On this day · 53 years ago · 1973
53 Years Ago Today: Clarence White Played His Final Show Before a Drunk Driver Killed Him
Clarence White reinvented bluegrass flatpicking, co-built the guitar's B-Bender, and held the Byrds together through their final years. On July 14, 1973, he played what turned out to be his last show.
By Kenji, Bluegrass / Old-Time desk · Edited by Cadence ·
On July 14, 1973, Byrds and Kentucky Colonels guitarist Clarence White played his final show at BJ's, a bar in Palmdale, California. In the early hours of July 15, a drunk driver struck him while he was loading equipment after the gig, and he died later that day at age 29. White co-invented the B-Bender (StringBender) with Gene Parsons and is a Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee.
A bluegrass prodigy who rewrote what a flatpicked guitar could do
Clarence White, born Clarence Joseph LeBlanc on June 7, 1944, was still a teenager when he started reshaping bluegrass guitar. Per Wikipedia's account of his career, White co-founded the Kentucky Colonels with his brothers, and his flatpicking, fast, precise, melodically inventive in a style built for fiddle tunes, pushed the acoustic guitar into a lead-instrument role bluegrass hadn't given it before. He backed that reputation up in the studio too: session credits piled up across the Everly Brothers, Ricky Nelson, Pat Boone, the Monkees, Randy Newman, Gene Clark, Linda Ronstadt, Arlo Guthrie, and Jackson Browne.
The B-Bender: bending a string a whole step with your picking hand free
White's most lasting technical contribution came from a problem, not a genre. Working with musician and engineer Gene Parsons, he built a mechanical linkage that ran from the guitar strap through the body of a Telecaster to the B string's tuning peg. Per Wikipedia's account, pulling down on the neck while playing bent the B string a full step, letting a standard six-string electric guitar mimic the pitch-bending swoop of a pedal steel. The device became known as the B-Bender, or StringBender, and it's still built into guitars and sold as an aftermarket part decades later, a rare case of a working musician's studio problem becoming permanent guitar-building vocabulary.
Holding the Byrds together through their last years
White joined the Byrds as a full-time member in 1968, stepping in after Gram Parsons' abrupt departure that July, per Wikipedia. Per the same account, he stayed through the band's final configuration, playing on their run of early-1970s country-rock records until Roger McGuinn dissolved the group in February 1973. By then, White had spent most of the decade doing double duty: reshaping bluegrass flatpicking as a teenager, then reshaping what an electric guitar could do live with a band built around vocal harmony and jangle.
July 14, 1973: a bar gig in Palmdale, then tragedy hours later
On the evening of July 14, 1973, Clarence and his brother Roland White had dinner with their mother, then headed to BJ's, a bar in Palmdale, California, to sit in with fellow musicians, according to The Adios Lounge's account of the night. It was, by every account, an ordinary gig. In the early hours of July 15, while the brothers were loading their equipment into their car after the show, a drunk driver struck Clarence, and the impact threw his body into Roland, who suffered a dislocated arm in the same collision. Clarence White died later that day at age 29.
Chasing that flatpicked bluegrass tone today
White's own studio and stage string gauges from his Kentucky Colonels years aren't documented well enough to cite as fact. But if it's the bright, articulate flatpicking attack that made his bluegrass playing cut through a fiddle and banjo mix that you're chasing on a dreadnought today, a crisp 80/20 bronze acoustic set remains a reliable modern starting point.
EJ11 80/20 Bronze Light (.012–.053)
Why this one: A bright, vintage-voiced 80/20 bronze set built for flatpicking cut-through, not a historical claim about White's own undocumented Kentucky Colonels gear.
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