Duane Eddy – guitar hero of the sixties

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Today I am featuring a star whose career as a guitar hero began in the late nineteen fifties and ended with the advent of the British groups in the sixties. Duane Eddy was a guitar player who started playing at age five, who developed a style that was unique. He loved picking single note tunes on the bass strings down near the bridge. He teamed up with a local disc jockey named Lee Hazlewood who later became a famous record producer, to churn out ten albums and thirty-four singles with fifteen in the top forty between 1958 and 1965, selling a total of one hundred million records. Duane Eddy and Lee Hazlewood formularized their music by mixing Eddy playing his single-note melodies on a Chet Atkins Gretsch 6120 hollowbody and bending the bass strings through a mix of echo, whammy bar and tremolo. This became the sound of the nineteen fifties rev heads in cowboy hats and it made Duane Eddy the best selling rock and roll instrumentalist ever.

Duane Eddy’s most lasting hits are probably Peter Gunn and Shazam! which you can find him playing if you do a search on YouTube but I have picked a very tasty clip called Three-thirty Blues: