ROOTS of Country Music

The Professional Work of Buddy Emmons

(b. Jan. 27, 1937, in Mishawaka, Indiana)

Buddy Emmons is a pionerering steel guitarist whose musical versatility spans genres such as country, swing, jazz and folk. Emmons has performed or recorded with a wide variety of vocalists and musicians including Judy Collins, Linda Ronstadt, Ernest Tubb, John Hartford, The Everly Brothers, Ray Price and Lenny Breau.

His innovative musical stylings range from tasteful ballad accompaniment and classical music to jazz, big band swing standards and Western swing.

Buddy Emmons and Jimmy Day, and their playing and mechanical innovations alike have done more for the development of the pedal steel guitar than any other contributors.

At age eleven, Buddy 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, Michigan a year later. 

In 1955, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee 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 Records 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 (1957) and Ray Price & the Cherokee Cowboys (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, Californai in 1967.  Because he was considered the greatest steel guitarist of his time, this move opened up a new world of opportunites 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, TN and over the following three decades played with such country greats as Mel Tillis, Donna Fargo, Duanne 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.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Ray Price Recording Session

August 11, 1966

Columbia Studios, 804 16th Ave. South, Nashville, Tennessee

Session Personnel: Ray Price (vocal) Harold Bradley, Ray Edenton  (rhythm guitar), Grady Martin (lead guitar), Wayne Moss (guitar), Buddy Emmons (steel guitar), Joseph Zinkan (bass guitar) Len Miller (drums), Tommy Jackson (fiddle), Bill Pursell (piano)

• Each Time (Writer: Ray Price)
• Touch My Heart (Writers: Donny Young, Aubrey Mayhew) 

Listen to Each Time