture much-coveted lap steel guitars. Ever restlessly tinkering, he eventually invented the first solid-body electric bass guitar.

Bonnie studied, performed and recorded on the local Morrison label with Tutmarc, 27 years her senior. The two married in 1944 and had a daughter, Paula, in 1950. Around 1955, a local hopeful, whose name she doesn’t remember, presented Bonnie with her future. “A songwriter came to me in Seattle and she wanted me to make some demos for her,” Bonnie says. “I’d recorded a couple of things and I sang with bands, so I had a local name, but very local, and in those days it really meant less than it means now.”

She made the demos, and the songwriter sent them to Robison. “I didn’t know Fabor Robison from anyone,” she recalls. “He contacted me and said, ‘I’d like you to come down and audition for me.’ He had a studio and a publishing company in the canyon, in Malibu, California. So I went down and he immediately asked me if I wanted to be a session player, which I did, and he said that he would record me, so he did.”

For the next few years, Bonnie lived with Robison and his wife in their Malibu home, playing sessions (most notably for Dorsey Burnett, Ned Miller and Tom Tall), getting to know a host of top-notch studio musicians (including guitarist Roy Lanham), and indulging a growing fascination with production values and technology.

“I worked in the mixing with the engineer,” she says, “but I worked as his assistant in there. I’d keep the records, do the cataloguing and things. So I learned to operate the equipment. He had a pretty decent studio, in fact a good one for being in a home — a nice control board, nice mixing board, and he got some pretty good sounds out of there.

“Fabor was very difficult to work with. But I didn’t care. My whole intent was to learn to produce and learn the studio. And regardless of how hard to work with he was, he had a lot of hits, so he did something right, you see? I learned everything from those years, so I don’t have any complaints.”

In 1956, having urged Bonnie to change her last name, Robison released two Bonnie Guitar 45s, the first featuring her originals, “If You See My Love Dancing” and “Hello, Hello Please Answer”. “We recorded my two songs with just one guitar,” she says, “didn’t use any band at all.” Robison sent the record to Cashbox and got a response along the lines of, “with the right material she could have hit records.” That assessment would soon be validated.

“I’d gone home to see my parents [she and Tutmarc had since divorced], and Fabor called me at home and said, ‘I have a song I want you to listen to. I’m recording it tonight. Come right back down.’ So I went back and he was recording ‘Dark Moon’ with Dorsey Burnett. He didn’t like Dorsey’s version of it.

“I told him I’d give up my royalties to be able to record that song. I knew in my mind, as little as I knew, that that was a hit song. I just knew it. So, we went right in the studio and started working on it, and I played the lead guitar and everything.” Ned Miller, the song’s composer and a fellow Fabor staff member, also contributed guitar; the only other instrument was a bass.

The simple production and extremely simple lyric to “Dark Moon” (it has but one verse) focused listeners on Guitar’s liquid butterscotch croon, and the understated but inescapable emotion of her delivery. Her tone was perfect, but beguilingly untrained; her sustains and slides were as masterful, within her range, as Patsy Cline’s.

Bill Gavin was smitten by that single (backed with her original “Big Mike”) and began championing it on his “Lucky Lager Dance Time”, a popular regional show often credited as the model for the later Top 40 format. A regional hit, “Dark Moon” was about to catapult Guitar onto the national stage.

Robison’s practice was to develop an artist and then sell their contract to a larger label. With Guitar, he scored a twofer. Randy Wood of Dot Records was interested in both Guitar and the song. He re-released “Dark Moon”, and it soared to #6 on the pop charts. It even hit #14 on the country charts, while Hawkshaw Hawkins’ nearly immediate cover languished unnoticed.

But another agenda was also in the works. “Randy Wood had Gale Storm at the time,” Guitar explains. “Gale Storm’s manager heard how my record was hitting, and he wanted her to record the song. So Dot covered it with her. There was a lot of controversy about that at the time — a label covering their own artist like that.”

Gale Storm had generated a string of hits for Dot, partly owing to her starring role in the TV series “My Little Margie”. “They tried to make it comfortable by taking me to her session while she was recording,” Guitar says, “and I could visit the ‘Little Margie’ set. But I think they just did what business does. Her manager was very forceful; she had a very high profile and I had no profile compared to hers, so why would they give attention to me? The funny thing, I didn’t think of [how] that would affect my sales. I didn’t think about sales. I was doing what I wanted to do. I was singing in the studio and playing in the sessions and producing. So I was happy.”

Guitar was even amused by the apparent confusion on jukeboxes. “We were working in the studio and after hours we’d go down to different places like the Copper Kettle, and ‘Dark Moon’ was down there with her name on my record. It would say ‘Dark Moon’ by Gale Storm, but it would be my voice, my record.”

Nearly five decades later, she is dumbstruck when asked whether the “error” might have been intentional, and perhaps more widespread than she imagined. This has never occurred to her.

“Dark Moon” was Gale Storm’s last hit record.

Label machinations weren’t the only hazard Guitar was learning to manage with grace and good humor. Asked about solicitations of sexual favors, she replies in shock, “Who told you about that!?”

(Actually, it was just a hunch.)

She relates an occasion when an influential figure in her early career surprised her. The man is now deceased and she asks not to use his name. The pair had traveled together to Nashville for the annual DJ convention sponsored by WSM radio. After checking in at the hotel, her companion carried her bags to her room, then announced that the hotel was full so they would have to share. “I flat out said, ‘You get me a room, by myself immediately, or I’m going back home.’ And he did.

“That’s just part of it. I don’t take that seriously either because what does it mean? You just have to say ‘no’ and go down the road.”

Dot released six other Bonnie Guitar singles and three albums through 1961, but “Dark Moon” was to be her only major hit of the era. She has a theory about that, based on a warning she got from “The Purple People Eater” singer Sheb Wooley. “He told me, ‘Don’t let them put that big orchestra behind you,’” she says. “‘Dark Moon’ was a hit because of the simplicity; it had a lonesome, far-out sound. It was almost ethereal, you know? It wasn’t heavy with reverb or anything; it wasn’t the mixing. It was just the way [Robison] recorded it.

“When Randy Wood signed me, he right away put a big band with me. Well that was the kiss of death.” The differences in approach are manifest on the 1991 Bear Family disc Dark Moon, still in print, which compiles most of her earliest recordings on Fabor and Dot.

Other opportunities had more appeal at the time, anyway. Back in Seattle, Bob Reisdorff, a record promoter with Lou Lavinthal’s C&C distributing, approached Guitar with a demo tape that captured her imagination. It was the Fleetwoods singing “Come Softly To Me”. Guitar was so excited by its potential, she joined Reisdorff, Lavinthal and his two C&C partners in starting a record label, first named Dolphin, then Dolton. Guitar’s renown would be an asset to the label, but even more important was her recording experience, unique in the partnership.

Fleetwoods founder Gretchen Christopher was just 18 when the trio first went into the studio on the day after graduation in 1958. She remembers Guitar as a taskmaster, hounding them about pronunciation. “I remember her saying, ‘The girls are saying meeester blue!’,” but she adds, “Bob Reisdorff always credited Bonnie with having the good sense to say the Fleetwoods don’t need a big orchestration. All they need is minimal backing, which was a guitar and bass. And the percussion was our own; it was Gary [Troxel] shaking car keys in his hand.”

Guitar recorded the Fleetwoods at Joe Boles’ studio, a basement setup with limited equipment. “Because they had so much air in their voices, I had to do a lot of different fooling with microphones to get enough sound on the tape to saturate the tape,” she says. “I knew that that sound would be interesting to people because they were so used to the full sound. I wanted it to come out but I wanted it to be intimate. And I knew also not to use a regular guitar sound. I put nylon strings on my guitar…and I played just little, tinkling notes behind them. Then when we did ‘Mr. Blue’ I wanted trombone with that.”

Guitar’s daughter, Paula Johnson, fondly remembers her hours as an 8-year-old curled up quietly around a microphone at Boles’ studio. “[Bonnie] got known for getting tape saturation like nobody was getting,” she says. “I remember her even teaching me to read those needles just falling into the red just a little bit. There were certain places she knew that those needles were gonna cause distortion, and she worked on those singers and getting that sound that is so much like Gary singing right in your ear, right in your face.”

“Come Softly To Me” was a roaring start for Dolton; it spent four weeks at #1 on the pop charts in 1959. The Fleetwoods’ third Dolton single, “Mr. Blue”, also sailed to #1, and the trio released an album by the same name later in the year.

The label also scored a national hit with “Werewolf” by locals the Frantics. Guitar contributed the memorable werewolf howl at the end. She also cut “I Love An Angel” with Little Bill And The Bluenotes. “She really made us work for it,” Little Bill Englehart says. “She saw that we were young kids, and she wanted more than that out of us. She really grilled us hard and it wasn’t like a real fun session. At the time, I probably thought, ‘Jeez, what a…,’ you know? But as it turned out, when they released the record, it became a national release. It got up on Billboard and all that. She knew what she was doing.”

In a stroke of luck at the end of a long story, the Ventures presented Dolton with a finished master of the instrumental classic “Walk Don’t Run”, which yielded the label a #2 pop hit in 1960 and began the Ventures’ long chart run for Dolton.

Guitar also had been writing and recording her own “Candy Apple Red”, which slipped into the pop top 100 for Dolton in 1959, despite what she felt was a lack of promotion heft on Reisdorff’s part. Their relationship was strained, she thinks, by envy. Although both were credited as producers on all Dolton’s releases, Bill Gavin had made a thing of naming Guitar his “Lucky Lager Dance Time” top producer. “[Reisdorff] didn’t want my name on the records anymore,” she says, “even though I was doing the arranging and the studio work and stuff. He was trying to get me out of the situation.”

In 1960, Guitar effectively abdicated day-to-day involvement with the label when Reisdorff cut a deal with Dolton distributor Liberty Records to move the Fleetwoods and the Ventures to Los Angeles. The partners sold the label outright to Liberty in 1963.

Guitar devoted the early ’60s to touring, spending time with her family, and producing would-be hitmakers independently. “Western Recorders was on Hollywood Boulevard,” she recalls. “That’s where I did a lot of productions. Don Blake was a mixer that I liked real well; we got along great. I’d go there sometimes and Don would stay after recording and we’d work all night on sounds, trying to get different sounds, experimenting.”

She also did some recording of her own. Don Robertson, Hal Blair’s partner in Elvis Presley’s favorite songwriting team, recollects via e-mail: “I had been a longtime fan of her work and she was a fan of mine so it was a natural step for us to try recording together. We worked on an idea of Bonnie’s which was an instrumental adaptation of a melody from Rigoletto, which we named ‘Rockaletto’. It was later recorded by Duane Eddy under the title ‘Twangsville’.

“Bonnie and I worked out a duet arrangement of ‘Born To Be With You’ [Robertson’s 1956 pop hit for the Chordettes] which we recorded at the now legendary Gold Star Studios in Hollywood. It was Bonnie’s suggestion to call our act the Echoes. The single was released on Dolton Records.

“She was an excellent rhythm guitar player — one of the best.”

Through the years, she also maintained a close friendship with Randy and Lois Wood. Around 1965, Wood urged Guitar to return to Dot, as a recording artist and producer, and as liaison to the country music world for Dot’s parent, Paramount. She began commuting weekly from her Dot base camp at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel to Nashville, where she often stayed with Marijohn Wilkin and befriended Kris Kristofferson. Colleagues urged her to move there for her career, but she says, “I never wanted to live in Nashville. I like the West Coast and to tell you the truth, I like the West Coast sound. Nashville was a nice sound but it was kind of a round sound. I liked recording the West Coast sound [although] I was doing more in Nashville for Dot.”

Guitar says Wood had always believed she could be a hit country artist, and his confidence was more than vindicated in 1966. That March, her recording of Jan Crutchfield’s “I’m Living In Two Worlds” hit #9 on the country charts and squeaked into the pop 100. In May, she released an album with that title, lavishly orchestrated by Clif Parman. (Guitar produced it and disputes the co-production credit given to George Richey.) In July, her recording of “Get Your Lie The Way You Want It” (written by Billy Mize) was a #14 country hit. In September she released the album Miss Bonnie Guitar, which went to #21, and in October, her single “The Tallest Tree” reached #24 despite what some considered to be antiwar undertones in the lyrics. She released a Christmas album as well, Merry Christmas From Bonnie Guitar.

The Country Music Association named her Top Female Vocalist for 1966, in the second year of the organization’s existence.

She also found time to produce Mac Wiseman’s 1966 album A Master At Work. “When you’re recording Mac Wiseman,” Guitar says, “of course you want the Nashville sound.”

Wiseman’s recollections of the sessions contrast strikingly to those of the youngsters she’d produced for Dolton. “It was truly a pleasure and she was — I wouldn’t say she was introverted, but she wasn’t very outgoing, you know. She had a lot of input, but unless you kind of dug it out of her, she didn’t apply it, is the way I found. But one of the things I remember about her is her knowledge of the old songs that she helped me select.”

Guitar was nominated again for CMA’s Female Vocalist award in both 1967 and 1968. She had a top-10 country hit in each of those years, as well as two other singles and two albums in the top 50. But Wood had left Dot in 1967 to form the Ranwood label with Lawrence Welk, and Guitar lost her greatest advocate.

Paramount sold Dot to Gulf & Western in 1968, and in 1969 only one of Guitar’s two singles charted in the top 50, along with her one album, Affair. The year was nevertheless a landmark one: She married “the perfect husband,” Mario DiPiano, a fellow Washingtonian she had met through her sponsorship of Little League teams around Seattle. Guitar effectively retired from Nashville; although she continued to tour, write and record intermittently, her home life settled into an idyll.

“We raised quarter horses and cattle on a beautiful ranch over between Seattle and Tacoma in a little town called Sumner,” she says. “It was only 80 acres but a wonderful location and had lots of beautiful views and timber. I had a racetrack on it, a training track, and a big pond. You could fish off my deck.” She took to training quarter horses and helped to raise her granddaughters.

In 1973, Buck Owens protégé Susan Raye took Guitar’s “Cheating Game” to the country top 20, giving her a hit song in each of three decades. “I knew Buck Owens,” she says. “You know everybody but you don’t get friendly with everybody because you never see them except once or twice a year. [But] one of Buck’s writers was Dennis Knudson, and he was my writer first. I signed him up in Seattle, and then he signed with Buck without getting a release from me. So I had to go court — for Buck.

“When Dennis told me what he had done, I didn’t try to keep him; I wasn’t gonna sue Buck or him, either one. For what? Kid was getting a better break with Buck than he had with me — Buck had a high profile, why would I take that away from some kid?

“[But] Dennis had evidently signed with somebody else too, I can’t remember his name, and that fellow was suing Buck for a million dollars because Dennis was a very excellent writer. Luckily when Dennis signed with me, I had torn a corner off the contract, some old thing that we used to do to prove that we had a contract. And I found it and I went down and took it to court. It worked out that Dennis was actually my artist and I had given him to Buck, so he couldn’t sign with anybody else.”

In the late ’70s, DiPiano became ill with complications of high blood pressure, and Guitar curtailed her performance schedule to take care of him until he died in 1983. A year or so later, she accepted a gig at the Notaras Lodge in Soap Lake. “All my friends in Nashville were telling me, ‘Go to work…because when you lose your partner, then you need to do something.’ I thought, ‘Well, why not?’ So I came over here and stayed forever I think.”

She didn’t stay forever right away, but the first weekend dates were so successful, the Lodge hired her full-time. Each Saturday night, after her show, she made the three-hour drive back to the ranch, but within a year she had sold it for lack of reliable caretakers. From that point until she retired, her career revolved around the Notaras Lodge.

In 1988 and ’89 she recorded five singles on the Playback label; her last one, “Still The Same”, rose to #79 on the country charts. She continued to perform around the region from time to time. Gregg Keplinger, Pearl Jam drum tech and drum maker for the likes of Jerry Watts, Elvin Jones and Art Blakey, recalls accompanying her for many of those dates.

“When she played, to my ear it was like an orchestra,” Keplinger says. “She’s really playing a lot of parts. I was blown away by how strong it was, and how she’d structure stuff with her instant arrangements. I mean she’d open up the tune and play a solo that would be different every night.”

As for her repertoire, Keplinger says, “She’s a dictionary and encyclopedia both.

“The funny deal among other musicians,” he continues, “is she’s quite a bit older than most of us and she could grind you in the dust. How whacked is it that a guitar player would even attempt to do four-hour shows with just a drummer? And she’d do it, and people would be dancing, and carryin’ on.”

The intensity eventually took its toll, particularly in the Notaras Lodge work. “To tell you the truth, I was getting burned out,” Bonnie says. “In the summer there were many times I worked 14 or 15 days without a break. I had special things going on all the time to keep the club alive — ’50s night, Hawaiian luaus. We had outdoor shows in the daytime and sometimes I’d get up and set up something to play canned music for two or three hours for the early morning people coming into the town. Then I’d go to work at 8 or 9 o’clock and play until 2 in the morning, or whatever traffic would bear for people who were still there. So I really burned myself out.”

These days, her dexterity is not what it once was, a result of carpal tunnel syndrome and a touch of arthritis. She still writes songs and stories constantly, but now has no interest in the bother of getting them published or produced. Although she estimates she already knows more than a thousand chords, she has ordered a copy of The Gig Bag Book Of Picture Chords For All Guitarists, and is excited to see what she might be able to learn from it. “I just love chords!” she says, and she says it frequently.

And then there are those calls from the past. Just recently she was surprised by one from DeWayne Blackwell, best known in recent years for writing Garth Brooks’ smash “Friends In Low Places”. “He said, ‘I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate the fact that you recorded ‘Mr. Blue’ with the Fleetwoods, because you liked the song and made it a hit for me.’ Just out of the blue! I hadn’t talked to him since we recorded it. It’s things like that that are so fulfilling and make you feel so good, you know?”

Sometimes, rarely, she thinks she might rather have wound up in Las Vegas, but she says, “I wouldn’t be gambling and out watching shows all the time. I’d probably be just settled back, like I am now; I’d just be surrounded with more lights and more activity that would be, you know, embracing me in a different way than this is.”

She pauses, mid-swing, to marvel at the descent of a jet headed for a training ground in Moses Lake — and calls attention to the splendor of the pale, rising moon.

ND contributing editor Linda Ray urges readers to look all these people up on the internet, but read skeptically. Special thanks to Mike Callahan and Sarah Claussen.

*Which means she merits more than a footnote, right?