Remembering 'Rebel Rouser' rock icon Duane Eddy, dead at 86

Duane Eddy was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 on the strength of a career he launched in 1958 with the million-selling instrumental “ Rebel Rouser .”

The most commercially successful instrumental artist in the history of rock 'n' roll, the Grammy-winning guitarist died peacefully on April 30, surrounded by family members in Franklin, Tennessee.

He was 86.

Eddy was born in Corning, New York. He was honored by the City of Corning on June 7, 2017, when that day was officially declared “Duane Eddy Day.” He was later honored by the Steuben County Hall of Fame in 2022. A newly formed group, called the Corning Duane Eddy Circle, is working to honor his life and what he has meant to the City of Corning.

While he was raised in New York State, Eddy moved to Tucson, then to Coolidge, Arizona, with his family as a teenager.

It was while living in Coolidge that he hooked up with a DJ named Lee Hazlewood, who cut the young guitarist’s instrumental breakthrough, “Rebel Rouser,” in a Phoenix studio called Audio Recorders.

“Rebel Rouser” was the third song he and Hazlewood recorded.

How Duane Eddy and Lee Hazlewood made 'Rebel Rouser'

The first was “Soda Fountain Girl,” recorded with a friend named Jimmy Delbridge and released in 1955 as a duet by Jimmy and Duane.

In an interview with blogger Simon Nott in 2013, Eddy said of “Soda Fountain Girl,” “The first record Lee Hazlewood produced with Jimmy Dell and myself, we sang together when we were 16/17."

By 1957, Eddy was renting a room from Hazlewood in Phoenix and had purchased his signature hollow-body Gretsch "Chet Atkins" model at Ziggie's Music when a twangy instrumental titled "Raunchy" hit the Top 5 in two versions at the same time — one by Bill Justis, the other by Ernie Freeman.

As Eddy told The Republic in 2020, "When 'Raunchy' hit, Lee said, 'You need to go home and write something. We need to cut an instrumental.'"

Hazlewood had recorded "everybody that could hum a tune by then," Eddy recalled.

"He'd take them in the studio and send the record off to different independent labels in LA to try and get a deal," Eddy said. "I just wanted to play. And he said 'Write an instrumental' so I did."

The next Hazlewood session resulted in “Movin’ ’N’ Groovin’,” a less-than-subtle instrumental rewrite of Chuck Berry’s “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.” It failed to set the charts on fire, stalling at No. 72 in early 1958.

"That was enough to encourage the company back east to say, 'Go do some more,'" Eddy told The Republic. "So we went in, in March of '58, and cut 'Rebel-Rouser.' The rest is history, so to speak."

“Rebel Rouser” was a different matter altogether. Boasting one of early rock and roll’s essential riffs, a haunting low-end melody swimming in echo, it peaked at No. 6 in 1958, and Eddy followed through with two more Top 10 singles, “Forty Miles of Bad Road” (No. 9) and “Because They’re Young” (No. 4) by 1960.

Jon Anderson of Yes told The Republic "Rebel-Rouser" was the first song that inspired him to buy a record.

"They’re incredible recordings," Anderson said. "Very much like Ricky Nelson’s. So damn good. So clean."

Eddy went Top 40 15 times on Billboard’s Hot 100 and sold more than 100 million records worldwide.

'The first rock 'n' roll guitar god'

Released in 1958, his debut album, “Have ‘Twangy’ Guitar Will Travel,” peaked at No. 5 and spent 82 weeks on the charts. Among his more well-known recordings is the theme to “Peter Gunn,” which peaked at No. 27 on the U.S. charts in 1960 but did better in the U.K., where it peaked at No. 6.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame website quotes John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival calling Eddy “the first rock and roll guitar god." The Hall of Fame goes on to note the influence of Eddy’s trademark twang in everything from “Born to Run” to the Beatles (dig the twangy low-end riffing on “I Want to Hold Your Hand”).

Eddy moved to California in the late ’60s, but he talked to the Republic in 2012 about the role the Valley played in shaping the sound of his music.

How the Arizona desert shaped Duane Eddy's twang

“The spaciousness and openness of the desert, the feel of it and the smells, shaped my music," he said. "I play like that, with big notes and open spaces. I figured out through the years that I’ve been subconsciously influenced by that.”

Few guitarists in the history of rock 'n' roll have had a more distinctive trademark than the low-end twang he captured on those instrumental classics he and Hazlewood recorded at Floyd Ramsey's Audio Recorders in Phoenix.

A lot of that came down to Eddy's fondness for the low strings on his hollow-body Gretsch, a preference he developed as a teen at Ramsey's studio when session great Al Casey couldn't make it.

"Sometimes I would do a little turnaround on lead guitar if Al wasn't around," Eddy told The Republic in a 2020 interview.

"And that's when I learned that the low strings were much more powerful than the high ones. So I noted that in my brain and then revisited that idea when I started making my own records."

The other quality that made those early instrumental classics so identifiably Duane Eddy?

That involved a road trip to a junkyard on the banks of the Salt River, where Hazlewood found the echo he was after in an empty water tank they carted back and set up as a makeshift echo chamber in the parking lot behind the studio.

"They just dropped it in there on a rack," Eddy told The Republic. "They put a speaker at one end and a mic at the other and it would come out the speaker, swirl through the tank and the mic would pick it up at the other end and we had our echo. It was great."

Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys is a huge Duane Eddy fan.

"You take this instrument that everybody has," he told The Republic in 2022. "You can go to a store and buy it. But nobody can pick it up and sound like that except Duane Eddy. That is the rarest of abilities as a musician, to take this inanimate object and give it a singular voice. His sound is so identifiable."

Although the hits dried up for Eddy after “Boss Guitar” hit No. 28 in 1963, he played guitar on Art of Noise’s version of the theme to “Peter Gunn,” a Top 10 U.K. hit in 1986. A year later, the legend’s first album in nearly a decade featured guest appearances by Fogerty, George Harrison, James Burton, Ry Cooder and Steve Cropper (of Booker T. & the M.G.’s), speaking to the lasting impact of those early records.

Published in 2004, “The Rolling Stone Album Guide” summed up the pioneering surf guitarist’s role in the early development of rock and roll.

“Twang is the word most closely associated with guitar legend Duane Eddy,” the entry began.

“And certainly that sound best summarizes his personality on record. But Eddy wasn’t all lower-register melodies, liberal tremolo and omnipresent whammy bar. His instrumentals were the original music-minus-one exercises — only the vocalist was missing. This emphasis on song construction separated Eddy from inspired ’50s primitives such as Link Wray and set a standard for the rock instrumental that flowered in the’60s when the Ventures came on the scene, and later with the advent of surf music.”

Eddy always looked back fondly on his days in Phoenix, working with Hazlewood at Audio Recorders.

"That was where it all happened for me," he told The Republic in 2020. "And for Lee."

Eddy is survived by his wife Deed, four children, five grandchildren and nine great grandchildren.

Corning reporter Jeff Smith contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Remembering 'Rebel Rouser' rock icon Duane Eddy, dead at 86