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Duane Eddy’s twang remains one of rock’n’roll’s greatest sounds
The late guitarist was rightly ubiquitous in the late 1950s thanks to his otherworldly sound, earning admirers from Bruce Springsteen to John Peel
Yet his best records – Shazam!, Rebel Rouser, Peter Gunn, Cannonball, Ramrod and more – carried a sense of danger that rock’n’roll was starting to lose by the time of Eddy’s ascendancy. Instead he fell on the straitened times of the itinerant rock’n’roller – backed by locally recruited pick-up bands when he toured (“His act was more a public rehearsal than a polished performance,” said the NME of a 1978 gig in Margate), but the Eddy legend lived on. You could hear it in any artist who had fallen in love with the first wave of rock’n’roll, especially in Bruce Springsteen – the scraping, twangy guitar lines in both Born to Run and Thunder Road are explicitly indebted to Eddy.
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