The Horizon Divides You: Exploring Ambient Country

Where to start?

The blank page.

The wide-open sky.

The horizon divides you.

A half of the endless firmament; a half of the ground, rooted with plants, scattered with sand. A Rothko of the mind.

How do you write about music when you don’t even know what it’s called? What is this sound I’ve found? Ambient country? Cosmic Pedal Steel? Narcoleptic Nashville?

My journey here began with Chuck Johnson’s 2017 LP Balsams, which I first heard in the car of electronic producer Mitternacht late one Liverpool evening, driving home from a loud night in the rehearsal room. The brake lights streamed in my drowsy eyes as the sublime slides pitched and yawned, underpinned by huge but gentle bass tones, warm and enveloping. It was pedal steel, but not as I knew it, Jim. It felt like coming back to a familiar place, an intoxicating flashback, but also something brand new. This was music I’d been dreaming of all my life, filling the vehicle with preternatural calm in the middle of a thriving city.

Journeys are important in this music. You can see it in the tracklisting of the KLF’s Chill Out, hear it in Raymond Richards’ American journeys, feel it in SUSS’s noirish Night Suite.

Although ambient music can be traced to multiple inspirations – Satie, Cage, Riley, Reich et al – it was intellectually codified with the naming of Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports. With the music of this 1978 LP evoking a serious sense of stillness, of waiting around aimlessly in European departure lounges – its origins lie in the anticipation of movement. Perhaps it is this dual sense of moving and not-moving that endures.

How did we get here? To begin at the beginning. A brief history of the pedal steel guitar. It starts in Hawaii, after European sailors and Mexicans both imported various types of guitar to the islands. Tuning to a bright major chord lent the guitar well to sitting lazily on the laps of the local players, relaxing in the sunshine, watching the waves. Again, movement and stillness combined. Sounds like you’re moving, but don’t go anywhere.

The lap steel began around 1874, which allowed the instrument plenty of time alone on the island to develop tangentially to other types of music, with innovations including the musician’s use of metal slides rather than fretting the guitar neck with their fingers, a technique later assimilated by blues musicians. The abandonment of fretting the strings with hands also has another advantage – the sounds can lie between the notes, no longer tethered to the ‘one or the other’ of traditional guitars. By the 1920s, musicians like Tampa Red in the southern states of the US were developing slide techniques of their own, and via a Slovakian intervention from John Dopyera, the Dobro emerged with its resonator hole to increase the volume available to musicians. By the 1930s, electric Hawaiian guitars came onto the mass market.

The constraints of major key tuning soon brought innovation, moving away from the simple lap steel of Hawaii towards the pedal incarnation associated with country and western music. Paul Bigsby, mainly known nowadays for his namesake tremolo (or ‘whammy bar’) on electric guitars, was the first to develop a reliable precursor of the pedal system as we now know it.

Moving the pedals pulls the strings tighter, to allow pitch changing of the notes using feet and knees as well as the slide, with combinations conjuring a greater depth of notes and expression to be wrung out of the simple act of sliding a metal bar along the strings, lending the instrument its swooping seagull qualities.

Fred Rose specifically instructed Don Helms, one of Hank Williams’ Drifting Cowboys, not to play below a certain mark on the neck, to ensure those high and lonesome notes sang through on transistor radios and jukeboxes across the land. The lap steel became a mainstay of American country and western music, and from there it became a familiar sound the world over via the fingerpicks of Helms, Sonny Curtis, Tom Brumley, Jerry Byrd and more.

Perhaps the foremost pedal steel player, Buddy Emmons, took up the instrument at age eleven and went to study at the Hawaiian Conservatory of Music, one of several academies around the US that sprung up in the wake of South Pacific’s box office success. The instrument embedded itself in both country and popular music, with the result that it later turned up everywhere from Elvis to the Everly Brothers.

Santo and Johnny’s enduring 1959 instrumental hit Sleepwalk (itself begetting Fleetwood Mac’s coast-conjuring Albatross) was another pioneering example of the pedal steel breaking country boundaries and eloping into the rock and roll world. This track holds its somnolent power today, regularly turning up in recent years on soundtracks for television and film such as Twin Peaks, The Leftovers and Scorsese’s The Irishman.

In the country-rock movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s, aping the Nashville or Bakersfield sounds necessitated employing the pedal steel, where it was played by greats like Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Al Perkins and of course Captain Trips himself, Jerry Garcia. The Grateful Dead’s obsession with Merle Haggard, who had nurtured the Bakersfield sound with Ralph Mooney at his side, meant that when they looked to emulate his work with The Strangers, they couldn’t resist the lure of the pedal steel guitar.

He utilised it on two of their strongest studio albums, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, and took it to spacey places live on the likes of Looks Like Rain and Stella Blue, as well as guesting with New Riders of the Purple Sage, and on various Jefferson Airplane, Brewer & Shipley and CSNY records – perhaps most notably Crosby’s sun-dappled parable Laughing from the stoner-cosmic If I Could Only Remember My Name, an album which definitely heads into ambient territory with its wordless chants and plentiful reverb. Garcia famously gave up on pedal steel in 1974, claiming it would require another lifetime to dedicate his time to exploring it fully, although it did make occasional reappearances such as their joint tour with Dylan in 1987.

Kleinow’s work with The Flying Burrito Brothers stands out to me as an exemplar – fine technical playing, but also experimental uses of fuzzboxes and overdubbing, duetting swooping lines with himself that cascade and unfurl around the band’s Cosmic American music – the use of effects pedals to alter the sound is one that would later be explored by many musicians working towards that ambient vibe.

Of course, later revivalists of the country-rock sound like the fabulous Beachwood Sparks required a little sprinkling of pedal steel from their multi-instrumentalist Farmer Dave Scher for that authentic sound, so the instrument never disappeared.

In recent years however, the instrument has enjoyed a different kind of renaissance – no longer used simply to signify the lonesome whippoorwill, or the tender cries of a lover’s broken heart, the pedal steel now evokes a whole vista, a desert night sky speckled with infinite stars, or an underwater paradise of cold, calm peace.

After my encounter with Chuck Johnson, I began to notice more pedal steel records emerging, first observing his guest appearances on other records, such as Andrew Tuttle’s gorgeous Alexandra, my favourite record of 2020. Daniel Lanois released Goodbye to Language, his collaboration with Rocco Deluca, around the same time and this also found a home on my turntable. No less ‘other’, but more electronic and prone to interruption via paused tones or synthesised flourishes.

Following the thread, I wondered how the pedal steel had come from straight country to modern ambient – where had it been in the interim period? With my ears retuned by Balsams, it didn’t take too long before the dots started to connect themselves, like stars strung out in that desolate night sky. The constellations emerged, and from Andromeda to Vulpecula, the correlation was there all along.

For example, having mentioned Eno earlier, it would be remiss of me not to namecheck the brilliant Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, with Daniel Lanois’ yearning tones famously soundtracking a fantasy swim in a filthy Leith toilet in Trainspotting, a pivotal film of my teenage years. Following his sequence of four ambient albums in the late seventies and early eighties, this was the next project he undertook, and can be seen as a crucial stopping point on the way to today’s ambient country.

I found pedal steel presence in more older records, for example the post-rave comedown tones of the KLF’s Chill Out album from 1990. I’d been turned on to this by a former boss of mine, who rhapsodised about her illegal rave days and the mornings after. As she told it, the mist would begin to settle on the hillsides and moors and as the coming of the dawn raided their highs, her friends would inevitably find their weary way back to their Devonshire Road flat and consume a haze of spliffs while listening to this, which had emerged fully formed from the ambient house records in the clubs and been recorded in just two days. Elvis on the radio, steel guitar in my soul.

I instantly liked this album, with its reverb-cloaked King in AM static, subdued house synths and languid pedal steel, played by Graham Lee of Australian post-punk pioneers, The Triffids. I love the idea that the same instrument soundtracked booze-sodden shacks in Midwest America, then went on to conquer the hearts and ears of water-guzzling ravers at afterparties in dingy flats across the UK, coming down off ecstatic revelries to the shimmer of steel. Wherever it finds itself, the pedal steel guitar remains true to itself – the beauty in its sound comes from those in-between spaces, the liminal areas between one note and the next, the yearning slide transitions that open wide spaces in our own minds. Microtonal melodies.

There is of course the soundtrack to Paris, Texas by Ry Cooder, which while employing Cooder’s traditional slide guitar rather than pedal steel, takes a similar notion of landscape and abstraction to blow out Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground into a haunting, timeless desert ambience, again both stationary and moving. Which meant it was somehow the perfect soundtrack for a childhood memory of the Cooder tape playing in the beat-up Volkswagen as my Dad tried to navigate North Wales B-roads long before the invention of satellite navigation. Somehow the music worked – although there are no deserts in Dolwyddelan, the landscapes remain evocative, with the steel sonics suiting slate-grey mountains as much as the Arizona flats.

Other examples of proto-ambient country continue to emerge, with the reissue this month of Lee Underwood’s magical California Sigh. Underwood was Tim Buckley’s guitarist for much of his recording career, and with this record finally coming to wax for the first time courtesy of Drag City’s new pressing, you can clearly draw lines that bisect both his work with Buckley, and the burgeoning ‘chill out’ movement. It’s some kind of new-age post-stoner drift complete with wave sound effects and clearly analogous to the contemporary music from the likes of North Americans, Ezra Feinberg and Blue Lakes.

Chas Smith provides the pedal steel on meditative tracks like the closing Aspen Sigh replete with bucolic birdsong, hopeful acoustic picking and a sense of contentment that lingers long after the needle falls into the runout groove. Smith went on to appear on numerous great records and carved out a niche as the go-to-guy for pedal steel on film soundtracks, appearing on both Villeneuve’s Dune films recently, before sadly passing away in May this year.

Another late ’80s progenitor of the ambient steel sound is BJ Cole’s Transparent Music which again locates the hinterlands of dreamspace that only pedal steel can navigate. Cole has had a long and storied journey from playing with Humble Pie and Elton John right through to Spiritualized’s epic Ladies & Gentlemen, We Are Floating Space, and on his rendition of Pavane pour une infante défunte by Ravel, clearly signposts the way to get lost in ambient country.

Combing back through the eighties, I discovered the brilliant work of Susan Alcorn, who took the pedal steel to new experimental vistas by routing her steel through synths, experimenting with guitar effects pedals and just generally refusing to conform to the old norms of the instrument. Her joyful friendship with Pauline Oliveros helped to realign the idea of what could be done with a pedal steel – witness her And I Await The Resurrection Of The Pedal Steel Guitar to see both magical melody and strange dissonance wrung from 12 strings, a slide, a screwdriver and a rock.

Moving forwards again into the 2000s, but on a similarly experimental note, Heather Leigh, both solo and alongside Peter Brötzmann has disengaged the pedal steel from former contexts and used it as a whole bed of sound rather than as an accompaniment, for some truly out-there avant-garde noise worlds that show the pedal steel is as capable of apocalyptic tones as any other instrument, if not more so.

Back to the gentler world of ambient country, I found another example of the cosmic pedal steel in the closing stages of one of my favourite Liverpool records of the last twenty years, The Sand Band’s masterful All Through The Night, particularly the perfect closing track, where an old tape of what sounds like vintage self-help advice is layered over the beautiful tones of Scott Marmion’s pedal steel guitar, winding its way into the mind like a crack of light seeping through the curtains after a long dark night of the soul. I listened to this album so much it wore out and skipped, so last year’s reissue on Heavenly was a pleasant surprise for me.

William Tyler released Modern Country in 2016 on Merge Records, cementing his place as one of the pioneers of, well, modern country – an instrumental set with pedal steel by Luke Schneider that spoke to fans of his work with Silver Jews and Lambchop with new endless highways of anxiety to drift down, the cover image with him standing on the red dirt beneath blue sky perfectly illustrating the landscapes within. A record so good, I bought it twice.

Tyler continues to seed new furrows with his excellent Impossible Truth band, last year releasing the scintillating live set Secret Stratosphere, and he will be touring the UK in September, including a stop at nearby Future Yard in Birkenhead. Schneider continues his work both solo and with the aptly named Nashville Ambient Ensemble.

Spencer Cullum’s most excellent Coin Collection albums feature him playing pedal steel guitar at times, and again shows the versatility of the instrument – I recommend catching him live if possible, I have been lucky enough to see them twice and they never disappoint.

Listeners have also been blessed by this year’s Ballads by Dave Easley, in which the virtuoso applies his slides to several jazz standards (and Prefab Sprout’s Nightingales) and renders them dreamlike. Special mention to the excavation of Sonny Sharrock’s brilliant What Does She Hope To Be? which takes the woozy original and leans hard on the mellow aspects.

Raymond Richards, formerly of Mojave 3, has also made some impressive pedal steel-based records over the last few years, culminating in this year’s excellent Sand Paintings. Again, the travelling-without-moving motif emerges, with many tracks directly named after places. His previous record, The Lost Art of Wandering, takes in seven U.S. states along the way and once again advances the ambient qualities of the instrument.

I also very much enjoyed the ten-minute Balearic house bliss-out of his collaboration with The Project Club. It’s when this whole journey comes full circle, taking the whole pedal steel enterprise back to the beach.

Staring out at the waves, the sun shading the sky pink.

It could be evening. It could be morning.

Go ask the shepherds which, because I’ve long since forgotten. Here in the ambient country, we’re out of time.