Duane Eddy – “the first rock and roll guitar god” – had died aged 86.
BBC reports that he died on April 30 in Franklin, Tennessee. The cause was cancer.
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Born on April 26, 1938 in Corning, New York, Eddy began playing guitar aged 5. He formed a duo, Jimmy and Duane, with friend Jimmy Delbridge, aged 16; their first single, 1955’s “Soda Fountain Girl“, was produced by Lee Hazelwood.
His second single, “Moovin’ n’ Groovin’“, also produced by Hazelwood, was credited to Eddy “and his ‘twangy’ guitar”.
Eddy’s third single, “Rebel-‘Rouser“, another Hazelwood/’twangy’ guitar hook-up, have him his first Top 10 single.
Eddy’s recording of Henry Mancini‘s “Peter Gunn” number six in the UK in June, 1959. He went on to enjoy 16 Top 40 singles between 1958 and 1963. He continued to chart in the ’80s, playing on a re-recording of “Peter Gunn” by The Art Of Noise.
“Instrumentalists don’t usually become famous. But Duane Eddy’s electric guitar was a voice all its own,” Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s Kyle Young told Variety. “His sound was muscular and masculine, twangy and tough. Duane scored more than 30 hits on the pop charts. But more importantly, his style inspired thousands of hillbilly cats and downtown rockers – the Ventures, George Harrison, Steve Earle, Bruce Springsteen, Marty Stuart, to name a few – to learn how to rumble and move people to their core. The Duane Eddy sound will forever be stitched into the fabric of country and rock & roll.”