Duane Eddy, an electric guitarist who sold tens of millions of records with hits including “Rebel Rouser” and “Peter Gunn” and left an indelible mark on rock-and-roll by pioneering the sound called twang, died April 30 at a hospital in Franklin, Tenn. He was 86.
Mr. Eddy, who had his heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was one of the few rock musicians to reach international stardom as an instrumentalist. With self-effacing humor, he often joked that his most significant contribution to music was “not singing.”
By all accounts, Mr. Eddy more than compensated for any vocal deficits with his virtuosity on the guitar. He first experimented with the instrument at age 5 or 6 and grew up to become, in the description of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, “the rock and roll guitar god who invented twang.”
Mr. Eddy referred to the term as “a silly name for a nonsilly thing.” Twang, a guitar sound heavy on bass and reverb, brought an added jolt of energy to the already powerful dynamism of rock.
“Twang came to represent a walk on the wild side, late fifties-style: the sound of revved-up hotrods, of rebels with or without a cause, an echo of the wild west on the frontier of rock & roll,” wrote Michael Hill, the author of an essay written for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on the occasion of Mr. Eddy’s induction in 1994. “It was the battle cry of the early guitar hero, embodied by the lean and handsome Eddy, who arrives in town slinging a guitar like a gun. He didn’t need to speak or sing; he said it all with his terse playing.”
Mr. Eddy popularized the sound in numbers including “Rebel Rouser,” his first Top 10 hit — it peaked at No. 6 in 1958, according to Billboard — and “Forty Miles of Bad Road,” which hit No. 9 the following year. He lent his signature fretwork to the title song of “Because They’re Young,” a 1960 movie that starred Dick Clark as a caring high school teacher and gave Mr. Eddy a No. 4 hit, as well as to composer Henry Mancini’s title song of “Peter Gunn,” a detective series that aired on TV from 1958 to 1961.
Mr. Eddy sold more than 100 million records in all. Many of his hits, and the sound that defined them, were collaborations with Lee Hazlewood, a producer whom Mr. Eddy had met when he was a young musician just starting out in Arizona and Hazlewood was a local disc jockey.
For Mr. Eddy’s early recordings, they improvised a rudimentary reverb chamber using a giant water tank salvaged from a junk yard.
“They put a speaker at one end and a mic at the other and [the sound] 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,” Mr. Eddy told the Arizona Republic in 2022. “It was great.”
Jason Hanley, a musicologist and vice president of education and visitor engagement at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, wrote in an email that Mr. Eddy’s songs “mixed elements of western, rockabilly, and surf into some of the best instrumentals in rock and roll,” and that the low tone of his melodies “set him apart from his contemporaries.”
Although the early rock musicians were eclipsed in popularity by the “British invasion” in the mid-1960s, Mr. Eddy maintained his presence in rock as an influence on groups and musicians including the Beatles, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Springsteen.
A remake of “Peter Gunn” by the Art of Noise, a British techno-pop band, with Mr. Eddy as a featured artist received a Grammy Award in 1987. And generations that know the early rock period only from history books remember “Rebel Rouser” from the 1994 movie “Forrest Gump” starring Tom Hanks; the song is the soundtrack for one of Forrest’s unstoppable runs.
Duane Jerome Eddy was born in Corning, N.Y., on April 26, 1938. His parents ran a country store in the Finger Lakes area, where his father also drove a bread truck.
With aspirations of becoming a writer and traveling the world, the elder Eddy took the family west, to Arizona, around 1950. The family lived first in Tucson and later in Coolidge, midway between Tucson and Phoenix, where the father managed a Safeway supermarket.
By that point, Mr. Eddy had been playing the guitar for years. He had stumbled on his father’s old instrument in the family’s coal cellar, learned a few chords from his dad and “that was it,” his wife said.
He was in high school when he landed his first song, a Chet Atkins number, on the local radio in Coolidge. With a classmate, Jimmy Delbridge, who played the piano, he formed Jimmy and Duane, a country duo that impressed Hazlewood, then working as a DJ.
Working with Hazlewood, Mr. Eddy made “Moovin’ n’ Groovin’” in 1957 and followed it soon with “Rebel Rouser.” By then, Mr. Eddy’s twangy style was set.
“I played part of ‘Moovin’ n’ Groovin’ up high and part of it down low,” he told the Advocate of Baton Rouge in 2010. “By the time I got to ‘Rebel Rouser,’ I got it all down in the low register and left it there. I knew that the low strings were more powerful than the high strings.”
Mr. Eddy became a hit on Clark’s TV dance show “American Bandstand” and released his first album, “Have ‘Twangy’ Guitar Will Travel,” in 1958.
In the 1960s, Mr. Eddy moved to Beverly Hills, Calif., where he spent much of the next decades working in music production. He settled in Tennessee in 1985.
His marriages to Carol Fowler and Mirriam Johnson, the latter a country singer who performed as Jessi Colter and later married the singer-guitarist Waylon Jennings, ended in divorce.
Survivors include his wife of 44 years, the former Deed Abbate of Franklin; two children from his first marriage, Linda Jones of Columbia, Tenn., and Christopher Eddy of Spring Hill, Tenn.; a daughter from his second marriage, Jennifer Eddy Davis of Hendersonville, Tenn.; a sister; five grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
Looking back on his career, and on the history of rock-and-roll, Mr. Eddy took a modest view of twang as one step in the eternal evolution of musical sound.
“I’m sure some young kid will come along with something one of these days that will just blow everybody away,” he told the Scottish newspaper the Scotsman in 2012. “It depends on the individual and his soul.”
