Early in Buddy Emmons: Steel Guitar Icon, we meet the future legend as a skinny, high school-hating 14-year-old boy on his bike, hanging around outside a bar.
He ignored the loud barroom crowd, the thick clouds of cigarette smoke, the clinking sounds of beer bottles and shot glasses, and the waitresses yelling their drink orders as the door swung open. He focused on the country band at the bar.
The Majorette was Buddy’s hometown bar. Bob Reed and the Cowboys were in the band. Emmons was in the band at the age of 15 and he was playing a blond triple neck guitar. Fishell weaves effectively into this bio the fact that he was ready to play music for a living.
It is a living. What a life, what a life. Over the next half-century, Emmons became a pedal-steel virtuoso and played with everyone from Little Jimmy Dickens to Linda Ronstadt. He was an inventor, improving the mechanisms of the instrument and designing a new model.
Fishell is a pedal-steel guitarist, producer and educator.
Buddy Emmons was a genius because of his right brain’s creative talents and his left brain’s critical thinking. He received a U.S. patent in 1969 for improvements to the instrument’s pitch-bending system, which allowed him to play solo so beautifully that he was so beautiful that he cried.
Buddy Emmons was a steel guitar icon.
Steve Fishell is a man.
The University of Illinois has a Press.
There are 288 pages of this book.
Fishell has recorded with the likes of Dolly Parton, John Prine and Emmylou Harris, and he brings a musician’s knowledge to the topic. It might help at times if you don’t have to recognize the 13th and C6 tuning. He gives us Buddy Emmons, a human with quirks and flaws who had preternatural talent and an almost preposterous drive for divining new and more expressive sounds from his instrument.
Young Buddy is already hooked on music, but he is reluctant to play the steel guitar his dad used to play. He clashed with his music teacher on his way to becoming a self-taught musician. He learned through repetition and listening. He listened to both jazz and steel- guitar greats, as well as the Western swing band of Spade Cooley.
Emmons used to practice in the dark, which was perhaps the most fascinating musical self- improvement method this side of Robert Johnson’s mythical journey to the crossroads.
Emmons said that he began figuring out how to find his way without looking. When the lights were out, I liked the feeling of something happening in my head.
His playing was very good. Fishell puts us on the road, in the studio, and in the jam sessions that Emmons loved showing the impact of his playing on fellow musicians. They were awed by his ingenuity. Vince Gill said he was intimidated by Emmons in the studio in 2005. Fishell writes that we see Emmons the man with his rough edges and quirks. He tried to control his temper, but not always successfully. We see the drinking, the pills, the domestic tumult, but also the long, happy third and final marriage toPeggy Hix, who “rescued Buddy from his dark side.”
It was difficult to be Buddy Emmons, steel guitar icon. If it wasn’t the self-imposed pressure of driving himself to perfect, it was the admiration of admirers who told him how great he was. But Buddy Emmons: Steel Guitar Icon is filled with inspiring music and innovations. Emmons died of heart failure at the age of 78. He was a musician who made his music speak new languages, whether it was country, jazz, folk or western swing.
If you want to see an example of Emmons’ playing, try Ray Price’s version of the Willie Nelson classic “Night Life”. In an interview with the author, Linda Ronstadt talked about hearing the record for the first time in the company of a pedal steel player. Emmons was identified as the best one by his boyfriend.
Ronstadt said it was a texture he had never heard before on the pedal steel. I was completely enamored with the person. “I think Buddy Emmons made the steel guitar sexy.”
It makes you want to hear that man-of-steel magic. So move ahead. Start discovering. Let this biography guide you.
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