The Tulsa Sound: Leon Russell and J.J. Cale

In the late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties, a group of musicians came of age in Tulsa who would, without ever quite intending it, invent something that got called the Tulsa Sound. It was not a manifesto. It was not a school. It was what happened when a handful of extraordinarily talented teenagers in an oil city listened to everything available on the radio, absorbed the blues from the east side and the country from the surrounding plains, and started playing together.

Leon Russell was born in Lawton and raised in Tulsa. He was playing piano professionally by age fourteen. He left for Los Angeles in the early nineteen sixties and became one of the most sought-after session musicians of the decade, playing on records by the Rolling Stones, the Byrds, Frank Sinatra, and dozens of others. He wrote Delta Lady, Superstar, and A Song for You. He appeared on Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour in nineteen seventy as bandleader, arranger, and performer. His recorded output across the nineteen seventies is one of the longest sustained runs of American musical productivity in the era. He died in Tennessee in twenty sixteen and is buried in Tulsa.

J.J. Cale came from Tulsa by a different route. His sound was quieter, more deliberately restrained. He recorded After Midnight in nineteen sixty-six, and when Eric Clapton covered it in nineteen seventy, Cale's name entered the conversation. He wrote Cocaine, which Clapton also covered. Clapton called Cale one of the most important influences in his life. Cale deflected the praise with the equanimity of someone who had consciously chosen to make music rather than careers.

What they shared was an approach to rhythm, a looseness in the pocket of a groove, a preference for feel over precision, that Tulsa musicians who came after them have identified as the essential quality of the sound.