NEW YORK — Duane Eddy, a pioneering guitarist whose reverberating electric sound on instrumentals like “Rebel Rouser” and “Peter Gunn” helped give early rock ‘n’ roll its twang and influenced George Harrison, Bruce Springsteen and countless other musicians, has died at 86 .
Eddy died of cancer on Tuesday at Williamson Health hospital in Franklin, Tennessee, according to his wife, Deed Abbate.
With his jangly rhythms, backing screams and handclaps, Eddy has sold more than 100 million records worldwide and mastered a distinctive sound based on the premise that a guitar’s low strings sounded better on tape than its high ones.
“I had a distinct sound that people could recognize and I’ve kept that pretty much. I’m not one of the best technical players by any means; just seeing the best,” he told the Associated Press in a 1986 interview. “A lot of guys are more skilled than I do with the guitar. A lot of it is over my head. But some of it is not what I want to hear from the guitar.”
“Twang” defined Eddy’s sound from his first album, “Have Twangy Guitar Will Travel,” to his 1993 box set, “Twang Thang: The Duane Eddy Anthology.”
“It’s a silly name for a silly thing,” Eddy told the AP in 1993. “But it’s haunted me for 35 years, so it’s almost like sentimental value — at least.”
He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
Eddy and producer Lee Hazlewood helped create the “Twang” sound in the 1950s, a sound that Hazlewood later adapted for his production of Nancy Sinatra’s 1960s hit “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” Eddy had a five-year commercial peak from 1958-63. He said that in 1993 he used his 1970 hit “Freight Train” as a cue to slow down.
“It was an easy-listening hit,” he recalled. “Six or seven years earlier, I was at the forefront.”
Eddy has recorded more than 50 albums, some of them re-releases. He did not work much from the 1980s onwards, “living off my royalties”, he said in 1986.
Of “Rebel Rouser”, he told the AP: “It was a good title and it was the most rock ‘n’ roll sound. It was different for the time.”
He composed theme songs for films such as “Because They’re Young”, “Pepe” and “Gidget Goes Hawaiian”. But Eddy said he turned down the James Bond theme song because there wasn’t enough guitar in it.
In the 1970s he worked behind the scenes in music production, mainly in Los Angeles.
Eddy was born in Corning, New York, and raised in Phoenix, where he began playing guitar at age 5. He spent his teenage years in Arizona dreaming of singing on the Grand Ole Opry and ended up signing with Philadelphia’s Jamie Records in 1958. “Rebel Rouser” soon followed.
Eddy later toured with Dick Clark’s “Caravan of Stars” and appeared in “Because They’re Young,” “Thunder of Drums,” among other films.
He moved to Nashville in 1985 after years of semi-retirement in Lake Tahoe, California.
Eddy was not a vocalist, saying in 1986: “One of my greatest contributions to the world of music is not singing.”
Paul McCartney and George Harrison were fans of Eddy and he recorded with them both after the Beatles days. He played on McCartney’s “Rockestra Theme” and Harrison played on Eddy’s self-titled comeback album, both in 1987.
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