Hank DeVito

Henry M. DeVito won a scholarship to the School of Visual Arts in New York and studied graphic arts there, but playing paid better than starting out in design, and he began working as a composer and player in New York in 1968. In 1970 he joined the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble, whose members included Michael Kamen and Mark Snow. He played clubs in San Francisco in 1974 and by February 1975 was in Los Angeles, and through the mid-1970s his steel is on records by Jesse Colin Young, Hoyt Axton, Jonathan Edwards and Mary Kay Place.

In 1975 he became the pedal steel player in the Hot Band that Harris put together for Elite Hotel, with James Burton on electric guitar, Glen D. Hardin on piano, Rodney Crowell on acoustic guitar, Emory Gordy Jr. on bass and John Ware on drums. He was still with Harris on Blue Kentucky Girl (1979), which won Harris the Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance, he plays pedal steel on songs including “Hickory Wind.” He also played on Crowell’s first albums, from Ain’t Living Long Like This (1978), and on Rosanne Cash’s Right or Wrong (1980) and Seven Year Ache (1981).

His songwriting took off at the same time. Dave Edmunds made the first recording of “Queen of Hearts” on Repeat When Necessary (1979), a No. 11 hit in Britain; Crowell cut it on But What Will the Neighbors Think (1980), with DeVito on guitar; and Juice Newton’s version from Juice (1981) reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 14 on the country chart. Edmunds also recorded his “Sweet Little Lisa” and “Cheap Talk, Patter and Jive,” Waylon Jennings his and Crowell’s “Old Love, New Eyes,” and Albert Lee several of his songs on Albert Lee (1982).

In February 1981 he moved from Los Angeles to Nashville, and Crowell and Cash followed six months later. With Crowell, Vince Gill, Tony Brown, Larrie Londin and Gordy he was in the Cherry Bombs, the band that backed Crowell and Cash on tour in the early 1980s. In Nashville he played steel and rhythm guitar on Ricky Skaggs’s Don’t Cheat in Our Hometown (1983) and played on George Strait’s Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind (1984), and he co-produced the first Sweethearts of the Rodeo album (1986) with Steve Buckingham. “If You Change Your Mind,” written with Cash for King’s Record Shop (1987), was released in March 1988 and became her ninth No. 1 on the country chart. Patty Loveless recorded his “Blue Side of Town.”

The Cherry Bombs reunited in 2004 as the Notorious Cherry Bombs, with DeVito on acoustic and steel guitar, Dobro and background vocals and two of his songs, “Wait a Minute,” written with Crowell, and “Sweet Little Lisa.” Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell’s Old Yellow Moon (2013), which won the Grammy for Best Americana Album, opens with his “Hanging Up My Heart” and includes “Black Caffeine,” written with Donivan Cowart, and the title song, written with Lynn Langham.

Alongside music he has photographed cities on tour, taking his lead from Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans. For the cover of King’s Record Shop he photographed Gene King’s record store in Louisville and set his own portrait of Cash in its doorway; the album package won a Grammy for the CBS art director Bill Johnson. In 2015 the Tennessee State Museum showed his large-format pictures of 1980s Nashville in the exhibition Places I Remember.