Duane Eddy That Classic Twang

There have been other Duane Eddy greatest hits packages, but this is the one. Remastered from the original tapes for the first time, this set includes 24 cuts in ear-popping clarity. Rebel Rouser, Moovin' 'n' Groovin', Ramrod, Cannonball, Yep!, 3-30 Blues, Forty Miles Of Bad Road, Some Kinda Earthquake, Shazam (MONO and STEREO), Pepe, Kommotion, Because They're Young, and 12 more!

Let's not talk about guitarists who can play circles around other guitarists, or about which famous picker influenced which other famous picker. Let's talk instead about guitarists who influenced kids, tens of thousands of kids, to pick up the guitar. In that regard, no one succeeded like Duane Eddy. He extended a sense of the possible to kids sitting on the edge of their beds cradling their first guitar. After a week or two, they could pick out a few bars of Rebel Rouser or Forty Miles of Bad Road, and pretend in front of the mirror at least that they were Duane Eddy.

It would take years to approximate the tone and dynamics of the originals - even if it could be done ',at all, but with his commanding . 'simplicity Duane Eddy could plant a seed where other guitarists would just make a young picker shake his head and want to heave the instrument into the yard.

Duane Eddy also earns his place in the history books for being the first to make instrumentals that were true rock 'n' roll records. Even on the smallest record player, these were big records. There's a rock 'n' roll sensibility here; an onrush of hormones and teenage brashness. Later, we found that this was due in no small measure to the production genius of Lee Hazlewood, but it was Duane Eddy's name on the record -and a very rock 'n' roll name it was. The titles of the songs were very rock 'n' roll titles, too. Rebel Rouser, Stalkin' And then how many kids wanted to buy a red Gretsch guitar with a Bigsby tremolo tailpiece like Duane Eddy? He was probably the best salesman either company ever had.

Although he's associated with Phoenix, Arizona, Duane was born in Corning in far upstate New York, 150 miles from the Canadian border. He grew up there and in other small upstate New York towns like Bath and Penn Yan. There was a surprisingly good market for country music in the north country, and several of the southern Saturday night radio jamborees, like the Opry and the WWVA Wheeling, West Virginia Jamboree, could be picked up there loud and clear. Duane's father showed him a few chords on a guitar laying around the house, and Duane had got his first guitar, a Kay, and a lap steel guitar by the time he was nine. He was on local radio in upstate New York before the Eddys moved to Arizona in 1951 when Duane was 13. His father set himself up in a grocery business there.

Duane formed a band that played around Coolidge, Arizona, southeast of Phoenix. According to some accounts, they were heard by Lee Hazlewood, then a dee-jay in Coolidge; according to other accounts, Duane was hanging around the station where Hazlewood worked, even babysat for Hazlewood before they ever struck up a professional relationship. Regardless, the affiliation with Hazlewood was the critical one in Duane Eddy's career. Hazlewood got Duane and his group a fairly steady date at the Madison Square Garden in Phoenix, and another gig playing the hillbilly hits of the hour on the local ABC-TV affiliate.
Before then, around 1955, Duane met Al Casey, the premier hillbilly guitarist in and around Phoenix. Duane asked if he could sit in on a club date, and, even though Casey said later that he didn't see much in Duane, he let him hang around and showed him some of what he knew. Duane also says that he took a couple of lessons from western swing guitarist Jimmy Wybele...

Duane Eddy

Duane Eddy is the original rock 'n' roll guitar hero. His 1950s guitar instrumentals like Rebel Rouser and Forty Miles Of Bad Road inspired countless kids to start playing the guitar, and many of rock music's icons list him as a major influence. His style is instantly recognizable, a bold statement of tone and attitude, a Spaghetti Western movie set to music.

 It is virtually impossible to overstate Duane's influence in the history of the electric guitar. The entire genre of 'guitar instrumentals' virtually began with, and was certainly defined by, Duane's oeuvre of instrumental hits. It's not hyperbole to say that if there were a Mount Rushmore for rock 'n' roll guitar players, Duane Eddy would be George Washington. This collection compiles Duane's best-known songs, along with a few surprises, for an album that truly 'rocks.'

Duane Eddy was born on the East Coast of America, in Corning, New York, on April 26, 1938. His childhood was spent in Corning and other upstate New York towns like Bath and Penn Yan, before his family moved to Tucson, Arizona, in 1951. A year later, the family moved to the small town of Coolidge, Arizona.

Duane fooled around with music from the age of five, when his father showed him a few chords on the guitar. When Duane was nine years old, his aunt bought him a lap steel guitar. After the move to Arizona, Duane continued to play both lap steel and the standard guitar. Country music was the biggest thing in Duane's musical world, and like many other up and coming guitar players, he loved the thumbpick-and-fingers style playing of Chet Atkins and Merle Travis.

Duane's father managed the local Safeway grocery store in Coolidge, having transferred there from a similar job in Tucson. A local disc jockey got into a conversation with Duane's father one day and learned that Duane was an aspiring guitarist, so the disc jockey offered to record Duane at the station, which the jock played on the radio and announced as being by local boy Duane Eddy.

When Duane's rendition of Chet Atkins' Spinning Wheel aired on the station one Monday morning, a young man Duane's age named Jimmy Delbridge (aka Jimmy Dell) came running up to Duane at school, and asked him to come over and play some music with him later in the afternoon, after school.

Duane joined Delbridge (and his brother Bill Delbridge on banjo, and Duane's friend Ed Myers on rhythm guitar) and began playing local dances a few weeks later as Jimmy & Duane, The Coolidge Kids.

Ed Myers, rhythm guitarist in the group, had an interest in becoming a radio disc jockey, so he went around to the local station WCKY looking for advice on how to break into the business. In doing so, Myers met a disc jockey named Lee Hazlewood, then an up-and-coming disc jockey fresh from broadcasting school in California.

The beginning of Duane Eddy's musical career is irrevocably intertwined with that of Lee Hazlewood. The Oklahoma-born Hazlewood was nine years older than Duane, and after studying broadcasting in California had come to Arizona to disc jockey on radio station KCKY. Hazlewood was a minor celebrity of sorts in Coolidge, known for his on-air personality Eb X. Preston, a character he used to exchange on-air banter with himself while announcing records.

After Myers met Hazlewood and introduced Duane to him, Lee and Duane became friends, and Hazlewood became the informal manager of Jimmy & Duane. Hazlewood soon thereafter drove Jimmy and Duane up to Phoenix to be on a talent show there that Ray Odom presented on Saturday nights at the Madison Square Garden, a boxing venue in Phoenix. A year later, Hazlewood took a disc jockey gig on KRUX in Phoenix, and later KTYL. Phoenix was a major metropolitan area, especially compared to sleepy Coolidge, and offered many more opportunities.

After the Phoenix show proved successful, Jimmy and Duane realized that Phoenix offered much greater opportunities than Coolidge. Soon thereafter Hazlewood took Jimmy & Duane into a studio in Phoenix called Ambassador Recording, and cut two Lee Hazlewood-penned songs with the group, Soda Fountain Girl and I Want Some Lovin' Baby. Duane recalls that the studio was a tiny studio in the back of somebody's house, and that Lee hired Buddy Long and his Melody Boys to be on the session.

Duane Eddy Duane Eddy - Rocks
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