Duane Eddy, rock ‘n’ roll pioneer renowned for his echo-laden twanging guitar sound – obituary

Duane recorded a tape which was broadcast on a neighborhood station and heard by one other musician, Jimmy Delbridge. After they started to carry out at native dances collectively, Eddy acquired the custom-made Chet Atkins-model Gretsch guitar that might turn out to be his signature instrument. 

By the point a neighborhood disc-jockey, Lee Hazlewood (later to be a power within the music trade and to duet with Nancy Sinatra), heard Eddy play, he was main a band known as the Rebels. Hazlewood booked them at novice exhibits and issued some information regionally.

With Lester Sill, who raised the cash to document 4 tracks with them, Hazlewood leased Eddy and the Rebels to the fledgling Philadelphia label Jamie Information. 

Eddy’s throbbing first effort, Movin’ ‘n’ Groovin’, made in early 1958, launched his twangy trademark sound, rapidly adopted by a brand new single, with Stalkin’ on the A-side and Insurgent Rouser on the B-side, that includes a mix of whooping handclaps, yells, honking saxophone and moody guitar reverberation produced in an improvised echo-chamber – an empty water-tank with a speaker at one finish and a microphone on the different.

Though Stalkin’ was featured a number of occasions on Dick Clark’s tv present American Bandstand, it was solely when Clark flipped it over that youngsters urged him to play it repeatedly, hoisting it to No 6 within the American charts (it made No 19 in Britain). The follow-ups, Ramrod and Cannonball (each 1958), set the sample for the string of Eddy hits that adopted.