Tommy White
Tommy White is a steel guitar and dobro player from Louisville, Kentucky, who has been in the Grand Ole Opry’s house band since 1998. Before that he toured for nine years with Donna Fargo and for eight with the Whites and Ricky Skaggs. He was inducted into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in 2013 and the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame in 2022.
He was born on 9 January 1960 in Louisville, the son of the steel guitarist Tom White Jr., who taught him. He had his first pedal steel at nine, was playing clubs around Louisville at ten, and at eleven went on the road in Michigan with the Opry star Stu Phillips. In his early teens he sometimes filled in for his father with Red and Gene Stewart and played several shows with Pee Wee King’s Golden West Cowboys. At fourteen he was the staff steel guitarist of the Lincoln Jamboree in Hodgenville, Kentucky, and at fifteen he made his first album, Tommy White, 100 Proof Steel, Aged 15 Years, produced by Ron Lashley of the Emmons Guitar Company.
Donna Fargo hired him when he was sixteen, and from 1976 to 1985 he toured the United States and Canada with her, playing coliseums and theaters as well as the Golden Nugget and Four Queens in Las Vegas. From 1985 to 1993 he worked for the Whites, who often shared the bill with Ricky Skaggs, Sharon White’s husband. Those tours ran to 100 to 150 dates a year and reached Israel, Ireland, England, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. It was with the Whites that he first came to the Opry, and he played steel on their 1988 album Doing It by the Book.
His studio credits include the Cox Family’s Everybody’s Reaching Out for Someone and Shenandoah’s Under the Kudzu (both 1993), Tom T. Hall’s Home Grown (1997), the Oak Ridge Boys’ From the Heart and Joe Diffie’s In Another World (both 2001), and Kenny Chesney’s Be as You Are (2005). On Paul Brewster’s Everybody’s Talkin’, recorded at Ricky Skaggs’s studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee, he played steel guitar, dobro and pedal dobro alongside Skaggs, Bryan Sutton, Stuart Duncan and Jim Mills. He also played dobro and steel on a long run of bluegrass tribute albums in the mid-2000s, among them Beatlesgrass, Eagles Grass and Stonesgrass.
He joined the Opry’s staff band in 1998, playing steel guitar and dobro, and appears on the band’s live album Grand Ole Opry Country Classics, Vol. 1 (2007). Alongside the Opry he took road dates with Vince Gill in 2005 and 2006 and with Steve Wariner in 2007 and 2008. More recently he has played and recorded with Lionel Richie and Lady Gaga.
