The Texas Sound. For some it’s the report of a .12-gauge on the opening day of duck season. For others it’s the grinding of a diamond bit on a dusty Austin chalk lease. For the rest of us it’s the sound of a guitar laced with a smidgen of sweet distortion, a singing violin-like tone that can make an audience quiver in harmonic sympathy with a bend this way, or a vibrato that.

Texas is guitar country. Has been since before World War I, when Wortham-born blind Lemon Jefferson brought the Texas blues from his hometown to Dallas and then to the whole Midwest. Before the Dallas born Charlie Christian became the first electric guitarist to gain fame, with the Benny Goodman Sextet. Before Tioga-born Gene Autry strummed his way into history as the first singing cowboy star. Even before Buddy Holly defined the rock trio format for generations to come. Buddy readers need no further proof of just how deep Texas is immersed in guitar history. The successes of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmie Vaughan, Billy Gibbons, Eric Johnson, and others brought the rest of the world around.

The Buddy Texas Tornados are an elite corp of the Lone Star State’s finest musicians. The editors have been picking them since 1978. With so many fine players in circulation, choosing so few a year is a harrowing task. The variety of styles in Texas is as wide as a panhandle horizon.

We salute the new inductees for 2004 as they take their place alongside previous Buddy Texas Tornado guitarist and bassist inductees.

John Sprott was born in Ft. Worth on June 25th, 1958. A couple of years later the family moved to Lubbock, where he stayed.

He said that his early guitar influences were James Taylor, Toy Caldwell, and BB King. He added that David Lindley influenced his melodic concepts on slide.

“I used a straight mike stand with a round bass to play slide, and in standard tuning rather than the open slide tunings used by virtually all of the greats of slide guitar,” he said.

He said that he loves playing blues and attempting to reproduce the licks of King (BB, Freddie, and Albert), Albert Collins, and John Lee Hooker, but that he rarely he gets the exact desired result.

Sprott’s first paying gig was with his big sister in ’73-’74 and was hooked. He played with a number of local rock and country bands until 1980, when Dennis Jones, Greg Galbraight, and he formed a band that became The Nelsons. The punkabilly outfit entered the MTV Basement Tapes contest in 1983, won the semi-final round, and were awarded $5,000.00 worth of gear.

The band recorded an EP in ’84 and a CD in ’90. During that time they had opened for such acts as Culture Club, Billy Idol and jammed with Jimmy Page.

The Nelsons disbanded in ’91 but Sprott, Kevin Mackey, Sean Frankhouser formed the Fearless and Incomparable Texas Blues Butchers.

They were soon joined by Stephen Shaw (aka Elvis T. Busboy) and, later as they played in the Dallas area, Tim Alexander.

Sprott also played on and co-produced House of Doom with Lubbock songwriter D.G. Flewellyn and worked on Story of a Rebel with Jeffrey Duke Patterson.

Elvis T. Busboy and the Texas Blues Butchers have recorded two CD’s, Dance Favorites and ETB II. Today, the band includes Danny Cochran on drums with Sean Frankhouser back on bass.

Sprott also gigs solo and with the Plain Brown Wrapper Band. He loves twangy Fenders. “When we are using my PA, I play through a Line 6 Pod directly into the console. The signal comes off of the channel on the board into an old Fender Deluxe Reverb.”

In the studio he plays a 335, Firebird , or Les Paul straight into a late 60’s Fender Champ, or sometimes a Full Drive or Mesa V Twin.

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