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Hank acknowledged various American players as early influences including Scotty Moore, James Burton and Buddy Holly..and IIRC, Cliff Gallup..

I wonder if Hank ever heard this 1956 LP- the first album release by Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps (the first lineup with Cliff Gallup on lead guitar)? The LP includes Gene's then current first hit single, Be Bop a Lula.

Cliff Gallup's playing on the well known faster rockabilly songs includes fingerpicking and fast runs etc with some slap back echo...however, on the slower ballad songs he used tape echo and the guitar's vibrato more gently and bases his fills and solos etc more on the melody lines of the songs...and the overall effect is very similar to what Hank played on Cliff's ballads a few years later..

The particular tracks I'm referring to on the above LP include Up A Lazy River, That Old Gang of Mine, and Jezebel..which were all old standards by the mid '50's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IREN3ahloiw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UubXgI7U5Wg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1oVPIt6mhU

From listening to the tracks, I would say that the guitar echo is the same as the vocal echo and comes from the same source - a studio 15ips tape recorder providing a single slapback echo by taking a feed of the vocal mic and the guitar mic in to the record head and adding the output of the playback head to the mix.

Would Cliff Gallup have had a separate tape echo? I doubt it. This was 1956. We know that Scotty Moore had a Ray Butts Echosonic tape echo built into his amp but fewer than 70 were made.

Ray

There was some comment on wiki that Cliff Gallup had his own echo unit which he made himself...

Either way, I was specifically referring to the style and feel of Cliff's playing...it struck me that Hank seemed to play in a similar style on the early songs when the Shads backed Cliff Richard.