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Pedal mettle

Buddy Emmons's Western bop

by Bill Kisliuk

Ever look at an old photo of yourself that you hate but everyone else thinks is cute? Walk down the street and see an ex who reminds you of that first clumsy pass at romance? That's how country-music great Buddy Emmons feels about Amazing Steel Guitar: The Buddy Emmons Collection (Razor & Tie), his 34-year-old jazz outing that has just been re-released.

Emmons doesn't like the disc. It brings up bad memories. To this very day he gets twisted up thinking about that 1963 New York recording session with top jazz cats -- how the hillbilly hero from Nashville got humbled by the big-leaguers in the Big Apple. But just like that first lover or that old photo, there's more to Amazing Steel Guitar than Buddy Emmons would care to admit. His revolutionary pedal-steel work places him on a par in his world with the likes of jazz guys like Sonny Rollins and Jimmy Smith in theirs. And Amazing Steel Guitar is a milestone, albeit an odd one. In 1963 it was the first of its kind. Today it remains a unique experiment in a style that never was: Western bop.

A pedal-steel prodigy at age 11, Emmons first hit the Grand Ole Opry in 1955, behind hillbilly howler Little Jimmy Dickens. He later worked with country legend Ernest Tubb and his Texas Troubadours. In 1962 he became one of Country Hall of Famer Ray Price's Cherokee Cowboys. By '63 he was comfortably ranked among the top players in Music City.

Today Emmons is without question the sultan of the pedal steel. He's played on hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of studio sessions, with folks from Ray Charles and Henry Mancini to the Carpenters and current country chart-toppers Marc Chestnutt and George Strait. He's also designed and manufactured pedal-steel guitars on and off for 35 years.

On Amazing Steel Guitar he places the bending, sliding, weeping, and beeping possibilities of the instrument alongside top jazz rhythm men Charli Persip and Art Davis. They ride hard on Sonny Rollins's "Oleo" and Ray Noble's "Cherokee"; the CD also features five earlier Emmons instrumentals. But as tasty and novel as Amazing Steel Guitar is, the stories he tells about it are just as good.

In the early '60s Emmons sometimes led jam sessions at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville. Now a place where, he says, "country solo singers sit in the window and play to the tourists," Tootsie's was then a hangout for Opry artists who stretched out on country tunes, standards, and -- at Emmons's suggestion -- a little jazz. DJ/songwriter Justin Tubb, son of the Texas Troubadour, asked Emmons whether he wanted to cut a jazz LP.

Soon Emmons was going over tunes with producer Quincy Jones. "They wanted to throw me into that lion's den in New York. That gave me a small heartache. I'd never been to New York and I didn't want to go."

But there he was in July: unable to read music adequately, without charts for the band, with little more than a tiny amp that cramped his sound and a belly full of worry about what was to come. Jones did not make the session, and Emmons was dismayed to discover that drummer Persip, bassist Davis, pianist Bobby Scott, and reed player Jerome Richardson didn't know many of the tunes he had worked up. "They weren't familiar with the changes on about 10 of the 15 songs I called. Or so they said. That was a blow to me too. We had to start naming tunes that everyone knew."

On the first day Emmons just couldn't get it together, repeatedly stumbling over the tom-tom-beat intro to "Cherokee." "After that session I went up to my room and cried. I stayed up there that night and drank, called my wife and said, `Honey, I'm not making it.' "

On the second evening he dropped into Birdland, where master saxophonist John Coltrane's quartet was trading sets with vibraphonist Terry Gibbs. "That put a little fire in my ass. And then I didn't give a damn what happened and didn't care what I played."

Emmons wrote a swinging blues figure called "Bluemmons," (mistakenly titled "Bluemoons" on the Razor & Tie CD); he took on "Oleo" and soul-jazz pianist Horace Silver's "The Preacher." He has not done anything like that since, though he has recorded swing and big-band tunes with a jazz orchestra and made an LP with the late cult-figure jazz guitarist Lenny Breau.

Does he still hate Amazing Steel Guitar?

"I do," he laughs. "Because I know what I could have done. The only good feeling I have about is that I was offered the chance to do it. That's about it. But that's just one man's opinion."