Weldon Myrick

He was born Weldon Merle Myrick in Jayton on 10 April 1938. His older brother Tex played steel guitar in Lubbock, and hearing him on a visit home, when Weldon was eight or nine, set him on the instrument. His father bought him a Rickenbacker steel, and as a teenager he played a Saturday night jamboree in Breckenridge, Texas, backed the Opry stars Minnie Pearl, Jim Reeves and Ferlin Husky at a show in Lubbock, and played with Waylon Jennings. After finishing high school in 1956 he moved to Big Spring, Texas, and on a trip to Nashville a couple of years later he recorded with the Ben Hall Trio.

In 1963 he moved to Nashville for good and won an audition with Bill Anderson’s band, the Po’ Boys, playing on Anderson’s “Bright Lights and Country Music,” “I Love You Drops” and “8×10.” In 1964 he began working with Connie Smith and her RCA Victor producer, Bob Ferguson; his steel lines, answering her phrases on “Once a Day” and “The Hinges of the Door” and on her albums Connie Smith (1965) and Miss Smith Goes to Nashville (1966), became part of what she called the Connie Smith sound. He joined the Opry’s staff band in 1966.

On Music Row he played on Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” Sammi Smith’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles,” Linda Ronstadt’s “Long, Long Time,” Donna Fargo’s “The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.,” Merle Haggard’s “The Way I Am,” Reba McEntire’s “Whoever’s in New England,” George Strait’s “Right or Wrong” and Alan Jackson’s “Chattahoochee,” and backed singers from Roy Acuff and Kitty Wells to Elvis Presley, Dolly Parton and Dwight Yoakam. He also played on bluegrass sessions: Jim & Jesse’s Epic album Saluting the Louvin Brothers, recorded at Columbia’s Studio B in Nashville in February 1969 with Bobby Thompson on banjo, and the Osborne Brothers’ 1972 Decca single “Midnight Flyer,” cut at Bradley’s Barn with Hal Rugg on a second steel. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he was a member of Area Code 615, the group of session players including Norbert Putnam, Mac Gayden and Wayne Moss whose records were nominated for a Grammy; his own “Welephant Walk” is among its recordings.

He also made records of his own, singing and playing, for Capitol, Dot, Decca and RCA among other labels, played on more than a dozen film soundtracks, and wrote songs recorded by Buddy Holly, the Wilburn Brothers and Jean Shepard. NARAS gave him its Super Picker award for instrumentalists every year from 1974 to 1979, ROPE named him Musician of the Year in 1996, and the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame inducted him in 1997. After he retired from the Opry in 1998 he gave concerts and steel-guitar seminars in Japan and Sweden and backed Opry stars on WSM’s Midnight Jamboree. He died at St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville on 2 June 2014, aged 76.