For many reaching the state of teenagehood during the late 1950s, in the temporal space between Elvis and the Beatles, the throb of Duane Eddy’s electric guitar – deep, dark and, above all, twangy – represented the wordless evocation of American dreams, the expression of a yearning for blue jeans, neon lights, candyfloss, and cars with chrome tailfins.
Eddy, who has died aged 86, exploited the popularity of instrumental music in that era to create a string of hits, which started in 1958 with Rebel-Rouser and went on to include Peter Gunn, Shazam, Forty Miles of Bad Road and Because They’re Young.
Few did more to encourage a new generation to take up the guitar, not least because he made it sound simple. Unlike most guitar heroes, particularly those of subsequent eras, Eddy never indulged in exhibitions of speed or technical dexterity, yet the influence of his sound extended to Ennio Morricone’s soundtracks for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns and Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run.
The first album compiling Eddy’s early hits, released in 1960, was boldly but not inaccurately titled $1,000,000.00 Worth of Twang. Two years later, a second volume would claim to contain a further million dollars’ worth. By the time he made an album featuring guest stars in 1987, the admirers who queued up to take part included Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Steve Cropper and Ry Cooder.
Eddy was born in Corning, a small town on the Chemung River in New York State, to Alberta (nee Granger) and her husband, Alfred Eddy, who drove a bread-delivery truck and later managed a grocery store. By Duane’s early teenage years the family had moved to Arizona, first to Tucson and then settling in Coolidge. He had begun playing the guitar aged five and at 16 he formed a duo called Jimmy and Duane with a friend, Jimmy Delbridge.
While broadcasting on a local radio station, they met the man who would become the key influence on Eddy’s career: a disc jockey named Lee Hazlewood, a Korean war veteran who had ambitions as a songwriter and record producer. Soon, Eddy and Delbridge were joining a country band, Buddy Long & the Western Melody Boys, but Hazlewood had greater plans for one of them.
In 1957 Eddy traded his Gibson Les Paul guitar for a brand-new Gretsch, the 6120 Chet Atkins model – a hollow-body single-cutaway instrument with prominent f-holes and a Bigsby tremolo arm, retailing at a pricey $385. With that cherry-red guitar, and under Hazlewood’s supervision, and with finance arranged by Lester Sill, the producer’s business partner, Eddy and a group of session musicians recorded four tunes in a Phoenix studio that Hazlewood had modified by adding an echo chamber made from a 2,000-gallon water tank.
Through Sill’s contacts in the music business, the Jamie label of Philadelphia released a first single under the name of Duane Eddy and the Rebels. Co-written by Eddy and Hazlewood, Movin’ and Groovin’ reached the US Top 100. The follow-up, Rebel-Rouser, did even better: catching the ear through the addition of vocal whoops and a coarse-toned tenor saxophone solo (by the veteran Gil Bernal) to Eddy’s already distinctive sound, reaching the US Top 10 and the UK Top 20.
Early in 1958 his first album was released, titled Have “Twangy” Guitar, Will Travel. Containing the early hits and such moody epics as Ramrod, Stalkin’ and Three-30 Blues, it became a smash hit in its own right, reaching No 5 in the US album chart at a time when most long-players were bought by adults.
In the summer of 1959, Eddy’s version of the theme to Peter Gunn, a popular TV detective show, transformed Henry Mancini’s slinky melody into something distinctly menacing, its insistent riff topped by the trenchant saxophone of Steve Douglas, overdubbed at the Gold Star studio in Hollywood.
Some Kinda Earthquake and Shazam were similarly aggressive, but with Because They’re Young in 1960 Eddy and Hazlewood adopted a more lyrical, romantic tone, adding sweeping strings and broadening the guitarist’s audience, the disc reaching No 2 in the UK and No 3 in the US. Having briefly fallen out over a contractual dispute, Eddy and Hazlewood were reunited in 1962 to concoct (Dance With the) Guitar Man, another Top Five hit.
The early-60s craze for instrumentals led to others taking a slice of the action, notably the Ventures in the US and the Shadows in the UK. But the arrival of the Beatles in 1963 shifted the emphasis back to songs and singers, and Eddy’s hit were suddenly stalling in the lower reaches of the chart.
A notably handsome man, he appeared as an actor in several films, including the high-school drama Because They’re Young, which also starred Dick Clark and Tuesday Weld, and the TV western series Have Gun – Will Travel, starring Richard Boone, for which he also performed the theme tune, The Ballad of Paladin. Switching roles, Eddy produced records for Phil Everly and Waylon Jennings, who had married Eddy’s second wife, the country singer Jessi Colter, following the end of their seven-year marriage in 1968.
In 1972 Eddy and his guitar were called to perform the musical equivalent of a walk-on role in BJ Thomas’s hit ballad Rock and Roll Lullaby, a No 1 on the easy listening charts. In 1986 the British synth-pop group Art of Noise invited him to participate in their post-modern remake of Peter Gunn, arranged by Anne Dudley and produced by the Art of Noise, which won the Grammy award for that year’s best rock instrumental. He played on Foreigner’s 1995 hit Until the End of Time and on Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack to the film Broken Arrow the following year.
A sold-out show at the Royal Festival Hall in London in 2010 inspired a new album, Road Trip, recorded in Sheffield, the home town of its producer, the singer and songwriter Richard Hawley. To promote it, Eddy appeared at the Glastonbury festival in 2011.
As with his marriage to Colter (whose birth name was Mirriam Johnson), his first marriage, to Carol Puckett, ended in divorce. Eddy is survived by his third wife, Deed Abbate, and by three children, five grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren.
• Duane Eddy, guitarist, born 26 April 1938; died 30 April 2024
• This article was amended on 5 and 6 May 2024. Duane Eddy performed, but did not write The Ballad of Paladin, as an earlier version stated; and Steve Douglas, rather than Plas Johnson, played the saxophone on Peter Gunn. Also, the 1986 remake of Peter Gunn was produced by the Art of Noise, not Trevor Horn.
