Boots Randolph

Tenor saxophonist Boots Randolph played a key role in shaping the Nashville sound, whose pop-inflected textures shaped country music throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. Born Homer Louis Randolph III in Paducah, Kentucky, he spent his childhood in the small town of Cadiz in Trigg County, where his brother Bob gave him the lifelong nickname “Boots.” He first played trombone during his school years and tried several other instruments before concentrating seriously on saxophone at age sixteen. During World War II he performed with the U.S. Army Band.

After the war Randolph spent several years working semi-professionally across Indiana, Kentucky, and Illinois. In the late 1950s Jethro Burns caught one of his performances and urged him to relocate to Nashville. Burns then introduced Randolph to Chet Atkins, who placed him on the RCA roster. Randolph soon met Atkins’s rival Owen Bradley as well and appeared on numerous sessions Bradley produced. He joined the city’s growing circle of session players who relaxed in the basement clubs of Printer’s Alley—the narrow downtown passage between First and Second avenues—and became a regular member of that circle. Along with his colleagues, Randolph enthusiastically embraced jazz and rock & roll in addition to country music.

The 1963 instrumental single “Yakety Sax” fused those varied influences into an instantly memorable melody and remained Randolph’s sole major hit. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, however, he maintained steady album sales with thirteen chart entries, delivering agreeable saxophone interpretations of songs from many styles and serving as the saxophone counterpart to Chet Atkins on guitar and Floyd Cramer on piano. He left RCA for the Monument label in 1966. For more than a decade he also logged an average of two to three hundred studio sessions annually on other artists’ recordings; the saxophone parts on Elvis Presley’s later releases are widely believed to be Randolph’s.

In 1977 Randolph opened his own thriving venue in Printer’s Alley; the club operated into the 1990s and later gave rise to a second location near Opryland U.S.A. He continued performing into the 2000s. In 1994 the original Yakety Sax album entered the informal country canon when Germany’s Bear Family label reissued it. Randolph suffered a brain hemorrhage in late June 2007 and remained comatose until his death at age eighty on July 3, 2007.