Buddy Emmons: the Big E

1937 – 2015

The tie, exactly: Buddy Gene Emmons — "Buddie" in some accounts, the Big E to the music world — was born January 27, 1937, in Mishawaka, and raised between Mishawaka and nearby South Bend; Vintage Guitar's account puts the raising in South Bend, and this section prints the twin-city childhood whole rather than claiming the half it likes. He took up the lap steel at eleven and took lessons at the Hawaiian Conservatory of Music in South Bend — the same South Bend Hawaiian-steel teaching world that formed Herb Remington, the other Mishawaka steel man in this section, whom Emmons himself named among his first influences.

The course: Emmons left high school at sixteen to play. At eighteen, in 1955, he joined Little Jimmy Dickens's Country Boys; then Ernest Tubb's Texas Troubadours; then, from 1963 to 1968, Ray Price's Cherokee Cowboys, the band in which the modern pedal steel sound was largely written. He was an inventor as much as a player: he co-founded the Sho-Bud guitar company with Shot Jackson in 1957, introduced the split-pedal function in 1956 and two added strings in 1962, patented a pitch-raise-and-return mechanism, and founded the Emmons Guitar Company in 1963 — the instruments the field still measures itself against carry his name on the headstock. The Academy of Country Music named him its best steel guitarist nine times beginning in 1969; he entered the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in 1981; the Country Music Hall of Fame honored him with the 2013 tribute concert The Big E: A Salute to Buddy Emmons. He retired in 2007.

The end: Emmons died at Nashville of a heart attack. The date stands corrected on the record and is printed corrected: the first circulated reports gave July 28, 2015; the record date, carried by the standard references, is July 21, 2015. He was 78.

Sources:

1. Vintage Guitar magazine, Emmons profile and obituary coverage (the South Bend raising; the Hawaiian Conservatory lessons; the death date)
2. Wikipedia and AllMusic, "Buddy Emmons," read November 2026 (birth at Mishawaka; band course; Sho-Bud and Emmons Guitar Company; honors)
3. Country Music Hall of Fame, The Big E tribute record (2013)