The recorded record: what Mishawaka put on other people's discs, and its own

THE DISCOGRAPHY AS A CIVIC FACT · PERSONS AT POINTER, RECORDS AT SIZE

A small city's musicians are usually counted by birthplace; the music record counts them by output. On that measure Mishawaka's century is out of all proportion to its size, and this entry states it in the sound's terms — the persons stand whole in the People record and are pointed to, not re-dug. The steel guitar first, because the city's claim there is total: two Mishawaka-born men, Herb Remington and Buddy Emmons, defined the instrument between them. Remington, hired on the spot by Bob Wills for the Texas Playboys after a 1946 Hollywood audition, left his signature in the band's records — "Boot Heel Drag" above all — and in the side the catalogues list under a title the record gives in two forms, "Remington Ride" and "Remington Steel," printed as found in the People record and carried here as the variance it is. Emmons's discography is the architecture of the modern pedal steel: the Country Boys, the Texas Troubadours, and from 1963 to 1968 Ray Price's Cherokee Cowboys, "the band in which the modern pedal steel sound was largely written" — alongside the instruments themselves, the Sho-Bud company co-founded in 1957 and the Emmons Guitar Company of 1963, and the Academy of Country Music's best-steel-guitarist honors nine times from 1969. Both men's formation carries a boundary printed in the Halls record: Remington was taught in part across the river, at South Bend's Hawaiian Conservatory of Music — the region's steel school — and the birth, and this entry, are Mishawaka's.

The voices and the fiddler are the city's other exports. Joy Lynn White — raised in Mishawaka from the age of three, a Mishawaka High graduate who sang local radio and television jingles while still in school, on her own account — began as Little Lynn, lead singer from the age of five of her father Gene White's gospel act, the Singing White Family: a Mishawaka gospel family act is the first recording unit this entry can name, and its alumna's solo discography runs Columbia's Between Midnight & Hindsight (1992) and Wild Love (1994), an Academy of Country Music nomination for New Female Vocalist in 1993, and The Lucky Few (1997), reported as a number-one seller on the Americana chart — the chart claim printed as reported. Lisa Germano, born in Mishawaka in 1958 to two music teachers, wrote her first piano piece — a fifteen-minute "opera" — at seven and took up the violin; her recorded life runs from John Mellencamp's band, joined in 1985 on drummer Kenny Aronoff's recommendation, through The Lonesome Jubilee (1987) and Big Daddy, to a solo catalogue of thirteen albums as of 2025 whose landmark is Geek the Girl (4AD, 1994), session and guest work across more than sixty records, and a return to Mellencamp's band for the Live and In Person tour of 2023. Around them, at pointer size, the session men: Roger Hawkins, the Muscle Shoals drummer whose records — "Mustang Sally," "Respect," "I'll Take You There," "Old Time Rock & Roll" — are named in his People entry, and Remo Belli, whose name is not on the records but under the drummers on them. And at the boundary of the claim, printed exactly as the People record prints it: Ben Goldwasser, born in Mishawaka in 1982 and raised in New York, co-founded MGMT — Oracular Spectacular and its successors are a world career standing on a Mishawaka birth certificate and nothing more, and this entry claims exactly that much.

Sources:

1. The People record of this history — the entries for Herb Remington (the Playboys course; "Boot Heel Drag"; the Ride/Steel title variance), Buddy Emmons (the Cherokee Cowboys; Sho-Bud and the Emmons Guitar Company; the Academy of Country Music honors), Joy Lynn White (the Singing White Family; the schoolgirl jingles, on her own account; the Columbia albums and The Lucky Few), Lisa Germano (the Mellencamp years; Geek the Girl; the thirteen albums and sixty-plus sessions; the 2023 return), Roger Hawkins and Remo Belli (the session records at pointer), Ben Goldwasser (the birth-tie limit, printed as there stated).
2. The Halls of Fame record of this history — the steel-guitar plaques and the Hawaiian Conservatory of Music formation boundary, pointer only.