Hargus “Pig” Robbins, a member of Nashville’s A-team of session players who added keyboards and piano to albums by Dolly Parton, Bob Dylan, Kenny Rogers, Miranda Lambert, Ween, and many more, died Sunday. The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, who inducted Robbins into the Hall in 2012, confirmed his death. He was 84.
Robbins’ playing was all about the feel. Listen to the bluesy piano he dropped into Dylan’s “Pledging My Time” in 1966, the defining but never heavy-handed intro he played on Crystal Gayle’s 1977 “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,” or the supple solo that Robbins added to Lambert’s “To Learn Her” on 2016’s The Weight of These Wings. It was that sense of providing exactly what the songs called for that made Robbins an in demand player up until the end of his life — Dolly Parton asked Robbins to play on a new album but his health…
