Buddy Emmons

Buddy Emmons (b. Mishawaka, January 27, 1937 - d. July 21, 2015) – Steel guitarist, guitarist, vocalist, songwriter, and composer. At age eleven, Emmons learned to play the steel guitar at South Bend’s Hawaiian Conservatory of Music, where his hero Herb Remington had also studied. After playing locally as an early to mid teenager, Emmons left high school at age sixteen to play in a band in Calumet, Illinois, and then moved on to Detroit a year later. In 1955 – when he was only eighteen, he moved to Nashville and joined the Little Jimmy Dickens Band, one of the hottest acts in country music at the time. Included in a series of instrumentals that the band recorded for RCA were Emmons’s own “Raising the Dickens” and “Buddy’s Boogie,” which both became standard tunes for the steel guitar. After the Dickens band broke up in 1956, Emmons went on to join the following Nashville acts: Ernest Tubb and the Texas Troubadors (starting in 1957) and Ray Price & the Cherokee Cowboys (starting in 1962). During those Nashville years, he also did session work with George Jones and Melba Montgomery. Accepting an invitation to play bass with Roger Miller, Emmons moved to Los Angeles in 1967. Because he was considered the greatest steel guitarist of his time, this moved opened up a new world of opportunities in popular music, as he landed session work with Judy Collins, the Carpenters, Nancy Sinatra, Gram Parsons, and John Sebastian. In 1974, Emmons returned to Nashville and over the following three decades played with such country greats as Mel Tillis, Donna Fargo, Duane Eddy, Charlie Walker, John Hartford, George Strait, Gene Watson, Ricky Skaggs, Johnny Bush, and Willie Nelson. From 1993 to 2001, he toured with the Everly Brothers. Among his many recordings are a jazz album in 1963, Buddy Sings Bob Wills (1976), and a series of CDs with Ray Pennington. A 1981 inductee of the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame, Buddy Emmons also contributed greatly to the design of the pedal steel guitar by introducing a “split-pedal” function in 1956, an improvement on Hoosier Bud Isaacs’s earlier pedal innovations.