Bud Isaacs

Isaacs was born March 26, 1928, in Bedford, Indiana. His father was a millworker at Bedford Cut Stone Company.[7] His mother enrolled Isaacs in lessons provided by the Oahu Music Company located above Hoover's Confectionary in Bedford.[7][8] Initially he played a conventional acoustic guitar Hawaiian style (horizontally across the knees) with raised strings.[8] He persisted at the Hawaiian academy but preferred the lap steel style and tunings[9] of Noel Boggs.[8] With his acoustic guitar at age fourteen he performed with Pee Wee King's band on the Grand Ole Opry and was offered a job,[lower-alpha 2]but the offer was withdrawn when his true age was revealed.[4][7][8] He soon moved up to a Rickenbacker electric lap steel.[4]

At age sixteen he acquired a Gibson "Electraharp", one of the earliest commercially available designs of a steel guitar with pedals.[10] He quit high school that year to become a professional musician.[8] He made his radio debut on WIBC-AM in Indianapolis and in 1944 began traveling throughout the Midwest to perform on various barn dance shows.[11] He worked in Texas, Arizona, Michigan and elsewhere during the following decade.[11] With the Electraharp, he recorded the song "Big Blue Diamonds" for King Records.[8] He worked for numerous artists in recording sessions and on the road[1] and was a member of the house band of the Grand Ole Opry for many years. He recorded as a solo performer for RCA from 1954 to 1960.[1] and created his much-copied[5] "Bud's Bounce" and "The Waltz You Saved for Me".[6]

After receiving a new custom pedal steel, a double neck eight-string,[12]^: 32 made by west coast guitar maker Paul Bigsby in 1952, Isaacs experimented with it, trying to imitate the sound of two fiddles playing in harmony.[2] Bigsby's new steel guitar design featured a pedal mechanism which changed the pitch of two strings simultaneously. Isaacs was not the first to use pedals.[5] Speedy West had been using a pedal steel since 1948;[5] however, Isaacs was the first on a recording to push the pedal while notes were still sounding.[13] Other steel players strictly avoided doing this, because it was considered "un-Hawaiian".[13] On a Webb Pierce recording session in Nashville in November, 1953,[2] producer Owen Bradley asked Isaacs to try his technique on a solo for the song "Slowly".[2] The song became one of the most-played country songs of 1954 and was No. 1 on the Billboard's country charts for seventeen weeks.[4] It was the first recording of a pedal steel guitar on a hit record.[11] This single performance by a session musician produced a rare and unlikely stylistic overhaul of the steel guitar sound in Nashville-produced country music.[10] Steel guitar virtuoso Lloyd Green said, "This fellow, Bud Isaacs, had thrown a new tool into musical thinking about the steel with the advent of this record that still reverberates to this day".[14] Attempting to put Issacs' innovation into words, music historian Tim Sterner Miller described it:, "... two pitches changing in contrapuntal motion against a sustained common tone..."[2] Not only was the song embraced by the public, it was immediately recognized by lap steel (non-pedal) guitarists as something unique that was not possible[2] to achieve on their instruments.[3] Now a favored session player, Isaacs performed on 11 top country records in 1955.[15] In an interview in 2012 by Jon Rauhouse, Isaacs said, "I had the only pedaled steel in town at the time. I got sessions with everybody!"[4] Dozens of instrumentalists rushed to get pedals on their steel guitars to imitate the unique bending notes that he played.[4] In the months and years after this recording, instrument makers and musicians worked to recreate Bigsby's mechanical innovation and Isaacs' musical innovation.[2] Even though pedal steel guitars had been available for over a decade before this recording, the instrument emerged as a crucial element in country music after the success of this song.[3]

In 1956, the Gibson company hired Isaacs to consult on their pedal steel instrument, later introduced as the "Multiharp".[5] Isaacs married Geri Mapes, also a musician, and they worked together with an act they called the "Golden West Singers".[6] The couple eventually retired to Yuma, Arizona, where Isaacs died September 4, 2016[11] at the age of 88.[6] He was inducted into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in 1984.[6] Record companies issued three compilations of his recordings, Master of the Steel Guitar (2005), Swingin’ Steel Guitar of Bud Isaacs (2005) and Bud’s Bounce (2006).[11]