Floyd Cramer

A pianist distinguished by his signature slip-note technique that came to define the pop-inflected Nashville sound in the closing years of the 1950s and the dawn of the 1960s, Floyd Cramer entered the world on October 27, 1933, in Louisiana. After spending most of his early years in Arkansas, he went back to Louisiana in 1951 and started performing on the radio broadcast The Louisiana Hayride, sharing stages with Jim Reeves, Faron Young, Webb Pierce, and Elvis Presley, who made his first appearance on the program during one of those shows.

Although Cramer issued a handful of solo recordings in 1953, his primary contributions during the first half of the decade came through session work, where he encountered Chet Atkins; Atkins urged the pianist to relocate to Nashville. Cramer made the move in 1955 and rejoined Atkins as the staff pianist for RCA Records, helping shape the emerging Nashville sound—a smoother, more forward-looking approach that shed the rough edges of traditional country and honky-tonk music. Under Atkins’s production, Cramer refined his singular method of striking a note and then gliding his finger to an adjacent key, producing a mournful, echoing effect reminiscent of guitar fingerpicking. Guided by Atkins, he participated in countless recording dates, among them Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.”

Cramer’s first solo album, That Honky-Tonk Piano, appeared in 1957, and the following year he achieved a modest pop success with the single “Flip, Flop and Bop.” Because his session commitments took precedence, solo projects appeared only occasionally; yet in 1960 he scored a major country and pop success with his own instrumental composition “Last Date.” Its successor, a reading of Bob Wills’s “San Antonio Rose,” climbed into the Top Ten on both charts. Between 1960 and 1962 he issued one LP annually—Hello Blues, Last Date, and I Remember Hank Williams.

From 1965 through 1974 Cramer put out a yearly Class Of… collection featuring contemporary hits rendered in his distinctive manner. In 1971 he joined Atkins and saxophonist Boots Randolph on the album Chet, Floyd and Boots. By 1977 he had begun experimenting with newer instruments; on Keyboard Kick Band he performed on an array of keyboards that included a synthesizer. His final notable chart entry arrived in 1980 with a version of the theme from the television series Dallas. After a relatively quiet stretch through most of the 1980s, he returned in 1988 with three albums—Country Gold, Just Me and My Piano!, and Special Songs of Love. Cramer passed away on December 31, 1997.