Laid-Back Country Pianist Floyd Cramer Dies At 64

Floyd Cramer, whose slurred, slipping piano notes nurtured an infant that matured into the Nashville sound, a repository of country, western and pop music, died Wednesday of the cancer he had been battling for six months.

He was 64 and died - fittingly - in Nashville, Tenn., a city he had helped position in a central spot in the pop music firmament.

At his death he had recorded thousands of discs.

“He was just a wonderfully talented person, and you didn’t have to struggle to get anything out of him,” guitarist Chet Atkins said Wednesday. “He was just a natural-born talent.”

Cramer was a natural for the combining of delicate style and country picking. He evolved a technique of adapting traditional guitar stroking to the piano. “The style I use mainly is a whole-tone slur, which gives more of a lonesome, cowboy sound,” he told the Encyclopedia of Folk Country and Western Music.

“You hit a note and slide almost simultaneously to another. … You don’t hit the note you intend to right off, but you ‘recover’ almost instantly, and then hit it. It is an intentional error and actually involves two notes. The result is a melancholy sound.”

Cramer’s early fascination with music produced a second-hand piano from his parents when he was 5 and growing up in Huttig, Ark.

After high school he auditioned for the radio program “Louisiana Hayride” broadcast from Shreveport, La. He got the job and was soon working with Webb Pierce, Jim Reeves and Faron Young and touring with such giants as Hank Williams. He also befriended another youngster new to the business, Elvis Presley, and backed him on concert dates in the ‘50s as well as on several movie soundtracks when Presley became famous.

Cramer by then was doing occasional work in Nashville and while there on one trip met Atkins, who encouraged him to move there permanently because the country and music industry was evolving from an audience of the mildly curious to commercial maturation.

By the 1970s Cramer had moved beyond club dates and recording studios to concert halls where he performed with major symphony orchestras and in musical theaters.

By then he had also become a featured performer on the “Grand Ole Opry” and also was on national TV with Johnny Carson, Perry Como, Johnny Cash, Merv Griffin and others.

While few of his albums ever received star status on the Billboard and other recording charts, Cramer had a loyal audience of tens of thousands who bought his music in stores and more recently through television advertisements.