John Hughey was Conway Twitty's most essential sound, and most people who love those records have never heard his name. He was born December 27, 1933, in Elaine, Arkansas, a small town in Phillips County. Twitty was born Harold Jenkins in Friars Point, Mississippi, and moved to Helena, Arkansas, at age ten. The two met in seventh grade, when Jenkins was still years away from becoming anyone, and they played together in local bands before either of them knew what they were becoming. Hughey heard Eddy Arnold's steel guitarist, Little Roy Wiggins, on the radio, and that was the end of it. He asked his father for a lap steel guitar, and he spent the next five decades working out what that sound could do.
In 1968, Hughey joined Twitty's backing band, the Lonely Blue Boys, and his steel guitar playing appeared on Twitty's first United States country number one, "Next in Line," recorded that same year and produced by Owen Bradley. The personnel on that session tells you something about the world Hughey had entered: Ray Edenton on acoustic guitar, Norbert Putnam on bass, Hargus "Pig" Robbins on piano, Herman Wade on electric guitar, Tommy "Porkchop" Markham on drums, Jerry Shook on six-string bass, and The Jordanaires on background vocals. These were serious musicians doing serious work, and Hughey's steel sat at the center of it. The Lonely Blue Boys eventually became the Twitty Birds, and the sound they built together became one of the most recognizable in country music.
What Hughey brought to those records was a technique that players still talk about in specific terms. His style was called "crying steel," and it focused on the upper range of the pedal steel guitar, what players now refer to as the upper octave of the E9th neck. He was inducted into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in 1996, where his plaque credits him as the master of "bar shiver." To this day, many players call the area above the 15th fret "Hugheyland" in tribute to his mastery of that register. The phrase is affectionate and precise at once, the kind of shorthand that forms only around someone whose influence has become structural. He was finding a place on the instrument where the sound could do something a voice could not, and he lived there.
The list of records Hughey's steel appears on reads like a map of a certain kind of country music at its peak. He played on "Hello Darlin'," the 1970 Twitty signature that became the number one country song of the year. He was on "You've Never Been This Far Before," on "Linda on My Mind," on "I See the Want To in Your Eyes," on "Lost in the Feeling." His session work extended well beyond Twitty: he recorded with Elvis Presley on "From Elvis in Memphis" and "Back in Memphis," and he appeared on albums with Alan Jackson, Reba McEntire, Dolly Parton, and Dean Martin. After leaving Twitty in 1988, he spent nearly two years with Loretta Lynn, then joined Vince Gill's band as Gill was building his early reputation in Nashville. Gill, who understood exactly what he had, put Hughey's steel on "Look at Us," a recording on which Gill later said the steel intro "makes that song recognizable by what happens before any words even get sung." In the 2000s, Hughey joined The Time Jumpers, a Nashville-based Western swing band that played every Monday at the Station Inn, and he remained with them until his death. When Hughey died on November 18, 2007, the word from Nashville was that Gill could not imagine going back into the studio without him.
The community that loves this music already knows, at some level, that the pedal steel is the instrument that separates country from everything else. It carries the emotional weight that the genre has always asked of its music. It bends toward grief and holds there. Knowing that in the abstract is different from knowing who, specifically, was doing it, and how, and on which records. Hughey's crying steel is the sound on those Conway Twitty sides that makes the listener feel something has been left unresolved, a note that doesn't quite settle, a phrase that hangs in the air after the vocal has moved on. That quality was a technique, developed over decades, rooted in a childhood spent listening to Little Roy Wiggins on an Arkansas radio station. The feeling those records produce has a name. The name is John Hughey.
