Buddy Emmons: Steel Guitar Icon

By Steve Fishell

Buddy Emmons is known as the world’s foremost steel guitarist from the latter half of the twentieth century. His musical and technological innovations revolutionized the pedal steel guitar, a console-type instrument with knee levers and foot pedals to alter the pitch of the strings. Brought to Nashville by singer Little Jimmy Dickens in 1955, at age 18, Emmons toured for years as a road musician, with Dickens, Ernest Tubb, Ray Price, Roger Miller, JJ Cale, and the Everly Brothers. He played on innumerable hit records over six decades as a session musician, as well as recording his own albums. Emmons influenced the way all subsequent musicians play the steel guitar.

In 1988, he began writing his memoir and worked on it for five years, stopping because it rattled the skeletons in his closet. Fellow steel guitarist Steve Fishell offered in 2010 to work with him to write his story. Emmons turned over the unpublished memoir and provided new interviews. The result is Fishell’s combined biography and memoir, Buddy Emmons: Steel Guitar Icon. Quotes from the Emmons memoir manuscript are included seamlessly in italics throughout the biography. Both tones are conversational and easy to follow. “Over a lifetime playing pedal steel professionally, I’ve returned again and again to Buddy’s recordings for inspiration,” Fishell writes. “He never fails me, and he always leaves me wondering, ‘how did he do that?’ How did he bend this challenging instrument to his will and make the sounds he heard in his head? How did he make it look so easy?”

Emmons began playing professionally while still in high school in his hometown of South Bend, Indiana. He was six feet tall and weighed 140 pounds. Fishell states, “Tall and handsome at fifteen—with the looks of a young man twice his age—steel guitar phenom Buddy Emmons grew up fast in the honky tonks around South Bend,”. He taught himself to play by ear, practicing in the dark to become comfortable in any possible situation. A year later, in 1953, he quit school and left home to play music full time.

He was 20 years old when he co-founded Sho-Bud Steel Guitars in 1957 and developed the split-pedal sound while recording “Half a Mind” with Ernest Tubb. The sound was a game-changer for steel guitarists. Several years later, Emmons designed a push-pull steel guitar and co-founded the Emmons Guitar Company to build his patented design. While his ideas and the resulting guitars were in great demand, he was not a businessman and had to extricate himself from his companies.

Constantly challenging himself to play better, he developed a love for jazz. His first solo album was Steel Guitar Jazz, recorded in 1963. Fishell describes it today as “the gold standard to which all other steel guitar jazzers must compare themselves.”

Emmons was a star attraction at steel guitar conventions. In 1977, he recorded a live album at the annual International Steel Guitar Convention in St. Louis, Missouri. “Buddy’s technique was invincible: his tone fat and sassy, his vibrato full of soul, and his choice of notes perfect,” writes Fishell. “The audience sensed they were witnessing history as they saw and heard the pioneering virtuoso at his creative peak.” By then, at age forty, he had been a pre-eminent steel guitarist for more than twenty years. When other players told him he was the greatest steel player there ever was, the introverted Emmons wondered, “Why can’t I be like everybody else?” Knowing that players he respected had been inspired by him added another layer to the pressure he put upon himself to always play to perfection. “At the beginning of the set I could see his right hand shaking,” stated one observer.

Fishell recalls a session he led as a producer, where he had played a temporary steel part as placeholder. “I quoted one of his signature licks but wanted the real deal from the maestro himself,” he writes. The next day Emmons listened patiently to the playback and then silently handed Fishell a white business card that read, “I really dig what you’re trying to play.” He burst into laughter at his joke. “We all cracked up, and then got on with an unforgettable recording session,” Fishell says.

In addition to discussing Emmons’s innovations and tunings throughout the book, Fishell includes an eight-page appendix titled, “Buddy Emmons’s Tunings and Pedal Changes.” The softcover book with 16 pages of black and white photos contains the standard endnotes and index expected in a biography. A “Buddy Emmons Timeline” lists the years of major life events.

There are also ten pages of “Tributes and Testimonials.” In addition to numerous comments from admiring steel guitarists, producer/songwriter Buddy Cannon recalls his first recording session: “My songs on that session weren’t the greatest, but Buddy played them like they were. I was blown away that I had a publishing contract and even more blown away that Emmons was hanging out with us.” Fiddle legend Buddy Spicher says, “Buddy was always helpful on sessions. He would try to find something we could play together in harmony. He didn’t just try to play everything he knew.” Rock guitarist Duane Eddy remembers, “Buddy took a solo, and I sat there with my mouth hanging open. It was just a cascade of sound, it was so gorgeous and perfect. I stayed out of his way after that.”

Buddy Emmons: Steel Guitar Icon is a worthy addition to the longstanding University of Illinois Press series, Music in American Life.