Buddy Charleton

Elmer Lee “Buddy” Charleton was born on 6 March 1938 in New Market, Virginia, and played with local bands before a member of the Texas Troubadours heard him while the band was working in the area. Buddy Emmons was then about to leave Tubb, and Charleton took his place.

His first recording session with Tubb was on 2 March 1962 at Columbia’s studio in Nashville, with Owen Bradley producing and Leon Rhodes and Grady Martin among the guitarists, and his last was at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, on 19 March 1973. In between he played steel on dozens of Tubb sessions, among them the one on 19 April 1965 that produced “Waltz Across Texas,” a ballad on which his steel set off Tubb’s plain-spoken vocal.

Charleton and the lead guitarist Leon Rhodes, who joined the Troubadours at about the same time, became known for their fast interplay on band instrumentals such as “Almost to Tulsa” and “Rhodesway Boogie.” Tubb asked them to keep their solos simple and melodic behind his vocals but let them stretch out in the band’s own spot in the show, and at dances they worked jazz pieces like “Take the A Train” and Gene Ammons’s “Red Top” into the set. Willie Nelson recorded with the band on his 1966 album Country Favorites, Willie Nelson Style. Rhodes later said that however fast he could play on guitar, Charleton could match it on steel.

Charleton left the Troubadours in 1973 and built a long second career teaching steel guitar, first around Fredericksburg, Virginia, and later at Billy Cooper’s Music in Orange, Virginia. Among the players he taught and mentored were Bruce Bouton of Garth Brooks’s band, Pete Finney, who worked with the Dixie Chicks, and Tommy Hannum, who played with Emmylou Harris and Ricky Van Shelton. He died at his home in Locust Grove, Virginia, on 25 January 2011.