The Steel Guitar Forum

I saw an interesting steel guitar on a Opry video of Porter Wagoner from the mid-60's. It was a Sho-Bud with 8 strings and 2 pedals. The player stood to play it. Familiar with that one? I wonder who the player was? He sang harmony too. That steel guitar sounded really great.

That was Don Warden, who now is Dolly's manager.

Did Don play on Porter's original recording of The Carrol County Accident? There was a very nice Fender steel sound on Porter's songs of this period, and I always wondered who was playing.

Chris, a lot of things on Porter's old records that sounded like Fender steel was actually Buck Trent playing an electric 5 string b@njo with benders on it.........JH in Va.

If you stand up to play pedal steel, how do you use the volume pedal with your right foot without falling over ?

Remember, Jeff Newman said Mooney had an extra foot, so he could work the vol pedal & stand up & play, I am surprised he never has, he just don't want us to know about that extra foot, you have to have great eyes to catch him using it!!

Ernie

Does anybody out there know how his guitar was set up?

Chris, that particular song you are talking about did have the electric banjo w/benders on it. Man, I used to dig that sound... Buck was quite the musician...

Once I saw him play steel..on Hee Haw I think it was. He did a killer version of My Shoes keep walking back to You.

Can anyone elaborate on his proficiency on steel? It would be great to know...

Thanks for the tip about the banjo, guys! You learn something new every day.

Good info on the Unofficial Sho-Bud page

Buddy's 1957 tuning:

E, B, G#, F#, D, B, G#, E,

but no mention of Don's tuning.

jamie

if you're not careful, banjos will soon be taking all the steel jobs!

Check it out to the right of the Melobar. White Sho-Bud, White platform shoes and White curly-cord... 28)
Man...I bet that knee(?)lever was a hard one to hit!

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Just a bit of trivia...

The "stand-up" Sho~Bud that Don Warden played was the very first one that was built!

And yes, Buck Trent fooled a lot of steel players into believing his banjo stuff was done on a steel. "Let's Go All The Way", by Norma Jean, was a prime example.

looks alot like rusty young..

I loved Don Wardens style especially on the show. All you had to do was listen for that first lick and you knew it was Don Warden. An incredible and unique style.
It seemed Don could milk that steel for every mouth watering lick possible. I miss hearing that particular
pedal steel sound on mainstream radio.

Dan

the curly chords are making a come back - how long before those white shoes and those pants like timothy b schmidt is wearing come back and haunt us too?

Hmm. I guess you could hook up a couple of hip-levers on a stand up pedal-steel.

As far a stand-up pedal players,go, Bob White and Pee-Wee Whitewing played standing up also with their Bigsbys.

The song that I saw this steel on was called "A Satisfied Mind". The film clip was from 1967 and Porter said it was "one of the old ones" refering to the tune.

That was one of Porter's first hits.

Around the late 90's, I had Sierra make me long legs and rods for my Sierra S12U, and attempted to do a stand up steel thing with a rock-a-billy band.
I had lever extensions made for LKL/RKR (my E>F & E>Eb's).
It was pretty much un-do-able.
At that height, just playing the thing made it sway back and forth from left to right (i would have needed some kind of stabalizer legs I guess).
You could either play pedals, or use the volume pedal, but not both at the same time.
It looked cool, though!... as does Rusty's rig.

looks cool? even if it worked, i wouldn't be caught dying of embarrassment behind it....i think it looks ridiculous. course, that's just my opinion.....like tim's pants, they didn't hurt his career!

Here is Junior Brown's stand-up steel, from Duane Marrs' website.

Price Porter from Marble Falls TX uses a stand-up MSA E9/B6 Uni with 7 pedals and 2 wrist levers. The guitar was originally converted by Tom Bradshaw and a cameo pic of it appears on the cover of Tom's catalog from eons ago. I re-did the guitar for him in 1995 making a small 'second' pedal rack that relocated the pedals rearward without disturbing anything else. There are short connector rods going to cranks that then pull the pedal rods. Price also plays lead and sings, so he wanted something that he could use while doing just that/those things, then jump on steel and still have pedal changes without having to suddenly sit down. As far as I know, he still drags it out to a gig here and there, now and then. Last time I worked on it was about 3 years ago. I re-made/re-mounted the wrist lever mechanisms to make them more user-friendly including replacing the levers themselves. I found that after about a half hour of messing with it, I could actually play it!!
PRR

Well we have the D,E,F,G and X knee levers already. It looks like Jr. Brown's could be called the "P" lever