Recently, I was listening to satellite radio. Among the artists getting a spin was Floyd Cramer. It is rare for a musician to perfect what they do so proficiently that they become a well-known artist on their own. In the case of Cramer, that is exactly what happened. As an artist, his smash hit "Last Date" stills stands as one of the greatest instrumental recordings. At the age of five, his parents bought him a piano. Never much for formal lessons, he taught himself to play by ear. As a child, he followed Southern gospel music and was heavily influenced by the Stamps-Baxter Quartet, especially pianist Joe Roper. Cramer's dedication to the piano left no question in the minds of friends and family he would eventually become a professional musician. That opportunity came once he graduated high school.

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Nashville piano pioneer. By Variety Staff. Follow Us on Twitter. Country music pianist Floyd Cramer, whose distinctively smooth style was avidly sought by singers ranging from Elvis Presley to Patsy Cline, has died.
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Floyd Cramer, whose slurred, slipping piano notes nurtured a style 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 in Nashville, a city he helped give a prominent spot in the pop music firmament. It was Atkins acting as producer who first hired Cramer, a colleague on some mids records, to move to RCA Victor, a mainstream label where Cramer came to be heard on thousands of discs. You are playing solid left-hand patterns and a dominant melody with the right hand. Cramer was a natural for the combining of delicate style and country picking. He evolved a technique of adapting traditional guitar stroking as exemplified by Mother Maybelle Carter and others to the piano. It is an intentional error and actually involves two notes. The result is a melancholy sound. Cramer by then was doing occasional work in Nashville and while in the city on one trip met Atkins, who encouraged him to move there because the country music industry was evolving beyond an audience of the mildly curious and reaching commercial maturation. By the s, Cramer had moved beyond club dates and recording studios to concert halls, performing with major symphony orchestras and in musical theaters.
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