April 1938 – April 2024
Second only to writing the perfect song, it is perhaps the ultimate goal of any guitarist to forge a sound that is theirs alone. Duane Eddy, who died of cancer in April at the age of 86, certainly accomplished that. And while the tag given to his methodology – ‘twang’ – had lightweight and frivolous connotations, the sound itself was anything but. “It’s a silly name,” the guitarist once said, “for a non-silly thing.”
The low-slung, mysterious, otherworldly tone – played on the bass strings of his giant Gretsch archtop, clad in reverb and given a shiver by his Bigsby vibrato bar – made the US guitarist’s ocean-crossing instrumentals of the late-50s so evocative that even life in suburban Britain felt like a classic American movie.
As the essayist Michael Hill wrote when, decades later, Eddy was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame: “Twang came to represent a walk on the wild side… the sound of revved-up hot-rods, of rebels with or without a cause, an echo of the Wild West on the frontier of rock ’n’ roll.”
Yet that illicit sound began with a flash of pure childhood innocence. Born in 1938 in Corning, New York, Eddy caught sight of the instrument for the first time at five years old when the family moved house. “We were down in the cellar and up
