Ray Edenton

He was born on 3 November 1926 near Mineral, Virginia, into a family that loved square dances; one brother played guitar and another piano. His first instrument was a banjo ukulele, and by six he was playing local square dances with his brothers and cousins. He went on to learn guitar, bass and mandolin, though music stayed a hobby while he drove a truck and dug wells before joining the Army in World War II.

He came home to Virginia on his discharge in 1946 and played for two years with the Rodeo Rangers. In 1948 he moved to Richmond to play upright bass with Joe Maphis’s Korn Krackers on WRVA’s Old Dominion Barn Dance, and in 1949 he arrived at WNOX in Knoxville. There he became friends with Chet Atkins and played his first recording session, backing Red Kirk on “Lovesick Blues” for Mercury. He then spent 28 months in a Veterans Administration hospital with tuberculosis.

In 1952 he moved to Nashville and became a staff guitarist at the Opry, playing acoustic rhythm. His first studio work in the city came in 1953; deciding to specialize in acoustic rhythm guitar, he fitted his archtop guitars, an L-5 among them, with heavy-gauge strings. On 25 March 1953, at Castle Studio in the Tulane Hotel, he played rhythm guitar on Webb Pierce’s “There Stands the Glass,” with Grady Martin and Atkins also on guitar, and he went on to play on 26 of Pierce’s 27 top hits. Few Nashville sessions used drummers then, and the style he worked out, imitating a snare drum, was valued as a rhythmic part of the record. He toured with Pierce and with Marty Robbins, recorded a vocal duet with Robbins as “Ray and Roy” at Castle Studio on 23 May 1954, and played the amplified guitar break on Robbins’s “Singing the Blues,” cut on 3 November 1955 and a hit in 1956. That August the Louvin Brothers released the first recording of “You’re Running Wild,” which he had co-written with Donnie Winters.

On the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love,” “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Bird Dog” he played his Gibson L-5 with a high G string, an idea he took from Atkins, and strummed with Don Everly the intros that Don devised. He was at the session of 1 March 1957 that produced “Bye Bye Love” and at many of the duo’s sessions through 1961, including the one for “All I Have to Do Is Dream” in March 1958, and other producers soon hired him to play similar parts. The Country Music Hall of Fame says he developed new guitar tunings that made sounds not heard before.

In 1961 the car crash that ended Hank Garland’s career left rhythm guitar open on the A-Team, and Edenton became a full-time session player. For amplified rhythm he played three-note “chink” chords on a one-of-a-kind black Gretsch prototype that Atkins had given him, fitted with lighter strings and two custom pickups by Ray Butts. He played on Roy Orbison’s Monument sessions from 1961 to 1963, among them those for “Dream Baby” and “In Dreams,” and on Patsy Cline’s sessions of 1962 and February 1963, where “Sweet Dreams” was recorded on 5 February 1963. On 3 November 1964 he played rhythm guitar on Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” produced by Jerry Kennedy.

His only solo LP, Ray Edenton Plays Uptown Country Music, was a set of instrumentals with amplified flatpicking, many of them fiddle tunes such as “Mississippi Sawyer,” “Eighth of January” and “Fire on the Mountain.” Don Law produced it for Columbia in 1965, with Grady Martin, Harold Bradley, Bob Moore, Buddy Harman, Floyd Cramer, Charlie McCoy and Boots Randolph in the band, and it came out in February 1966, a few weeks after the single “Wildflower” backed with “Bad Time.”

His sessions ranged across Julie Andrews, the Beach Boys, Gary Burton (Tennessee Firebird, 1967), Sammy Davis Jr., Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Leon Russell, Reba McEntire and Neil Young (Comes a Time, 1978), and he appeared on records by more than fifty members of the Country Music Hall of Fame. Connie Smith said he accompanied her on many sessions, including her first recordings in 1964. In 1973 he met Marty Stuart, then a 14-year-old in Lester Flatt’s Nashville Grass, and helped him through a session; Stuart later pointed to the Osborne Brothers’ recording of “Son of a Sawmill Man” as an example of Edenton’s rhythm playing.

He retired in 1991. In 2007 he was inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame with the rest of the Nashville A-Team, and on 6 October that year the Country Music Hall of Fame interviewed him for its Nashville Cats series, honoring him as a “Nashville Cat.” He died on 21 September 2022 in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, aged 95.