He continued to play in recording sessions throughout the '90s and into the new millennium, but was forced to stop playing around 2001 due to a repetitive motion injury. In 1993, Emmons began touring with the Everly Brothers. He quit Miller's band in 1973 and signed a solo contract, releasing several albums in the late '70s.Īfter 1978, Emmons began playing for a number of small labels, where he and Ray Pennington occasionally collaborated with some of Nashville's finest sidemen as the Swing Shift Band. Buddy was a player’s player, said Steve Fishell, the Grammy-winning producer and steel player who captained the 2013 album The Big E A Salute To Steel Guitarist Buddy Emmons. When not touring with Miller, he did session work for a variety of artists. In 1969, Emmons joined Roger Miller's Los Angeles-based band as a bass player. This led the two to create the Sho-Bud Company, which sold an innovative steel guitar that used push-rod pedals.
In 1963, he began a five-year stint with Ray Price & the Cherokee Cowboys, and in 1965 teamed up with fellow steel player Shot Jackson to record the LP Steel Guitar & Dobro Sound. In the late '50s, Emmons began playing occasionally with Ernest Tubb's band on Midnight Jamboree. He also recorded a pair of solo singles for Columbia, "Cold Rolled Steel" (1956) and "Silver Bells" (1957).
He appeared with them a few times on The Grand Ole Opry and recorded with them on a few singles, including "Buddy's Boogie" (1957). In 1956, Emmons went to Detroit to fill in for Walter Haynes during a performance with Little Jimmy Dickens soon afterward he was invited to join Dickens' Country Boys. Affectionately known by the nickname 'Big E', Emmons' primary genre was American country music, but he also performed jazz. He was inducted into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in 1981. As a teen, he enrolled at the Hawaiian Conservatory of Music in South Bend, IN, and began playing professionally in Calumet City and Chicago at age 16. Buddy Gene Emmons (Janu July 21, 2015) was an American musician who is widely regarded as the world's foremost pedal steel guitarist of his day. Born in Mishawaka, IN, he first fell in love with the instrument at age 11 when he received a six-string lap steel guitar as a gift. His musical versatility spans genres such as country, swing, jazz, folk, and country-rock, and he 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.īuddy Emmons earned a place among Nashville's elite as one of the finest steel guitar players in the business. Buddy Emmons is an American country and jazz guitarist.Įmmons has been called "The World's Foremost Steel Guitarist" and his talent is greatly admired by fellow steel guitarists.