Duane Eddy: One of the musicians who woke America up to the possibility that the electric guitar could be a lead instrument. (Chuck Berry was obviously another, and Bo Diddley inspired many guitarists although he never quite achieved superstardom.) Until now, music critics were arguing over whether the defining instrument of rock'n'roll would be the piano (a la Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard) or the tenor saxophone (a la Boots Randolph, a session player on many of the hits of the 1950s who invented the "yakity sax" technique). Suddenly rock'n'roll was breaking new ground with a new instrument. (The solid-body electric guitar had only been in mass production for a decade.)
Lee Hazlewood was the producer on most of Eddy's early recordings. Remember that in those days amplifiers didn't have a "Reverb" knob so effects had to be created the old-fashioned way. Hazlewood bought a 2,000-gallon water tank and used it as an echo chamber to get Eddy's trademark "twangy guitar" sound. (Some accounts say instead that the song was recorded inside a grain elevator.)
It was "Rebel Rouser" that first caught my attention and inspired me to buy a guitar, although "Forty Miles of Bad Road" was the first of Eddy's songs that I learned to play. I never did get the hang of "bending" the strings (making it impossible to play "Rebel Rouser" correctly), which is one of the reasons I switched to bass guitar 15 years later.
Dwayne Eddy was not a virtuoso and about the only thing he could do that I can't is bend the strings. People in the music biz used to poke fun at him and he took it good naturedly. I heard a DJ interview him in 1962. He asked him, in all (mock-) seriousness, if he had ever thought about playing flamenco. Eddy answered with honesty and humility, "Oh no, I could never play like that." The DJ was a little taken aback by this self-effacement (a quality that has never been very common in rock music) and replied very kindly, "Aw, you're just being modest."
