Pete Drake
Pete Drake who gave us the talking Sho-Bud steel guitar was another household name.
From a Nashville interview with Pete.
Is your equipment modified?
"My amps are just stock. As for my steels, I get Shot Jackson [of Sho-Bud in Nashville] to fix them up for me. If I want to raise or lower a string, I'll go to him and say, "Can you do this?," and he'll say, "No," then go ahead and do it. We did my Tammy Wynette pedal that way: I showed him how we could make it work with open strings, so he fixed it, and it was the most beautiful sound I every heard. So the next day we cut "I Don't Wanna Play House" with Tammy, and it became a number one record."
You mentioned Jerry Byrd as a great inspiration, Who else do you enjoy?
"Well, there's so many of them now, Lordy. I look at it kind of differently: There's the recording musician and the everyday picker. They're really not the same. A guy that's really great on a show may not be any good at all on a session, or vice versa. For recording, I think Lloyd Green, Weldon Myrick, Bill West and Ben Kieth are fantastic. They know how to come up with that little extra lick that you need to make a song. Hal Rugg is also a good recording steel man. For really technical playing, Buddy Emmons is a fantastic musician. Curley Chalker is my favorite jazz steel player, but in the studio I'd have to go with the commercial thing because I'm trying to make a dollar. You know, you can play over country people's heads, and I don't think they're ready for the jazz thing. I mean I like to listen to it, but it's "musicians' music," and musicians don't buy records."