Guitar Men, Part One - Harlow Wilcox

I started learning how to play guitar when I was four years young (1968), and I've been spanking that plank ever since. When I was growing up there was always music being played, usually at loud volume, at our house. My dad had a pretty big record collection, which in ten years time would at least triple due to his purchase of about 500 albums at a single yard sale. He loved good guitar and organ instrumentalists, Johnny Cash, Dixieland, Big Band, and the ever-present studio musician interpreters of rock hits of the 60s era. I absorbed all of it, and much of it rubbed off on me.



One of my earliest influences was a country session guitarist from Oklahoma named Harlow Wilcox. In 1969 he released an album called "Groovy Grubworm and Other Golden Guitar Greats." As a five-year-old, the album cover alone, with its colorful depiction of a green grubworm wearing a floppy hippie "Love" hat, peace symbol necklace, hoop earrings, and cowboy boots slithering out from the soundhole of a guitar, was enough to attract my attention. Inside the grooves were his interpretations of country and pop guitar instrumental like "Raunchy," "Wipeout," and "Under the Golden Eagle," as well as some of his own original compositions, such as the title track. Listening now, Wilcox is no shredder by any stretch; in fact his playing is fairly pedestrian. But to a kid, it was revelatory. His versions of these songs were easy to learn, and I still can play most of the album by heart. Harlow Wilcox and the Oakies only released one other album besides Groovy Grubworm, "Cripple Cricket and Other Country Critters" - both are fairly impossible to find. The single "Groovy Grubworm" made both the Billboard pop and country charts, and hit number 1 on the Cashbox country chart. After these two albums Wilcox pretty much disappeared from the music world (as far I know). He died in 2002.

Harlow Wilcox & His Oakies

Groovy Grubworm
Under the Double Eagle
Guitar Boogie
Walk Don't Run