“BUDDY EMMONS: STEEL GUITAR ICON” by Steve Fishell (University of Illinois Press, 288 pages, $23).
Early in “Buddy Emmons: Steel Guitar Icon,” Steve Fishell’s deft and lively biography, we meet the future legend as a skinny, high-school-hating, 14-year-old boy on his bike, hanging around outside a bar, fascinated by what’s taking place inside.
“As the club door swung open,” Fishell writes, “he ignored the loud barroom crowd, the thick clouds of cigarette smoke, the clinking sounds of beer bottles and shot glasses, and the waitresses yelling their drink orders. Instead, he laser-focused on the stomping country band blaring from the bar’s stage.”
The bar was the Majorette Tavern in Buddy’s native Mishawaka, Indiana. The band was Bob Reed and Choctaw Cowboys.
A year later, at 15, Emmons was in the band, playing a blonde triple-neck Fender Custom “Stringmaster” console steel guitar. As he wrote in the unpublished memoirs that Fishell weaves effectively into this bio, “I was ready to play music for a living.”