Duane Eddy, rock’n’roll pioneer renowned for his echo-laden twanging guitar sound – obituary
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Duane Eddy, who has died a few days after his 86th birthday, was famous for his raunchy, low-slung “twanging” guitar instrumentals – distinctive and more subtle than they might at first sound – and with a series of hits in the pre-Beatles era, including Rebel Rouser (1958), Forty Miles of Bad Road (1959), Peter Gunn (1960) and (Dance With The) Guitar Man (1962), became the bestselling instrumentalist in rock history.
Eddy’s trademark was his echo-laden repertoire of growling low notes (which he could only explain by getting technical) and staccato riffs. He first hit on the “twang” when challenged to compose an instrumental.
“I thought I’ll try something high and low,” Eddy recalled, “so I wrote [his first single] Movin’ ‘n’ Groovin’ which had a high part and a low part. I didn’t expect anything to happen with it but I thought it was an interesting experiment.
“I knew the low notes recorded better and I noticed that I had more power on the low notes so that’s what I incorporated and we threw some echo on it. When I went back in to do Rebel Rouser I used the tremolo and there we had my sound and my style. Since it worked so well, I thought ‘I found it, I’ll keep it’. ”
If, as an instrumentalist, Eddy could hardly hope to rank at the forefront of popular music, he managed several successful comebacks, propelled by enthusiasts such as George Harrison and Paul McCartney, and latterly by a new – British – manager, the Sheffield guitarist and singer-songwriter Richard Hawley.
He was always popular in Britain, having made his first tour in 1960 when he had three singles in the British charts and a part in the teenage film Because They’re Young. On the night news of President Kennedy’s assassination reached Britain, Eddy was about to go on stage in Bournemouth.
His career may have trailed away as the Merseybeat boom gathered momentum, but it revived in the 1970s, when he had a surprise Top 10 British hit with Play Me Like You Play Your Guitar (1975). While many of his contemporaries quickly vanished from sight, Eddy travelled a dignified path from the svelte, clean-cut, handsome young rocker to white-bearded, black-hatted portliness – and still sounded as cool as ever.
The eldest of three children, Duane Eddy was born in Corning, in New York state, on April 26 1938. He began to play the guitar when he was five, and by the age of 10 had appeared on the local radio station. At first he immersed himself in country music, even more so after a family move to Tucson, Arizona, to escape the cold weather in 1951 when he was 13.
His parents were Alberta Evelyn and Lloyd, who drove a bread van before promotion to run a branch of the Safeway supermarket chain took the family on to Coolidge, where Duane enrolled at Coolidge High School, only to drop out three years later.
Duane recorded a tape which was broadcast on a local station and heard by another musician, Jimmy Delbridge. When they began to perform at local dances together, Eddy acquired the custom-made Chet Atkins-model Gretsch guitar that would become his signature instrument.
By the time a local disc-jockey, Lee Hazlewood (later to be a force in the music industry and to duet with Nancy Sinatra), heard Eddy play, he was leading a band called the Rebels. Hazlewood booked them at amateur shows and issued some records locally.
With Lester Sill, who raised the money to record four tracks with them, Hazlewood leased Eddy and the Rebels to the fledgling Philadelphia label Jamie Records.
Eddy’s throbbing first effort, Movin’ ‘n’ Groovin’, made in early 1958, introduced his twangy trademark sound, quickly followed by a new single, with Stalkin’ on the A-side and Rebel Rouser on the B-side, featuring a combination of whooping handclaps, yells, honking saxophone and moody guitar reverberation produced in an improvised echo-chamber – an empty water-tank with a speaker at one end and a microphone at the other.
Although Stalkin’ was featured several times on Dick Clark’s television show American Bandstand, it was only when Clark flipped it over that teenagers urged him to play it repeatedly, hoisting it to No 6 in the American charts (it made No 19 in Britain). The follow-ups, Ramrod and Cannonball (both 1958), set the pattern for the string of Eddy hits that followed.
One had a curious origin. Eddy was in a cinema queue and heard two Texans jousting about each other’s taste in women, one of whom was described as having “a face like 40 miles of bad road”. In 1959 the single of that title reached No 9 in America and No 11 in Britain, where Eddy’s debut album, Have ‘Twangy’ Guitar Will Travel made No 6 in the album charts.
The records were made in Phoenix, with session musicians in Los Angeles sometimes dubbed on. After Delbridge dropped out, the Rebels were joined by the young saxophone player Steve Douglas, later one of the most sought-after session men (particularly with Phil Spector and the Beach Boys, as well as touring with Bob Dylan in 1978), and the pianist Larry Knechtel (who later played on Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water and with one of the popular Seventies groups, Bread).
Eddy’s version of Henry Mancini’s theme Peter Gunn for the television detective series of that name became a hit almost by accident. Recorded last of all with the intention of filling up an album in 1959, it was chosen as a single in Australia, where it did well, prompting European release (it climbed to No 6 in Britain) and, belatedly, 18 months later, in America itself.
On another instrumental, Because They’re Young (a British No 2 in 1960), Eddy held his own in the company of a group of celebrated jazz musicians, the drummer Shelly Manne, bassist “Red” Callender and guitarists Barney Kessel and Howard Roberts. But lush strings added while Eddy was away on tour turned the theme into something more suited to a cliché-ridden Western than the teen movie in which he also appeared.
This was the year in which Eddy headed a package with Bobby Darin, Clyde McPhatter and Emile Ford on a barnstorming British tour, coinciding with two more concurrent smash chart hits, Shazam! and The ‘Twang’s’ The ‘Thang’, which climbed to No 4 and No 2 respectively. Readers of the New Musical Express voted Eddy the Number One World Musical Personality in the magazine’s annual poll.
With a move to the RCA label in 1962, Eddy recorded The Ballad of Palladin, a version of a theme for a Western television series, Have Gun – Will Travel, in which he made some appearances; he was also in the lacklustre Western movie, A Thunder of Drums (1961).
One of his biggest hits was (Dance with The) Guitar Man (also 1962), his third million-seller, which reached No 4 in Britain. Much of Eddy’s best work from this period went unreleased, in particular some tracks on which he played with the guitarist James Burton (who beefed up much of Elvis’s work through the Seventies).
The advent of The Beatles relegated Eddy to the revival circuit, and one of his albums was released only in Japan. Having produced Phil Everly’s solo album Star Spangled Springer in 1973, Eddy returned two years later with an infectious new single, penned by the British writer and producer Tony Macaulay, Play Me Like You Play Your Guitar, which reached No 9 in Britain.
Again, Eddy sank from view, and even some excellent sides with the guitarist Ry Cooder, the pianist Don Randi and the drummer Jim Keltner went unreleased in the early 1980s. In 1983, after an absence of 15 years, he made a live American comeback at Randi’s club, the Baked Potato in Los Angeles, followed by an American tour.
Rather more unusual was his linking up in 1986 with the techno-pop combo The Art of Noise for a new version of Peter Gunn: it reached No 8 in Britain, where Eddy promoted it on Top of the Pops and Channel 4’s The Tube, and won a Grammy for best rock instrumental.
His first American album in two decades, Duane Eddy, was produced with the help of Paul McCartney and George Harrison, who hummed a tune by his old sitar tutor, Ravi Shankar, to which Eddy added a section of his own; the resulting track, The Trembler, ranks among the odder songwriting combinations in the history of popular music.
In 1994, it was used in Oliver Stone’s film Natural Born Killers.
In that year Eddy’s Rebel Rouser featured in the film Forrest Gump, and Eddy himself was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Mayor of Nashville, Tennessee, bestowed the title “Titan of Twang” on Eddy in 2000. In 2012 Eddy released Road Trip, his first new album in 15 years, produced by his new manager, Richard Hawley.
“There are two types of guitar players,” Eddy once said, “the players who have developed their skills to a point where they can play anything in any style, and me. I can’t do that. I’ve never been one to jump in on a jam session. I found a sound, the so-called twangy guitar sound, and I stayed with it.”
He is survived by his wife Deed, along with a son and a daughter from his first marriage, to Carol Puckett, and a daughter from his second marriage, to the country singer Jessi Colter, who subsequently married Waylon Jennings.
Duane Eddy, born April 26 1938, died April 30 2024
