He was a self-taught virtuoso of the electric guitar who impacted a generation of artists. John Fogerty, one of them, referred to him as the first guitar god of rock.
Duane Eddy passed away in Franklin, Tennessee, on Tuesday. Eddy made significant contributions to mainstream music in the 1950s with his reverberant, staccato guitar playing style, which became known as twang. He was eighty-six.
According to his wife, Deed (Abbate) Eddy, cancer problems were the reason for his hospitalized death.
With snarling, echo-laden classics like “Rebel Rouser” and “Forty Miles of Bad Road,” Mr. Eddy sold millions of records worldwide during his heyday as a purely instrumental recording artist in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the process, he significantly contributed to the electric guitar becoming the standard musical instrument in rock ‘n’ roll.
Many rock guitarists, including as Bruce Springsteen, Jimi Hendrix, and George Harrison, were influenced by Mr. Eddy. Mr. Eddy’s powerful fretwork is evident in the guitar lines of Bruce Springsteen’s song “Born to Run.”
On the Rhino Records website, founding lead vocalist and guitarist of Creedence Clearwater Revival John Fogerty is reported as saying, “Duane Eddy was the front guy, the first rock and roll guitar god.”
Self-taught, Mr. Eddy developed his rhythmic melodicism by heavily employing the vibrato bar and playing the lead lines on his guitar’s bass strings in his recordings. Despite never having studied music notation or reading, he possessed a keen sense of popular vernaculars such as jazz, country, and rhythm & blues.
He was also skilled at experimenting in the studio; during one session, he carried a 2,000-gallon water tank and set up a speaker inside to mimic the effects of an echo chamber.
“I enjoy experimenting with different textures and arrangement ideas on tracks in the studio,” Mr. Eddy stated in a 2013 interview with Guitar Player magazine, which had bestowed its Legend Award upon him in 2004.
Mr. Eddy continued, “It’s not just about playing the instrument for me; it’s also about making the album. Perhaps putting it this way—I don’t write or arrange songs in the traditional sense—will help to clarify. Rather, it reminds me of writing or organizing records. The element that unites all the strands and weaves them together is my sound.
From 1958 to 1963, Mr. Eddy’s distinctive style on the guitar yielded fifteen Top 40 pop tunes that were instantly identifiable. The string-sweetened song “Because They’re Young” was featured on the soundtrack of the 1960 film of the same name, which starred Tuesday Weld and Dick Clark.
The upbeat instrumental “Cannonball,” which peaked at number 20 in the pop charts in the United States and at number 10 in Britain in 1958, and the 1962 smash “(Dance With the) Guitar Man,” which featured a female vocal group on the chorus, are better examples of Mr. Eddy’s gritty style. The loping instrumental “The Ballad of Paladin” served as the theme for the CBS television series “Have Gun— Will Travel.”
The majority of Mr. Eddy’s early recordings were produced and written by Lee Hazlewood and were published by Jamie Records, a Philadelphia-based label. His backing group, The Rebels, featured a number of players from the renowned Wrecking Crew, a West Coast studio group that included saxophonists Jim Horn and Plas Johnson, guitarist Al Casey, and keyboard and bassist Larry Knechtel.
Titles for the majority of Mr. Eddy’s albums from the late 1950s and early 1960s included some variation of the word “twang.”
Mr. Eddy began playing the guitar at the age of five. He was born on April 26, 1938, in Corning, New York, a small town in the state’s south central region. Lloyd, his father, was a bread truck driver before becoming a Safeway grocery store manager. The home was run by his mother, Alberta Evelyn (Granger) Eddy. When Duane was thirteen years old, the family relocated to Tucson, Arizona. Later, they settled in Phoenix, where he met Mr. Hazlewood and they started a musical collaboration.
When Duane was sixteen, he received his first Gretsch guitar, built to order in the Chet Atkins model. The next year, he recorded his debut tracks as half of the duo Jimmy and Duane, alongside pianist Jimmy Delbridge (who would go on to record as Jimmy Dell).
Mr. Eddy started touring with Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars as a guitarist in 1957, and he soon started putting out records under his own name.
A disagreement over a contract caused Mr. Eddy and Mr. Hazlewood to split up in late 1960, although they eventually got back together to collaborate on projects. Mr. Eddy quickly became an RCA signee.
By the middle of the 1960s, the hit singles had dried up, but Mr. Eddy kept putting out instrumental albums, such as “Duane Does Dylan,” which was a compilation of Bob Dylan covers.
There was a resurgence of interest in Mr. Eddy’s work during the rockabilly renaissance of the following ten years. In addition, Mr. Eddy produced recordings in the 1970s for Waylon Jennings and Phil Everly. Waylon Jennings’ widow, Jessi Colter, was Mr. Eddy’s spouse from 1962 until 1968.
In the 1980s, Mr. Eddy’s music became known to still another generation of listeners when the British synth-pop group Art of Noise issued an avant-disco version of his hit 1960 rendition of Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn,” with lead guitar played by Mr. Eddy. In 1987, it took home the Grammy for best rock instrumental performance.
1994 saw the addition of Mr. Eddy to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the same year that the movie Forrest Gump included his original hit song “Rebel Rouser.” His collaboration with Ravi Shankar on the song “The Trembler” was included in Oliver Stone’s 1994 film “Natural Born Killers.” In 2008, he was also admitted to Nashville’s Musicians Hall of Fame.
Mr. Eddy is survived by his wife, Linda Jones, Chris Eddy, and Jennifer Eddy Davis, from his first marriage to Carol Puckett and Ms. Colter, respectively; he also leaves behind a sister, Elaine Scarborough, five granddaughters, and nine great-grandchildren.
Unlike many instrumentalists, Mr. Eddy said, he never seriously considered expanding his musical résumé to include vocals.
Elaborating on the subject to Guitar Player in 2013, he recalled an interview with Conan O’Brien in which he was asked, “Duane, you’ve been in this business for many years now; what do you consider your greatest contribution to music?” He answered, “Not singing.”
“I never felt that I had a good voice for singing,” he went on. “When I was young, this frustrated me a lot, so I took it out on the guitar.”
