- Also placed instrumental piano versiond of Bob Wills's classic "San Antonio Rose" (1961) and "Theme to the TV Series 'Dallas'" (1980) on Billboard magazine's country charts.
- Began playing piano at 5 years old.
- Biggest hit was 1960's "Last Date," which he composed as an instrumental piece. Country singer Conway Twitty added lyrics to Cramer's song in 1972 and turned it into a No. 1 hit.
- Prolific country pianist.
- Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (in the category sideman) on 10 March 2003.
- Inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, 1993; first to be inducted in category "Recording and/or Touring Musician Active Prior to 1980".
- Recorded and played with legendary Nashville guitarist Hank Garland and the 1958 Fern Jones album, "Glory Road".
- Along with legendary Nashville guitarist Hank Garland and The Jordanaires, recorded the two hit singles, "I've Got the Blues" and "Why Must You Leave Me," with rockabilly pioneer Vernon Taylor.
- Inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2008.
- Upon his death is survived by his wife Mary and two daughters.
- In 1961, Cramer had a hit with "On the Rebound", which went to number 4, and number 1 on the UK Singles Chart. ("On the Rebound" was featured during the opening credits of the 2009 Oscar-nominated film An Education, which was set in England in 1961.).
- Cramer's "slip-note" or "bent-note" style, in which a passing note slides almost instantly into or away from a chordal note, influenced a generation of pianists.
- While Cramer was well-established as a session player, he had a long career as a solo performer with dozens of his own albums and singles, including some Top 40 instrumental hits.
- In 1953, he cut his first single, "Dancin' Diane", backed with "Little Brown Jug", for the local Abbott label.
- In 1961, Cramer had a hit with "San Antonio Rose" (number 8).
- He taught himself to play the piano.
- In Nashville, Cramer found that piano accompaniment in country music was growing in popularity. By the next year he was, in his words, "in day and night doing session".
- East Tennessee State University, in Johnson City, Tennessee, offers the Floyd Cramer Competitive Scholarship.
- His signature playing style was a cornerstone of the pop-oriented "Nashville sound" of the 1950s and 1960s.
- His sound became popular to the degree that he stepped out of his role as a sideman and began touring as a solo act.
- It was Cramer's piano playing, for instance, on Presley's first RCA Victor single, "Heartbreak Hotel".
- Cramer had released records under his own name since the early 1950s and became well known following the release of "Last Date", a 45-rpm single, released by RCA Victor in 1960. The instrumental piece exhibited a relatively new concept in piano playing known as the "slip note" style. The record went to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 pop music chart, sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc. The song was kept out of the number 1 position by Elvis Presley's "Are You Lonesome Tonight". The session pianist for Elvis's recording of that #1 song, in a very early morning session (about 4:00 AM) at RCA Studio B in Nashville, was none other than Floyd Cramer himself.
- After finishing high school, he returned to Shreveport, where he worked as a pianist for the radio show Louisiana Hayride.
- As a studio musician, he became one of a cadre of elite players dubbed the Nashville A-Team and he performed on scores of hit records.
- In 1960, his piano instrumental solo, "Last Date" went to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 pop music chart and sold over one million copies. Its follow-up, "On the Rebound", topped the UK Singles Chart in 1961.
- Before long, he was one of the busiest studio musicians in the industry, playing piano for stars such as Elvis Presley, Brenda Lee, Patsy Cline, the Browns, Jim Reeves, Eddy Arnold, Roy Orbison, Don Gibson, and the Everly Brothers, among others.
- He was an American pianist who was inducted into both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
- Of the characteristic "slip note" style, Cramer commented, "The style I use mainly is a whole-tone slur which gives more of a lonesome cowboy sound. You hit a note and slide almost simultaneously to another." The origin of the style is uncertain. It seems to have first emerged at the 1960 session for Hank Locklin's hit "Please Help Me, I'm Falling", when Cramer was asked by Chet Atkins to copy the unusual piano styling of songwriter Don Robertson, who had played on the demo. Cramer also acknowledged the influence of "Mother" Maybelle Carter's autoharp playing.
- In 1955 he played dates with an emerging talent who would later figure significantly in his career, Elvis Presley. After Presley performed on Louisiana Hayride in 1955, he hired his own band which included Cramer, Jimmy Day, Scotty Moore, Bill Black, and D.J. Fontana. This group remained his supporting band for much of that year; however, when Presley asked them to relocate to Hollywood, Cramer and Day declined to follow him there, preferring to remain in Nashville to pursue independent careers as studio musicians.
- By the mid-1960s, Cramer had become a respected performer, making numerous albums and touring with guitar maestro Chet Atkins and saxophonist Boots Randolph, sometimes headlining and sometimes as the opening act for Eddy Arnold. Cramer also performed with them as a member of the Million Dollar Band.
- He cut a whole album of covers of Monkees tunes. The overlap of ersatz pop and pop-ified country results in an enjoyable goofy set of instrumentals.
- By 1974, Cramer was a Nashville institution, and Chet Atkins presented him with a special award at Opryland to commemorate Cramer's 15 years with RCA.
- Cramer bumped the charts with a 1977 single, "Rhythm of the Rain," as "Floyd Cramer and the Keyboard Kick Band," which was really Cramer playing 8 different keyboard instruments through the magic of multitracking.
- Cramer's grandson, Jason Coleman, followed in his footsteps taking up the piano, performing with him on television and in concert at a young age. At age 17, he played "Please Help Me, I'm Falling", the first song to feature Cramer's signature slip notes, with Hank Locklin at the Grand Ole Opry, and two years later played piano for the Medallion Ceremony at Cramer's induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He carries on his grandfather's legacy with recordings and a touring tribute concert, The Piano Magic of Floyd Cramer, sharing the piano arrangements and story of Cramer's contributions to American music.
- In 2004, his recording of "Last Date" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, established to honor recordings of lasting qualitative or historical significance.
- Floyd Cramer got appreciation with his albums: I Remember Hank Williams (1962), Floyd Cramer Plays the Monkees (1967), Sounds of Sunday (1971) and Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1978).
- In 1980, he placed a cover of the theme to the television series, "Dallas" in the country Top 40. Soon after, though, RCA let his contract lapse.
- He moved to Nashville in 1955, and Chet Atkins quickly spotted him and began using him as a regular session player. He did continue to do live work, appearing with Elvis, Webb Pierce, and Jim Reeves, but as it would remain for the rest of his career, studio work was his focus.
- In the 1980s, he recorded intermittently, hawking at least one compilation of his old hits (even further smoothed down with plenty of synthesized strings) on late night television ads. He recorded a bland, if heartfelt, set of gospel albums, as well as several new Class of style CDs of current hits, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
- Cramer's take on Lalo Schifrin's theme to "Mission: Impossible," is, well ... as the Church Lady would say, special.
- Floyd Cramer's signature "slip note" piano style, along with Chet Atkins' smooth production and syrupy background vocals by the Anita Kerr Singers (or the Jordanaires), exemplified the Nashville Sound of country music in the 1960s.
- He cut a few sides for a local record company, Abbott, but they went nowhere.
- Cramer died of lung cancer on New Year's Eve, 1997.
- In 1977 Floyd Cramer and the Keyboard Kick Band was released, on which he played eight different keyboard instruments.[.
- Often referred to a "countrypolitan," this polished form of country was an enormous commercial success--producing country's first cross-over hits in the pop music charts and carving out a niche on Top 40 radio. To some, it was an artistic disaster, and inspired a younger generation of country musicians--people like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark--to begin a return to a rougher, less citified style in the late 1960s.
- Over the years, he continued to balance session work with his own albums. Many of these featured standards or popular hits of the era.
- From 1965 to 1974 he annually recorded a disc of the year's biggest hits, entitled Class of . . . .
- In 1980 Cramer's final major chart entry was a version of the theme of the television series Dallas.
- In 2008 Cramer was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.
- MGM Records signed him in 1957, and he recorded one album of undistinguished honky tonk piano (more along the lines of Moon Mullican's roadhouse jive than the nostalgic honky tonk piano of Joe Fingers Carr and his followers).
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