Lobosco wrote:

Any other fans of Eddie Lang out there?

Yes, David, there are. One of whom is here.

A great guitar player, and one of Bing's close friends. Bing seems to have blamed himself for Eddie Lang's death. He had a constant sore throat, diagnosed as  tonsillitis and Bing persuaded him to have a tonsillectomy. There was a major haemorrhage shortly after the operation and he died at the age of 29 in 1933. The friendship and the events around the death are covered in some depth by Gary Giddins in 'A Pocketful of Dreams'.

He is prominent on a number of Bing's early recordings and Lang and Jo Venuti also recorded a number of interesting tracks. Guitar and violin in a jazz setting. Pretty novel at the time. There was a highly recommendable CD a few years ago ' A Handful of Riffs'.  He is also quite prominent on some early Beiderbecke tracks (eg Singin' The Blues').  He has been described as the father of the jazz guitar and certainly many others were directly influenced by him even though his career was so short. The 'Wiki' entry is extraordinarily brief for one who had such an impact.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Lang

No problem. Thanks for checking it out. I do it for my own enjoyment. I used to depend on You Tube clips a lot, but I got away from that to feature more articles. If you ever have any suggestions, give me a holler!

There are a few special recordings of Bing in which he is backed by little besides guitar, including the song in the Palladium concert for which one of his sons is the guitarist.  When I hear these songs, I always think of this affinity between Bing and that istrument going back to his artistic friendship with Lang.

Ron Field wrote:

The son was Harry.

Ron, thanks for jogging my memory, which currently is clouded more than usual by a nasty virus I can't get over.