At Long Last: The Jimmy Raney Book

For those of you who know me, you probably know that my intent to digitally reproduce my father’s original unpublished melodic line book along with my extended content started roughly in 2006 when I came into possession of the my father’s handwritten manuscript pages. I had seen them as early as 1985 when I was stayed with him for 6 months.

As was the blogging style those days, I decided to document this process on my original Blogspot blog, “Raney Day Thoughts”. At the time, I thought perhaps this public declaration would force me to get it done. As it turned out, that fateful decision would leave me and the Raney fans on the hook for nearly two decades, as I nearly gave up on the project for good.

BUT…

Today, in July of 2024, I can proudly announce “The Jimmy Raney Book” has finally been finished and published by Chuck Sher! It is available at Chuck’s website in both book and pdf download formats.

The new work has about 130 pages and includes my father’s original lesson examples, a historical overview of his concepts, and also my deep dive into particular aspects of his style, his cliches and his unique compositional, harmonic and rhythmic concepts. It also details the specific beginnings of his key influences.

At the risk of sounding immodest, I think it goes way deeper into his style and process than anything else out there that I’ve seen – be it transcriptions or videos. For me, as a Raney superfan with a literal subconscious knowledge of all my father’s work, I think I’m in a unique position this way to offer this, even if I’m not a guitarist.

I got some wonderful endorsements from musical phenoms and friends, Dave Stryker, Peter Bernstein, Pasquale Grasso, Jerry Bergonzi, as well as guitarist/educator, Randy Vincent. Big thanks to all them as well as Ed Fuqua and Jeff Brent who are also in my acknowledgements.

For any of you that have possibly bought the book already, please drop me a line and let me know your thoughts.

I’m elated to have finally fulfilled my dream to do this. When I finished this, I looked at this picture where Dad was looking directly at the camera and said, “Dad, we did it!”.

Cheers,

Jon