KGNU’s Big Daddy and Tony Ortega interview Bruce Bouton, a renowned steel guitar player. Bouton talks about his beginnings in steel guitar and his influential solos, notably “Highway 40 Blues.” He discusses playing with artists like Ricky Skaggs, Garth Brooks, and others. Bouton reflects on the evolution of the country music industry and songwriting. Bouton will perform at the Denver Steel Guitar Show on August 11th (Interview date: 7/20/2024)
Big Daddy: Alright, this is Big Daddy and we have Mr. Bruce Bouton on the line with myself and Tony Ortega. Bruce, how you doing?
Bruce Bouton: I’m doing good. How are you two guys doing out there in beautiful Denver?
Tony Ortega: I’m doing great, man. We’re actually in Boulder.
Bruce Bouton: Oh, that’s even better.
Tony Ortega: Yeah. Famous Boulder, Colorado.
Bruce Bouton: I haven’t been to Boulder in many years. I have lots of friends from there, but I haven’t been for quite a while.
Tony Ortega: I know that you’ve toured through Denver a few times. Matter of fact, you were here with Ricky Skaggs, but this was back in the mid 80s, and I was in a group called the Bobby Allison Band. We played the opening show for you when you were with Ricky.
Bruce Bouton: Was that at the Boulderado?
Tony Ortega: It was at some venue in Denver, but I remember you guys were all set up before we came on, and I remember staring at your steel guitar, thinking how cool it was you were playing with Ricky. I never got to meet you then, but –
Bruce Bouton: I’m sorry about that. My mind is very hazy about a lot of that time, and when I look back, that was 40 something years ago. I was actually in Denver recently with Garth Brooks, I’d say 2017 or something, I think we sold out – is it the Pepsi Center there?
Tony Ortega: Yeah, you got it, the Pepsi Center.
Bruce Bouton: Yeah, I think we did nine shows there or something, it was insane.
Tony Ortega: I’m glad you brought that up because we actually haven’t given you a proper introduction yet here. I’m going to let Dan do that.
Big Daddy: Yeah, Bruce. I’m glad you could join us. We’re talking to Bruce Bouton, steel guitar player. He has played with many great Nashville country bands like Ricky Skaggs, Garth Brooks. He was part of the G-Men, Brooks & Dunn, Shania Twain. And if you look at his Wikipedia page, the list goes on and on. There’s even names like Emmylou Harris and Kimmi Bitter and Chris Ledoux. We’re honored and privileged to have Bruce Bouton with us on the radio today. Thanks for joining us.
Bruce Bouton: Oh thank you for the kind words. I appreciate it.
Big Daddy: We wanted to know how you got started playing steel guitar when you were in college.
Bruce Bouton: I was a guitar player, or trying to be a guitar player, trying to find myself. I was a big fan of Clarence White, but I was also a big fan of traditional country music. I’m 70 years old now, but back in the 70s, I’d already gone through the 60s – basically, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, the Byrds, Cream, and just all the great music, Jackson Brown, Joni Mitchell, all that kind of stuff.
Tony Ortega: All the good music, yeah!
Bruce Bouton: Yeah, all the great music, but steel guitar was permeating through it. I snuck into a club and saw Emmylou when I was 17. She’s getting ready to join Manassas and she said, “But first I gotta go sing on this guy named Graham Parkland’s album”. And she went out and fell in love with Graham, and I saw the only tour that they did. At the time I was into Clarence White, and Sneaky Pete was in the band too, but I sat in front of Clarence the whole time. Anyway, long story longer, Clarence died. Clarence was hit by a drunk driver tragically, and then it put Graham over the edge and he OD’d. So Emmy had to come back to D.C. and she had to play, she’s a single mom, had to play five nights a week. In the meantime, I’d moved to Richmond, Virginia, and my buddy called me up one day and said, “Hey man, there’s a guy down the street, he’s got a steel guitar for sale, you ought to get it”. And I said, man, I’m too old.
Big Daddy: You were too old when you were college age?
Bruce Bouton: Yeah, I was 19 years old. My life was half over already.
Big Daddy: You listen to that Who song too much.
Bruce Bouton: Yeah, I went down to this music store to buy some guitar picks. I walked in, there was a guitar player magazine, a picture of the legendary Pete Drake on the cover. I opened it up and the first question was, “What made you play steel guitar?” And he said, “I was 19 years old driving a bread truck down in Alabama and I knew there had to be a better way. Now I make over 100,000 a year”.
For the listeners who don’t know who Pete Drake was, he was one of the A team. He played on Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, he played on “All Things Must Pass” with George Harrison, he played on everything, and he was a great man. But anyway, that was a sign from the universe that I wasn’t too old to play steel. So I got a steel, and I started working on it.
Big Daddy: Did you teach yourself or did you have a teacher?
Bruce Bouton: What happened was, there was a music store across the river called Metro Music and it was owned by an old steel player named Ray Garrett. All the steel players, the country guys, came in. Every Saturday they’d all be hanging around. I was the long haired hippie kid from the college part of town across the river, and I was like this science experiment. So they started showing me stuff, and then they took me to a jam session one day, and there was a guy named Buddy Charlton who had played with Ernest Tubb for years.
Tony Ortega: Oh, he was the master, yeah.
Bruce Bouton: Yeah, he was one of the greatest steel players ever, but he never wanted to be a studio musician, he was not that guy. He had moved back to the D.C. area, and was teaching steel up at Oxon Hill Music for 15 dollars an hour. Jay Jessup, who’s my dear steel playing friend, he and I would drive up every Tuesday to D.C. and split gas and take a lesson from Charlton.
Tony Ortega: Wow! I bet you learned some great stuff from him. He was an awesome player, man, like you. You’re an awesome player. And that’s quite a story. You’re quite the historian too.
Bruce Bouton: Buddy Charlton was great, man. But I think what Buddy taught me more than anything was how to tone out of an instrument, and really how important tone was. He would beat me up about my technique. And I didn’t learn his songs, that’s my big regret. All those great instrumentals. I barely learned them, and at one point he said, “You’re different from all my other students”. He said, “All my other students come in and they learn the stuff. You come in and you just cherry pick one little piece and then you figure out how to use it in something else. That’s going to get you a lot farther”.
Tony Ortega: Yeah, you’re quite the artist, man.
Big Daddy: What Bruce was doing was, he was hearing something and learning something and then adapting it to something else. So Bruce, you’re applying the knowledge that you got from the first piece to something else.
Bruce Bouton: But I never learned the whole first piece. I have regrets. I look back now at 70 years old and go, God, if I had done this and I had done that, but I was a party guy, man. I played in bands and drank too much and partied too much and didn’t practice enough, but I did practice a lot.
Tony Ortega: I wanted to ask you if you’ve written any steel guitar instrumental songs, or do you like to do that kind of thing?
Bruce Bouton: I did a record of film music during COVID. I wrote everything on that. It’s called Eden State – Ambient Americana, and it’s on all your streaming services.
Tony Ortega: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Big Daddy: Yeah, it’s an ambient kind of thing.
Bruce Bouton: It’s in Slovenian weather channels and Bosnian newscasts. I did it with a company in Europe. It’s instrumental, but it’s instrumental rambling. But I was proud of it.
Tony Ortega: I’m going to listen to it before you get here for the Steel Show.
Big Daddy: How did your solo on “Highway 40 Blues” by Ricky Skeggs come about? Because Tony was telling me that you’re known for that solo and a lot of the steel guitar players learn that solo.
Tony Ortega: I’m sorry, before you answer that, Bruce, I just have to tell some of these listeners that when Ricky Skaggs and you came out with that song, that took over the steel guitar community all over the world, man. Every steel guitar player I know had to learn that song, and it was so requested. Somebody would walk up to the stage if you played steel guitar, and they’d say, “Hey, do you play “Highway 40 Blues”?” You just took over the world with that tune. That’s really cool, man.
Bruce Bouton: And we were lucky. First of all, a guy named Ray Flatt, legendary guitar player, was doing a session with Rodney Crowell, and Ricky had replaced Rodney Crowell with Emmy. So Ricky was playing acoustic guitar and Ray was playing electric and Ricky said, “Hey man, I just got a record deal. I’m putting a band together, you wanna play guitar? And by the way, do you know any steel players?” And Ray said, “yeah, I know this guy, Bruce Bouton”. So Ricky came over to my house and auditioned me the whole first album, the Waiting for the Sun to Shine album.
He and I played it just acoustic and pedal steel. He offered me the job and man, I accepted, but I said, “Hey, will you let me play on your record?” And I’d barely ever done a recording session, much less a record. Two weeks later, we went in and cut “Crying My Heart Out Over You”. “Highway 40” was the second record. We had been fooling with that song a little bit on the road. Because Ricky had cut it back in the day with Vince Gill. Jerry Douglas had actually come up with the intro lick. So Ray and I copied that intro lick and then when I had to do the solo, once again, I had learned a little amazing two finger three string run from Weldon Myrick and Hal Rugg. So I learned that. And I just pieced it together. It was somewhat original thought, but basically, it was mapped out, but it just turned out to be a really big hit.
Tony Ortega: Sounds like a good memory for you, though.
Bruce Bouton: It was great, I played with Ricky for three or four more records. He fired me after the Live in London record and in the meantime I met this girl in a laundromat who wanted to be a singer. A couple years later I get a call from a producer named Alan Reynolds and that singer had requested that I play on her song, and that was a girl named Kathy Mattea. A song called “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses”.
Tony Ortega: Oh, I know that song well, man. That’s a great tune.
Bruce Bouton: I played on that and it was a number one record. That same producer called me a year or two later and said, “Hey, I got this new artist named Garth Brooks”. We went in and I overdubbed on a song called “Much Too Young”. Then I wrote a song for a guy named T. Graham Brown. I was working with Foster & Lloyd at the time, touring with them. And I said, “Man, I’m going to make enough money off this song where I don’t have to go out on the road”. I came home, this was in the late 80’s, and just waited for the phone to ring, and I’d get one or two calls a week, and then I started getting three or four calls. And what we have to keep in mind – back then, people bought records. They don’t do that now. But back then, everybody bought records and CDs, so there was so much money coming into the industry. These publishers were making money on the songs and so they were signing writers and the writers had budgets to do sessions.
There was a huge demo business in Nashville where you could work five days a week doing demos and learn how to be a session player. You’d cut five songs in three hours and you’d have to come up with stuff. That started happening and then friends of mine started producing records and they called me to come in and play. So I was able to spend most of the 90s in the studio.
Tony Ortega: That’s awesome.
Bruce Bouton: Yeah, but I wrote songs also. I realized that the money was in songwriting because session musicians only got paid. They don’t get royalties. So we would get our fee and just hope that they liked us enough to hire us again and that word would get out or somebody else would hire us. But that was the great bummer about it because in the studio, we created so many big records. We the musicians created the arrangements but never got royalties for it. All those beautiful intro licks and memorable things in a tune that sticks with people.
Tony Ortega: I wanted to ask you, you mentioned songwriting. Are you an avid songwriter? Do you like to do that still? Where are you with that, Bruce?
Bruce Bouton: I wrote a lot. I co-wrote a lot back in the nineties. George Jones got a couple of my songs. I got on a George Strait record, Garth, Glen Campbell. Back then I co-wrote. I just realized that when I started doing master sessions instead of booking demos on my off days, I would book writing appointments and I would co-write with writers. And so I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m a great writer. I think I’m a good editor. Writing was always a miracle. There were songs where all of a sudden something happened lyrically and it came out and there were other songs where I think I got coffee. Back then in the 90’s, if there were three guys in a room, or two guys in a room, or whatever, you just always split things evenly. You didn’t do anything, you just sat around and noodled on guitar. And that happened a lot of times. Post air sessions, sometimes you get in there and you’d be looking, you wouldn’t get anywhere. You go, “Okay, man, why don’t we take a break, go to lunch.” And then you come back from lunch and go, “Let me live with this a little while. We’ll get back together”. And you never did.
Big Daddy: So what happened to the song then, just finished it up next time or what?
Bruce Bouton: No, it disappeared. I’ve got tons of songs that really suck, but we have really good demos because there’s so much money floating around it. My publisher, I’d just say, “Hey, I want to do a demo session”. He said, “Great, play me the songs when you get done”. Those days are gone. It’s just, songwriters have been killed, they’ve been killed by the modern music business.
Big Daddy: Bruce ,what’s your biggest song as a songwriter? Co-songwriter?
Bruce Bouton: Because it sold so many records, I had a song called “Against the Grain” with Garth Brooks. But that was probably a song where, in all fairness, it was mainly written by Carl Jackson and Larry Cordle. I just happened to be in on it a little bit, but, I don’t know, man.
Tony Ortega: You might have been the main inspiration. I know how those sessions go a little bit, and if you weren’t there, maybe the song would have never happened.
Big Daddy: You kept it going.
Bruce Bouton: I can tell you everything that’s ever happened to me. And I can tell you the one thing that’s led to the other. I don’t take any of this for granted. It’s all been a series of incredibly fortunate events. When the music business started, I used to always have a session on Monday morning at 10 o’clock. Always. And then, I started getting days where I didn’t have sessions. In the early 2000s, it was starting to change. Some of the producers I worked with had already gotten rich and quit producing records. I got a call from a friend of mine saying that Reba wanted to put together a band of session players, and I toured with her for 11 years. 2003 to 2014. It was an amazing experience because it was all phenomenal players, and Reba and her ex-husband Narvel were just incredible people. Then I did the Garth comeback tour in 2014 and did that for three and a half years.
Big Daddy: What are you doing these days then?
Bruce Bouton: Right now I’m talking to you playing a telecaster. But man, I’m just enjoying life. I’m getting ready to head up to Kentucky today to play a benefit for a guy named Lee Bryce. But I’m playing with a group called McBride & the Ride that came out of the 90’s. And Ray Herndon, who’s been Lyle Lovett’s guitar player, is in the band. And Terry McBride who wrote 15, 20 songs for Brooks & Dunn, and then Billy Thomas who plays drums for Vince Gill and a band called the Time Jumpers. I’m going to drive up here this afternoon, go play the gig and drive back, and then I don’t know. I’m just enjoying life, but I’m still playing. People are still calling me for sessions.
Big Daddy: Oh good.
Bruce Bouton: I’m trying to figure out what to do when I grow up.
Big Daddy: Why retire if you’re having a good time, huh Bruce?
Tony Ortega: Sounds like fun, Bruce. Sounds like an awesome day, man.
Big Daddy: Hey, Bruce, knowing what you know about the steel guitar, would you play it now or learn to play it now at your age, considering how much you’ve learned over the years?
Bruce Bouton: Ha, that’s an interesting question. I don’t know if I’d start playing steel at 70 years old. It’s a very expensive instrument to get into. It’s heavy. You gotta take it down and set it up every time you play. But, I tell young players, it’s been the greatest decision I ever made, to play steel guitar. Because I’ve had a career. I’ve raised two amazing kids. In fact, my daughter just played in Denver a month or two ago. She’s, I gotta brag on her for a minute, but she’s in a band called Rainbow Kitten Surprise. They sold 12,000 seats at this theater in Denver. They played three nights. I forgot the name of the theater, but they sold 12,000 seats in 45 minutes.
Tony Ortega: Wow, she’s got it going on then, huh?
Big Daddy: That sounds pretty big to me. Sounds major.
Bruce Bouton: They’re getting bigger and bigger, but she’s got a master’s from Stanford in environmental science and all kinds of stuff. She’s a bass player. I don’t know where I went wrong, but anyway. And I’ve got a great son who works at a big financial firm down in Florida and getting ready to move back and I did this all playing steel guitar.
Big Daddy: Wow.
Bruce Bouton: I don’t know how it happened, but it was the right time because, as Tony can attest, the late 80s and the 90s, country music was – yeah, there was some bad music, but you know what they had? They at least had great guitar solos, they had fiddles, they had steel guitars, they had intros, they had songs that actually had space and melody. Now there’s still great music, but it’s coming from the periphery. It’s guys like Tyler Childers and Sturgill Simpson, Jason Isbell, Margo Price, all these people. Now, Margo, I don’t think she’s in steel anymore like she used to be, but there’s great music out there, but it’s not on mainstream country radios. The whole different vibe these days, it’s more, it’s pop music with a little bit of steel thrown in, maybe a fiddle here and there.
Big Daddy: Well, Bruce, that brings up a question. The Nashville industry is not using steel as much. Down the road, will our steel guitar players still be as good as they were back in the 80’s and 90’s and before that?
Bruce Bouton: It’s a different thing. We had the virtuosos. My buddy, Steve Henson, who’s still playing, is a great steel player. He would call them the Mount Rushmores, which I got to meet pretty much all of them when I moved, and they were all still alive. Buddy Emmons, Lloyd Green, Hal Rugg, Weldon Myrick, Stu Basore, Pete Drake, Russ Hicks, Jay Dee Maness. All these incredible players, they all wrote part of the book. You got to keep in mind, pedal steel guitar didn’t really go mainstream until Bud Isaacs played on a Webb Pierce record called Slowly. They started experimenting and Buddy Emmons got a Bigsby guitar. They had a few pedal steels around, but he came to town, he got with Shot Jackson, and they created this Sho-Bud steel. Then Buddy Emmons came up with the tuning of a pedal setup that to this day is still the status quo for how you set up your pedals on the steel. Wouldn’t you agree with that, Tony?
Tony Ortega: Oh yeah. And I just love all that history about that, and all those great players and how the guitar developed itself. And how all of that history kind of adds to you personally, and your tone and your touch, and you understand how the steel guitar fits in songs and you’re just awesome at it. We’re so happy that you’re coming to the Denver Steel Guitar Show. We’re all so honored, all so excited that you’re gonna be here and we’re gonna have a fun time and play some good music and it’s just gonna be great. I’m so appreciative that you’re taking the time to come on out.
Big Daddy: Bruce, we want to thank you very much, and we look forward to meeting you and hearing your music on Sunday, August 11th at the Denver Steel Guitar Show.
Bruce Bouton: I’ve got to practice, and I’m nervous as can be, this is not my thing, but I’ll get there. I’d rather play for a big crowd of people than sit there in a room of a bunch of steel players. So I’m going to be on high anxiety alert for the next couple of weeks.
Big Daddy: Oh, you’ll be fine.
Bruce Bouton: Thank you all for having me on here. I appreciate it.
Big Daddy: Oh, it was our pleasure. And what a great interview this was. We can’t thank you enough for joining us on Honky Tonk Heroes this morning.
Bruce Bouton: Okay, buddy. Thanks a lot. And Tony, I look forward to seeing you, and I’m sorry I didn’t say hi to you 43 years ago when we were playing.
Tony Ortega: That’s all right, man. You have a wonderful day. Thanks, Bruce.
Big Daddy: That was a lot of fun. Oh my god.
Tony Ortega: What a wonderful guy, wonderful musician.
Big Daddy: What a wonderful history too, and we could have probably talked to him all day whether or not our listeners wanted. I don’t know, nobody called in and said, “Get back and play music!”. It’s not every day when you get to have a fascinating guest like that and so you grab those opportunities. And we were talking about “Highway 40 Blues”. That solo that he’s famous for. I didn’t realize it really came from Jerry Douglas in a bluegrass band before him.
Tony Ortega: Very interesting, huh?
Big Daddy: Yeah! So we are going to play “Highway 40 Blues” and we’re gonna play some other things that relate to the Denver Steel Guitar Show.
