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The Steel Guitar in Early Country Music
Part Two: Jimmie Rodger’s Steel Guitarists
Chapter Ten: John Cali
Section One: Cali’s Career Through His Recordings With Rodgers
This ongoing series of articles has been examining the ten different steel guitarists who recorded with American
country music pioneer Jimmie Rodgers (1897-1933) between 1928 and 1933. (The first solo “hillbilly music”
star, Rodgers did much to popularize the acoustic steel guitar through his thirty-one sides including the
instrument.)
The present chapter (the last in the series) discusses the last steel guitarist to back Rodgers, multi-instrumentalist John Cali
(1897-1984) and the one side on which he accompanied Rodgers on acoustic steel guitar, in New York, in late-May 1933.
Rodgers had recorded with nine other steel guitarists before Cali, including Ellsworth T. Cozzens (in February
1928), John James Westbrook (October 1928), Joseph Kaaaia Kaipo (autumn 1929), Charles Kama Valera
(January 1931), Clifford Raymond Carlise (June 1931), and Richard Heywood (“Dick”) Bunyard and William
T. (“Billy”) Burkes (February 1932). In August 1932, Hawaiian steel guitarist David Samuel Kanui backed
Rodgers on five unreleased takes of Sam Lewis and Ira Schuster’s “In The Hills of Tennessee” in New York City.
An anonymous steel guitarist had also been part of a quartet which accompanied Rodgers on seven sides in
Hollywood in the summer of 1930, led by Hawaiian bandleader Lani McIntire.
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According to his State of New York Certificate and Record of Birth, John Cali was born in New York City on
June 26, 1897. Cali’s parents—Domenico Cali (c. 1867-?) and Antonina Leone (c. 1878-?)—immigrated to
New York from Italy in the late 1800s. (According to Cali’s World War I draft-registration card, his father was born
in the Catania region of eastern Sicily.)
According to Domenico and Antonina’s records in the International Genealogical Index at the FamilySearch
website, the two were married in Manhattan on March 31, 1892. New York city directories from the late 1800s
allow us to track the Caili’s moves around Manhattan—by c.1895, the couple was living at 201 East 107th Street
in the northeast part of the island, where Domenico ran a barber shop. By June 1897, Domenico and Antonina
had moved c. three-fourths of a mile north to 1818 Madison Avenue, where John was born. (To infer from John’s
Certificate and Record of Birth, Antonina had given birth to two previous children, who died at young ages.)
In Cali’s April 1984 Seattle Times obituary, his brother-in-law from his second marriage, Nick Giardina, relayed
that Cali had “a limited education.” Cali himself boasted in a 1981 Seattle Times interview with Don Duncan that
he had never taken a real music lesson in his life, yet was able to perform professionally on the tenor banjo,
standard guitar, mandolin, and violin, being self-taught on those instruments.(Cali also made recordings playing—
besides the steel guitar—the lute, ukulele, piano, tuba/sousaphone, and drums.)
The liner notes to Cali’s 1957 LP Banjo On My Knee provide some information about his adolescence. Apparently
first-enamored with the violin, Cali began his performing career at age eleven as a violin soloist with his school
orchestra. The following year, Cali began playing professionally, earning four dollars a week with the Faust Opera
Company (of New York City?), which performed at the Roma Theater. In c. 1911 (at c. age fourteen), Cali toured
the United States and Canada playing violin in the Neapolitan Trio.
Cali first appears in R. L. Polk’s directory of New York City in 1915, at c. age 18; the directory shows Cali living
at 200 East 107th Street (evidently across the street from his parents’ 1895 address), earning his livelihood as a
musician (and—by the time of the publication of the 1916 directory—also as a music-teacher).
Sometime in the mid-1910s, Cali landed a gig playing (violin?) in Vic Bereta’s fox trot-performing orchestra at
the Luna Park amusement-complex on the Coney Island peninsula in Brooklyn. Around this time, Cali began
recognizing the commercial possibilities of the newly-invented four-string tenor banjo then-gaining favor in urban
dance orchestras, and subsequently taught himself to play the instrument.
By the time Cali filled out his World War I draft-registration card (in late-August 1918), he was working at New York
City’s then-renown Rector’s Restaurant (as perhaps a member of the one of the establishment’s ensembles?).
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One of the largest entertainment-venues of the period, Rector’s—then in its second incarnation four blocks north of
Times Square—was a popular “lobster palace” and cabaret fitted with a ballroom for dancing and musical performances
(By c. June 1917, bandleader Earl Fuller was entertaining Rector’s patrons with his Rector Novelty Orchestra.)
By perhaps late 1918, Cali was playing guitar and banjo in the popular dance orchestra of pianist/bandleader
Vincent Lopez (1895-1975). (In his 1960 autobiography Lopez Speaking, Lopez relates a story detailing how—
in the days following the end of World War I—Cali’s belief in the importance of the musicians’ union convinced
Lopez to have his band become union-members.)
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Cali began appearing on records in the early 1920s. The National Four-String Banjo Hall of Fame has described
Cali as “one of the most-recorded musicians ever,” noting that he participated in “literally hundreds of recording
sessions . . . nett[ing] [thousand]s of songs.” Nolan Porterfield—in Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of
America’s Blue Yodeler—has observed that “Cali . . . was all over the place from [the] early [19]20s to [the] late
[19]40s,” backing “dance bands, jazz bands, vocalists, etc.”
On the banjo, Cali accompanied bands such as Ladd’s Black Aces (with Jimmie Durante) (in 1921), the Cotton
Pickers (with Miff Mole and Frankie Trumbauer) (1922-25), and the Broadway Bell-Hops (with Bix Beiderbecke
and Joe Venuti) (1927 and 1928). On standard guitar, Cali accompanied popular-music vocalists such as Ernest
Hare (1926, 1928, and 1930) and Annette Hanshaw (1928, also accompanying her on violin that same year).
Cali’s early backing-work involved playing on some Hawaiian-themed recordings, including Ben Silvin’s “My Isle of
Golden Dreams” (1919),”Underneath Hawaiian Skies” (1921), “Ka-Lu-A” (1921), and “Drifting and Dreaming (Sweet
Paradise)” (1926), the Ambassadors’ “Say It With a Ukulele” (1923), and the ’Radiolites’ Hawaiian fox-trot song
“Hello, Aloha! How Are You?” (1926), on which he played banjo. (Cali can be clearly heard backing the entry of the
Radiolites’ vocal trio on the latter recording.) On standard guitar, Cali backed steel guitarist Roy Smeck on sides
including “Honolulu Days (Olden Golden Days)” (1929) and “Strolling Down the Sands of Waikiki” (1930).
By the time of the publication of Polk and Trow’s 1925 New York City directory, Cali had moved to the Bronx
borough (north of Manhattan). Sometime around 1925 or 1926, Cali married Rose Letki (c. 1898-?); Letki’s entry
in the 1930 United States Census informs us she had been born in Poland and immigrated to America in 1914.
The 1930 census lists Cali’s main occupation as a radio-musician. (Don Duncan—in his 1981 Seattle
Times interview with Cali—relayed that Cali had at one point worked as a “house musician” for New York’s
WABC radio, also noting that then-theater-director and radio-producer Orson Wells had hired Cali to play the
mandolin on one of his radio shows.)
Instances where Cali has been positively identified as backing performers on acoustic steel guitar before Jimmie
Rodgers are rare; Malcolm Rockwell’s Hawaiian and Hawaiian Guitar Records 1891-1960 lists Cali as
accompanying vocalist Dick Robertson on steel (as well as standard) guitar on two Victor sides in April 1932
(including Whitson and Friedman’s “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”). Tony Russell’s Country Music Records: A
Discography, 1921-1942 identifies Cali playing steel behind vocalist Frank Luther on one September 1932
Electradisk recording (the “Buck Jones Rangers’ Song,” the official song of the youth fan club of the then-popular
western movie star). According to Russell, Cali played steel on six of Luther’s Victor recordings the following
month, including such sentimentally-titled sides as “In the Blue Hills of Virginia” (later recorded by the country
act the Delmore Brothers),”Going Back to the One I Love,” and “Silver-Haired Mother.”
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John Cali met Jimmie Rodgers in late-May 1933, when he was hired—along with fellow New York-born multiinstrumentalist Tony Colicchio (1899-1988?)—to back Rodgers on three sides during Rodger’s penultimate
recording session, held at Victor Records’ Studio 1 on East 24th Street in New York less than forty-eight hours
before his death. In the words of Nolan Porterfield, Colicchio—like Cali—was an “old hand” who “had jobbed
around in [New York] recording studios for years”; a perusal of New York city directories from the 1910s shows
Colicchio being active as a musician from c. 1915 (at c. age 16). Colicchio’s prior credits included backing jazz
musicians Red Nichols and Miff Mole, accompanying various singers and bandleaders, and playing guitar and
banjo on Ernie Golden’s Hawaiian-themed, waltz-tempo side “Honolulu Moon” (1926) and the waltz-tempo
Kalges/Goering/Pettis tune “Paradise Isle” (1927).
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By March 1933, Rodgers—who had been suffering from tuberculosis for nearly nine years—was in the terminal stage of
the disease. Porterfield informs us that Rodgers—in need of a cash advance to help defer mounting medical expenses
(and also apparently wishing to amass a backlog of recordings, to provide for his wife and twelve-year-old daughter after
his death)—called his Victor producer, Ralph Peer, from his sickbed at Houston’s Methodist Hospital to ask if their annual
mid-summer recording session might be moved up to the spring. Peer offered no objection, so Rodgers—accompanied by
a private nurse—sailed from Galveston to New York via ocean steamer in early May, arriving in New York within a week.
On May 17, 18, and 20, Rodgers—accompanying himself on guitar—recorded eight sides at Victor’s Studio. Recording
proved to be extremely strenuous for Rodgers, whose lungs at this point were—as Porterfield notes— “literally in shreds
and racked with pain beyond all relief [while] . . . the rest of his body [had been] sedated [via morphine and alcohol]
almost [into] a stupor in a desperate gamble to stay alive until his [recording] work was done.”
Peer’s assistant Bob Gilmore—who supervised Rodgers’s last sessions—recalled in the second edition of Irwin
Stambler and Grelun Landon’s Encyclopedia of Folk, Country, and Western Music that:
[Rodgers] was very ill . . . he had a nurse with him . . . in the recording studio he was [given an easy
chair and] propped up [with pillows] so that he could sing with the least expenditure of energy.....and
sometimes he would stop, in order to catch his breath.
Porterfield reports that at the end of Rodgers’s third day of recording, Gilmore suggested he take a few days off.
Rodgers and his nurse made a trip northeast to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where Rodgers rested and worked
on the four additional songs Victor had arranged for him to record. While Rodgers was in Massachusetts, Gilmore
decided to—as Porterfield notes—“hire a musician or two to accompany [Rodgers during his next day of
recording] . . . and spare him as much exertion as possible.” John Cali and Tony Colicchio were summoned,
and met with Rodgers in a rehearsal hall at Victor’s studios the morning of May 24 to rehearse their material.
According to Porterfield, a cot was set up in the rehearsal hall, “so that Rodgers could rest from time to time....”
During a three-hour session that afternoon, Cali and Colicchio recorded three sides with Rodgers, with the first
of these featuring Cali playing acoustic steel guitar:
“Old Love Letters (Bring Memories of You)” (Vi 23840)
“Old Love Letters” is a waltz-tempo ballad originally composed by Tennessee-born singer/songwriter Dwight
Butcher (1911-1978). (Butcher—who had recorded a dozen sides for Victor in New York in January and April
1933—was then being groomed as a possible Rodgers successor by the label.)
Years later, Butcher recalled that:
I had always idolized Jimmie [Rodgers], but, having been raised on a[n] [eastern] Tennessee
hillside farm, [I] never got too far away or ever had a chance to meet him. When Ralph Peer told
me he [Rodgers] was coming up to New York for a session in the spring [of 1933] and that he
might record some of my songs, well, this was about the most-important thing I had ever had to
look forward to. . . . I went over to the Taft Hotel [where Rodgers was staying, in Midtown
Manhattan] several evenings and rehearsed the songs with him. He would lay on the bed and
prop himself up with pillows in order to hold the guitar. . . . [Butcher’s recollection is currently
posted at the countrymusictreasures.com website.]
According to Porterfield, Philadelphia-born, Queens-based songwriter Louis Herscher (1894-1974)—who had a hand in
three of the songs Rodgers recorded in New York—was “called in to doctor” Butcher’s “Old Love Letters” before Rodgers
recorded it. (Herscher—who merits a page in Tony Todaro’s 1974 tome The Golden Years of Hawaiian Entertainment—
also composed a number of Hawaiian-themed songs, including “Luana” [with Lani McIntire and William E. {“Billy”} Faber]
and “It Happened in Honolulu” [with Johnny Pineapple and Faber]; he also collaborated with Andy Iona on several tunes.)
Porterfield praises Rodgers’s “heartfelt rendition” of “Old Love Letters,” describing it as “the best of the love ballads that
[Rodgers] . . . did, a rich and elegant melody hauntingly accented by Cali’s steel guitar,” which is complemented by Colicchio’s
waltz-style guitar-accompaniment.
The recording opens with an eight-bar introduction featuring Cali’s steel; in the ensuing two verses and first chorus, Cali
mainly doubles Rodgers on the melody (sometimes in the highest register of his guitar, creating Porterfield’s “haunting”
effect) and plays fills. During the last chorus, Cali abandons his melody-doubling to play counter-melodies high above
Rodgers’s vocal line.
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A bit of added poignancy is effected through the twofold use of an unexpected Db major chord in the song’s
chorus (in lieu of the “expected” D minor chord, which would be “native” to the song’s home key of F major).
Cali and Colicchio recorded two other sides with Rodgers, “Mississippi Delta Blues” (featuring prominent banjowork from Cali) and “Somewhere Down Below the Dixon Line” (with both Cali and Colicchio playing standard
guitar, their blues-tinged lines constantly intertwining with Rodgers’s vocals).
After Cali and Colicchio were dismissed, Rodgers rested a few minutes on his cot before recording one final bit
of Mississippi-inspired nostalgia, the “convict ditty” “Years Ago,” composed by Lou Herscher and Saul Klein (a
song-plugger for Ralph Peer), which would turn out to be Rodgers’s last recording.
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Through my visits to the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University (from which several
sheet-music covers shown in recent installments were obtained), I’ve gotten to know the CFPM staff, including
Curator of Recorded Media Collections Martin Fisher. During one recent visit, Martin expressed his affinity for
Jimmie Rodgers’s last recordings; I asked Martin if he might be willing to commit his thoughts to writing, which
he graciously agreed to do, which I offer below (from an e-mail of January 27, 2014).
Of all of Jimmie’s recording sessions, I think the last one is my favorite overall . . . there’s just a
special quality about the performances and the material. There is a noticeable intimacy to his
vocals that may have been the result of close mic[rophone]-placement. Cali’s banjo-playing goes
a long way toward jazzing up “Mississippi Delta Blues” turning it into an anthem rather than a
lament. “Somewhere Down Below The Dixon Line” also benefits from Cali’s jaunty guitarornamentation and Rodgers renders “Years Ago” in a celebratory fashion.
Contrasting these is “Old Love Letters”.
The first time I remember hearing “Old Love Letters” was in the car on the way to somewhere. I
was not only struck by the beautiful melody and chord structure but also the quality of Jimmie’s
vocal. He could have been living the song. His voice, although determined, seems forced,
breathless and shaky and in danger of breaking at any moment. The entire song is ornamented
throughout with upward vocal sobs . . . which lend a sense of agonized longing to the
performance. One gets the impression of a lover valiantly endeavoring to express sentiments to
a lost sweetheart through tears and physical pain.
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Roughly thirty-six hours after Jimmie Rodgers completed his May 24, 1933 recording-session, he was dead.
Porterfield relates that after an afternoon of shopping and sightseeing the following day (including a visit to Coney
Island), Rodgers collapsed on the street outside the Taft Hotel. After being given an alcohol rubdown to ease his
fever, Rodgers was put to bed; as the evening wore on, he suffered two bouts of spasmodic coughing, the second
accompanied by violent hemorrhaging. As Porterfield notes, “mercifully, the . . . end came soon,” in the earlymorning hours of 26 May, with Rodgers “slipping into a coma . . . [and] simply drown[ing] in his own blood.”
Rodgers’s body was transported back to his hometown of Meridian, Mississippi by way of Washington, DC, his
casket riding on a raised platform in the center of a special baggage car added to the Southern Railway’s
Washington-New Orleans run (which passed through Meridian). After lying in state at Meridian’s Scottish Rite
Cathedral, Rodgers’s body was buried in the Oak Grove Cemetery in suburban Bonita (just east of Meridian),
beside his baby daughter, June Rebecca (who had died of pneumonia around Christmastime 1923, at the age
of c. six months).
Next—in Section Two—the remainder of Cali’s career through his April 1984 death.
Information on recording-session personnel and recording-dates was taken largely from T. Malcolm Rockwell’s Hawaiian
and Hawaiian Guitar Records 1891-1960 CD-ROM. Thanks to Wendy Stubbs for her touch-up work on the “Paradise Isle”
cover.
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Anthony Lis
Fine photograph of John Cali as a
young man (date unknown), holding
one of his banjos
1989 photo of the RCA Studio A
location (where Jimmie Rodgers
made his last recordings).
Young Dwight Butcher (composer of
"Old Love Letters").
Sheet-music cover to Gus Kahn
and Walter Blaufuss' 1919
collaboration "My Isle of Golden
Dreams." (Cali played banjo on
Selvin's Novelty Orchestra's
October 20, 1919 recording.) (From
the sheet music collection of the
Center for Popular Music, Middle
Tennessee State University)
Sheet music for Klages/Georing/
Pettis's 1927 song titled "Paradise
Isle." (Tony Colicchio played banjo
and guitar on the Ernie Golden
Orchestra's April 11, 1927 recording
of the tune.) (From the sheet music
collection of the CFPM, MTSU)
Abel Baer's song "Hello, Aloha!
How Are You?." (Cali played a
prominent banjo-part on the
Radiolites' April 29, 1926
recording.) (From the sheet
music collection of the CFPM,
MTSU)
Gravestone for Jimmie Rodgers and
his second wife, Carrie (who died in
1961)—Oak Grove Cemetery, Bonita,
Mississippi.
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Old postcard of Luna Park
on the Coney Island
peninsula in the Brooklyn
borough of New York City,
where John Cali played in
Vic Bereta's orchestra,
perhaps in his late teens.
Ad for the Taft Hotel (roughly
six blocks northwest of RCA
Studio A), where Jimmie
Rodgers died early in the
morning of May 26, 1933.
1913 advertisement for Rector's.
Charles Rector's foutrteen-story
hotel-and-restaurant complex, a
couple of blocks north of Times
Square in Manhattan (the building on
the right-hand side of the postcard,
with the tallest flag [c. 1911?).
The Why?
My reason for starting this series of articles is to document the cover art from vintage Hawaiian, tropical and exotic-themed sheet music.
I've always been intrigued by the sensual images portraying life in the Hawaiian Islands and the Southern Seas. Part of my childhood
was spent learning Hawaiian Guitar, and I am forever reminded of those embryonic days whenever I come across a painting or photograph
of a hula maiden, surfer, or of Waikiki beach with Diamond Head in the background.
Hawaiian Sheet Music 1879-1949
There seems to be a large, and growing, group of Hawaiian sheet music collectors out there in cyberspace. Just go to eBay and watch
how many buyers bid on an unusual piece of Hawaiian sheet music from the twenties or thirties. Some collect them for the music, and
some for the artwork (some both)...but there is definitely a growing interest.
The Art
The general scope of these articles will run from the 1870s, when Hawaiian sheet music first began to be published in Honolulu, up to the
end of the forties. Many of the early images on these pieces show the naivety of the artists, and its often very obvious the illustrator never
set a foot on the Islands. A good example is the Egyptian-looking maiden on the cover of My Hula-Hula Love*1 (1911) or the Greek
looking one on Hawaii; Intermezzo*2 (1908). As travel to the islands became more popular, and affordable, the artwork on Hawaiian
sheet music became more realistic.
Research is a passion of mine, and I'm constantly on the lookout for details of these artists who have been largely forgotten by time.
Many of the great magazine and book illustrators of the last century are beginning to get their well earned due, but the sheet music cover
illustrators remain largely ignored. It doesn't help that many of these artists simply signed with their initials, or with mysterious symbols.
Often, to the consternation of collectors, they didn't even sign their work at all.
The Music
The music itself was often very non-Hawaiian as well, with silly lyrics, which were written in an attempt to mimic the Hawaiian language.
Examples of these are Oh, How She Could Yacki Hacki Wicki Wacki Woo (1916) and Yacka Hula Hicky Dula (1916), which was sung
by Al Jolson. There was still a large amount of traditional Hawaiian music being published, mainly out of Honolulu, but the majority of the
pieces in this series are of the Hapa-Haole variety.
*1 Illustration 2 on page 19 top
*2 Illustration 3 on page 19 top
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