Twisted Thursday – Emmons and McCoy?
ok so maybe not twisted but just slightly bent. I listened to two older albums today that had two artists playing out of their usual genre. The first was Buddy Emmons who is known as the “The World’s Foremost Pedal Steel Guitar” player (It says so on his website). Anyway if you’ve heard the music of Judy Collins, Linda Ronstadt, Ernest Tubb, John Hartford, The Everly Brothers, Ray Price, and Lenny Breau you’ve heard Buddy Emmons.
There are many outstanding steel players, like Ralph Mooney, Lloyd Green, Pete Drake, Weldon Myrick, Hal Rugg, Curly Chalker, Tom Brumley and Doug Jernigan, but Emmons is alone at the top.
“He’s not an ordinary guy,” Lloyd Green says. “In my opinion Buddy Emmons is probably the most intelligent and talented musician who’s ever played the instrument.””He’s like Picasso or Michelangelo. That might be laying it on a little thick, but he’s just flawless in his playing. Nobody is the composite player he is.””He was the first modern great steel player and nobody’s surpassed him yet. Emmons just, by God, came along and sounded like a 1977 steel player when he came here in 1955.”