When it comes to hot guitar playing -- hot as in sizzling, like steaks on a grill -- the country music genre provides plenty of thrills if a listener investigates artists such as Little Jimmy Dickens, who skillfully combined influences from both Western swing and the new sounds that would eventually be called rock roll. Sometimes the stunning sounds of twin lead guitarists such as Jabbo Arrington and Grady Martin would put in service of silly novelty tunes such as May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose, but there is no question about the quality of the playing. Arrington was a picker whose flashy chops and aggressive attack had, by the '40s, landed him a position in the band of regular Grand Old Opry performer Paul Howard. A member of the Opry since 1940, Howard developed one of the hottest Western swing bands east of the Mississippi, the Arkansas Cotton Pickers, prominently featuring his soloists in what was essentially a musical boot camp for future star players. In the Western swing tradition, the bandleader kept dual guitarists going at all times and looked for arrangements that would highlight such string delirium. When Howard left the Opry and Nashville and headed South looking for more enthusiastic Western swing audiences, the savvy Dickens hired some of his unemployed sidemen, such as Arrington and Martin. Arrington would also share lead guitar duties in this band with the equally wonderful Hank Garland, one of the few country western guitarists to also score highly in the world of jazz. Garland was also an ex-Howard bandmember and, in fact, had been frustrated by union regulations in his first attempts to join that band at the age of 16. Some critics feel Dickens took more than just the sidemen from Howard, hearing in all the classic Dickens' sides nothing more than outright imitation of the Arkansas Cotton Pickers' sound. For some reason, good old Jabbo, who was born Robert Arrington, never quite established the same level of reputation of either Garland or Martin. One of the main reasons was his untimely death in the early '50s, meaning he was out of the picture by the time the popularity of country music expanded to the point where busy session players from the Nashville scene became superstars in their own right. As it stood in the early 2000s, tracks featuring Arrington were only available domestically on various anthologies, while the industrious German archivists on labels such as Bear Family and Cattle had released full reissues dedicated to Dickens and Howard, respectively. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, Rovi