James Burton stands among the most revered guitarists in contemporary popular music. He is also among the most recorded. As a member of the famed cadre of Los Angeles studio musicians informally known as the Wrecking Crew, Burton worked five sessions a day, seven days a week, for some thirty years. He has played on more than four hundred albums. Burton was born in 1939 in Dubberly in rural Webster Parish far afield from the California fast lane where he would later find fame. He grew up listening to traditional country music and is best known as a country stylist and soloist. Burton’s prolific country credits include work with Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, Brad Paisley, Emmylou Harris, and Rodney Crowell (co-writer of the evocative song “Leavin’ Louisiana in the Broad Daylight”). But Burton is equally proficient in a wealth of other genres and has recorded and/or performed with a diverse roster of artists, including Frank Sinatra, Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand, Joni Mitchell, Nat “King” Cole, Tom Jones, Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Tina Turner, The Beach Boys, Sonny & Cher, Elvis Presley, and Elvis Costello. Costello is one of Burton’s many fervent admirers, along with Paul McCartney and the late George Harrison of the Beatles, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, and Linda Ronstadt.  

James Burton is completely self-taught, having learned in large part by playing along to records. He cites three virtuosic guitarists as his main influences—Chet Atkins and Merle Travis, primarily renowned in country circles, and the genre-defying Les Paul. Burton began playing in 1952 and within a year was performing in nightclubs in Shreveport and Bossier City. In 1954, still a teenager, he joined the house band of the Shreveport-based Louisiana Hayride, leaping into a high-level adult professional milieu. The Hayride, a weekly live radio show with a far-reaching signal broadcast by KWKH, was a popular and influential country music program, comparable to the better-known Grand Ole Opry. The Louisiana Hayride helped launch the careers of Elvis Presley (a country outlier, to some degree, but with ample stylistic overlap), Johnny Cash, Webb Pierce (from West Monroe, Louisiana), Hank Williams, George Jones, and Johnny Horton. Burton accompanied the latter two often, and played with many other Hayride stars.  

In addition to the country-music cultural significance of the Hayride, Shreveport also has a rich, long-standing history in gospel, popular music, and blues. And it was in blues with a rock tinge, rather than country, that James Burton first made his mark on the national Billboard charts, with a searing, syncopated solo on Dale Hawkins’s 1957 hit “Susie Q.”  This song, and Burton’s solo, remain a perennial favorite in the universal bar-band repertoire. Burton next made his mark upon moving to Los Angeles, where in 1958 he was hired as a featured guitarist by the pop-rock teen idol Ricky Nelson, providing inventive accompaniment and solos alongside Nelson’s suave and charismatic crooning. Burton’s seemingly effortless sound incorporated sophisticated jazz chords with fleet-fingered single-note runs that were based, in part, on old-time country finger-picking. This blend can be heard in peak form on Nelson’s “Hello, Mary Lou” and “Fools Rush In.”  

Ricky Nelson’s high profile on network television, and his thirty Top 40 radio hits between 1957 and 1962, put James Burton in the spotlight as well. In his 2010 autobiography Life, Keith Richards declared, “I never bought a Ricky Nelson record, I bought a James Burton record.” George Harrison, in a 1987 interview with Guitar Player magazine, expressed disappointment with the Beatles’ formative records, recalling, “Those early sounds that we did, I just hated them . . . in retrospect they sounded so puny. I mean, [in comparison] listening to James Burton playing on the Rick Nelson records. . . we would come up with our stuff—it was so feeble.”    

Elvis Presley offered Burton a job after seeing him accompany Nelson on television on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet; Burton initially had to turn down the offer due to his hectic schedule of studio commitments. (Among his other gigs, Burton was also playing on ABC-TV’s mid-’60s music program Shindig!) But Burton did go on to work with Presley, leading his TCB Band until Presley’s death in 1977, and playing on some of Presley’s most notable late-career records, including the 1972 hit single “Burning Love” and the 1973 album Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite. 

As Rodney Crowell aptly said in an e-mail to this writer, “James Burton’s guitar wizardry is a matter of instinct meets intuition. He doesn’t have to know a song to add the perfect fills or to throw down a breathtaking solo. He can play funky, clean, lean, and beautiful at the drop of a hat. All in the same song if need be.”  

 Appropriately, the prestigious and innovative Fender Musical Instruments Corporation commissioned him to design the James Burton Telecaster, an Artist Signature series electric guitar. Burton has played his personalized Fender all over the United States and in Asia, Australia, and Europe, most recently at the London Palladium in 2023. 

In 1990 Burton moved home to Shreveport, where he and his wife Louise established the James Burton Foundation, which “supports music education for those in need through guitar donations and music instruction to schools, hospitals, and community service organizations.” To fund the Foundation, in part, Burton has put on a series of James Burton International Guitar Festival concerts and special Christmas shows that have co-featured such Louisiana luminaries as guitarist Sonny Landreth and the Cajun accordionists Wayne Toups and the late Jo-El Sonnier.  

James Burton is a Grammy Award winner and has been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and the Fender Hall of Fame, among other honors. Even so, he is especially proud of and devoted to his work with the Foundation: “to give children the lifelong gift of music to pass on for generations.”  

Ben Sandmel is a New Orleans-based drummer, folklorist, and the author of Ernie K-Doe: The R&B Emperor of New Orleans. He produced and played drums on the Grammy-nominated album Deep Water by the historic Cajun-country band The Hackberry Ramblers. In 2018 the LEH honored Sandmel with an award for his Lifetime Contributions to the Humanities. In September 2021, Sandmel graduated from Tulane University with a master’s degree in musicology.