An instinctive melodicist who valued understatement over flash, Mr. Robbins helped set up the piano as an integral a part of the sleek, uncluttered Nashville Sound of the Sixties. He additionally was an enormous purpose that people and rock acts like Joan Baez and Mr. Dylan started touring to Nashville to undertake the impromptu method to recording popularized right here.
The previous Kingston Trio member John Stewart referred to him as “first-take Hargus Robbins” when, on the closing observe of Mr. Stewart’s acclaimed 1969 album, “California Bloodlines,” he listed the Nashville session musicians who appeared on it. Mr. Stewart was acknowledging Mr. Robbins’s knack for enjoying musical passages flawlessly the primary time by means of.
Mr. Robbins’s affect was perhaps most pronounced because the Nashville Sound developed into the extra soul-steeped “countrypolitan” model heard on data like George Jones’s 1980 blockbuster single, “He Stopped Loving Her At the moment.”
Mr. Robbins’s rippling, jazz-inflected intros to Charlie Wealthy’s “Behind Closed Doorways” (1973) and Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” (1977) turned enduring expressions of the Southern musical vernacular of their period. Each data had been No. 1 nation and crossover pop singles.
“Of all of the musicians on my classes, he stood the tallest,” the producer and A-Crew guitarist Jerry Kennedy stated of Mr. Robbins in an exhibit on the Nation Music Corridor of Fame.
“He has been a spine for Nashville,” added Mr. Kennedy, who labored with Mr. Robbins on hits by Roger Miller and Jerry Lee Lewis, and on “Blonde on Blonde.”
Mr. Robbins acquired his distinctive nickname, Pig, whereas attending the Tennessee College for the Blind in Nashville as a boy.
“I had a supervisor who known as me that as a result of I used to sneak in by means of a fireplace escape and play after I wasn’t alleged to and I’d get soiled as a pig,” Mr. Robbins stated in an interview cited within the Encyclopedia of Nation Music.
He misplaced imaginative and prescient in one in every of his eyes when he was 3, after unintentionally poking himself within the eye with a knife. The injured eye was finally eliminated and Mr. Robbins ultimately misplaced sight in his different eye as nicely.
Whereas on the College for the Blind he studied classical music, however he would additionally play jazz, honky-tonk and barrelhouse blues.
Mr. Robbins’s wide-ranging tastes served him nicely, equipping him for work on soul recordings like Clyde McPhatter’s 1962 pop hit, “Lover Please” (the place he was inscrutably credited as Mel “Pigue” Robbins), and Arthur Alexander’s “Anna (Go to Him),” a Prime 10 R&B single from 1962 coated by the Beatles.
Afforded the possibility to stretch out stylistically on “Blonde on Blonde,” Mr. Robbins performed with raucous abandon on “Wet Day Ladies #12 & 35,” the woozy, carnivalesque No. 2 pop hit hooked by the tagline “All people should get stoned.” He employed a young lyricism, against this, on elegiac ballads like “Simply Like a Lady” and “Unhappy Eyed Woman of the Lowlands.”
Hargus Melvin Robbins was born on Jan. 18, 1938, in Spring Metropolis, Tenn.
His first large break got here in 1959 when the music writer Buddy Killen secured him an invite to play on Mr. Jones’s “White Lightning.” Spurred by Mr. Robbins’s rollicking boogie-woogie piano, the report turned a No. 1 nation single.
One other alternative got here two years later, when the producer Owen Bradley, needing somebody to fill in for the A-Crew pianist Floyd Cramer, employed Mr. Robbins to play on the session for Ms. Cline’s “I Fall to Items.” Mr. Cramer quickly launched into a solo profession, creating a gap for Mr. Robbins on the A-Crew.
Mr. Robbins flirted with a solo profession within the ’50s, recording rockabilly originals beneath the identify Mel Robbins. “Save It,” an obscure single from 1959, was coated by the garage-punks the Cramps on their 1983 album, “Off the Bone.”
Certainly one of Mr. Robbins’s instrumental albums, “Nation Instrumentalist of the Yr,” received a Grammy Award for finest nation instrumental efficiency in 1978.
Working as a session musician was nonetheless his inventory in commerce, as a scene from Robert Altman’s 1971 film “Nashville” memorably attests. Upbraiding his recording engineer when a hippie piano participant nicknamed Frog reveals as much as work on their session as a substitute of Mr. Robbins, the narcissistic nation singer performed by Henry Gibson shouts, “Once I ask for Pig, I need Pig!”
Mr. Robbins was named nation instrumentalist of the yr by the Nation Music Affiliation in 1976 and 2000. Even after he was inducted into the Nation Music Corridor of Fame in 2012, he continued — then in his 70s — to do studio work with latter-day hitmakers like Miranda Lambert and Sturgill Simpson.
Info on survivors was not instantly accessible.
Shedding his eyesight could or could not have helped Mr. Robbins domesticate a keener musical sensibility. His taking part in, in any case, revealed a dedication to listening and creativeness that had him responding to his collaborators with a singular depth of feeling.
“Pig Robbins is the most effective session man I’ve ever identified,” stated Charlie McCoy, a fellow A-Teamer, at a reception held in Mr. Robbins’s honor on the Nation Music Corridor of Fame. “Anytime Pig’s on a session everybody else performs higher.”
“In case you’re going to be participant,” Mr. Robbins stated on the occasion, “it’s important to provide you with one thing that may complement the music and the singer.”
