Redd Volkaert

Country music listeners chiefly recognize Volkaert for serving as lead guitarist in Merle Haggard's ensemble the Strangers, a role he assumed in 1997. During the preceding decade he contributed to numerous Nashville sessions alongside Ray Price, Clinton Gregory, Dale Watson, and Lacy J. Dalton. Toward the end of the 1990s he simultaneously launched a solo career by issuing Telewacker. The 2001 release No Stranger to a Tele continued that endeavor, presenting an engagingly varied program of country swing, vigorous instrumentals featuring steel guitar, and vocal selections rooted in the Bakersfield-honky-tonk lineage.