Peddling Steel: Roy Thomas

Roy Thomas fell in love with the steel guitar at 14.

Born in Atlanta, Texas, in 1923, one of seven children, Thomas was fatherless by age eight. During the Depression, the family’s one source of entertainment was a battery-operated radio that occasionally let the Grand Ole Opry burst through the static.

“I heard my first steel guitar on that radio when I was 14,” says Thomas, sitting in his machine shop in Maurice, just outside of Lafayette. “That electrified, wailing sound fascinated me. I knew some way, some how, I was going to play one of those.”

By 16 he was working in a Fort Worth bakery. “I made it a point to find a music store, because I knew as soon as my earnings allowed I was going to buy a guitar,” he says. “By my third paycheck, I bought an electrified lap guitar, a Rickenbacker.

“The music store showed me how to tune it. I taught myself to play by listening very carefully to Leon McAuliffe on the radio. He was Bob Wills’ steel guitar player. [In Thomas’s Texas twang, the name sounds like Wales.] Bob Wills was the most famous western-swing musician that ever lived.”

The term steel guitar refers to an instrument in which a steel bar, commonly called a tone bar, is grasped in one hand and used as a slide, gliding over the tops of the strings. On his other hand, the player uses a celluloid thumb pick, and metal picks on the index and middle fingers. The most common types of instruments are the lap guitar, the table or console guitar, and the pedal guitar.

Soon Thomas had mastered Jimmie Davis’s “You Are My Sunshine,” Gene Autry’s “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine,” and “Steel Guitar Rag” by his radio teacher Leon McAuliffe.

During World War II, Thomas joined the navy at 19 and was stationed in San Diego. “I put together a band called the Musical Sailors,” he says. “We landed a job at a large nightclub in La Mesa, playing every Saturday night. My skills improved rapidly.“

Thomas traded in his Rickenbacker for a Gibson Console Grand doubleneck, 1942 model. Unlike the lap guitar, the Gibson had legs; the player sat in front of it like a keyboard.

During his twenty-seven months in San Diego, Thomas played regularly for the navy officers’ club and continued at the nightclub, where he met his wife Edythe Goebel. Within three months they were married. The couple, who have six children, celebrated their 63rd anniversary this year.

By 1945, Thomas was working in the engine room of a destroyer stationed between Okinawa and Japan. “We had twenty-one destroyers to shoot down suicide planes,” he says. “It’s a mystery to me to this very day how we managed to survive. In twenty-one days, all twenty-one destroyers had taken a hit.” Coincidentally, the invasion of Okinawa became know as the Typhoon of Steel.

After the war, the couple moved back to Texas, and Thomas began playing in Shreveport. “There were not many steel players around, so I was hired by many different bands.” In Greenville, Texas, he formed a group called the Rainbow Riders, which played live each weekday morning on radio and at the East Texas Barn Dance on Saturday nights. “I played with many Grand Ole Opry stars,” he recalls.

He sold his Gibson and upgraded to a Fender Deluxe with three necks. (Steel guitars can have single, double, or triple necks.) “I would give anything if I still had the Gibson,” he laments

In 1947, with a growing family, Thomas went to work in the Odessa oilfields. In 1955, he was transferred to New Iberia, and in 1961 he moved to Lafayette. With the Lafayette Oilfield Band, he continued to play as a sideline, often for oil-company parties. (He variously worked for Amoco, Phillips, and British Petroleum.)

In 1963 he bought his first pedal-steel guitar, a Fender 1000. The instrument is operated by foot pedals and knee levers. “You play it with both hands, both feet, and both knees,” he says. “The pedals and knee levers raise and lower the strings to prevent bar movement. The endeavor is to move the bar as little as possible.”

In 1963, while performing on live television, Thomas experienced an early version of the wardrobe malfunction. “I was taking a break on my Fender 1000 when one of the cables underneath came unhooked,” he writes on his Web site. “I immediately bent over the guitar to try to find out what was happening. I accidentally pushed my volume pedal wide open and at the same time a button on my shirt hung up on one of the strings and I nearly blew the top off the television station! . . . From that day forward I thought about building my own pedal steel guitar.”

In 1965, he set to work “primarily with a hacksaw and a file. I went to hardware stores and lumberyards looking for different shapes. I’d buy a piece of metal and saw part of it off. I bought door hinges and sawed them in half to have a flat part I could put a pin though. It was trial and error.”

The result was a bit crude on the underside, where he replaced the cables with rods because “it was impossible for them to come unhooked.”

“But the top was beautiful,” says Thomas. “I painstakingly made the body out of bird’s eye maple and varnished it until it was shiny.”

It took him six months to make a singleneck 12-string with six pedals and removable legs. “That first guitar played perfectly,” he says. “I named it Westwind. That was my wife’s idea, us being from West Texas.”

The finished product was a hit. “People wanted to know where I got it,” he says. Soon he was taking orders, charging $750 per instrument. By 1968, he was adding knee levers.

In 1969, Thomas moved to Maurice, where he bought a house on ten acres. His workshop was a converted smokehouse, about twelve feet square, moved from Abbeville. 

Thomas retired from the oil business in 1988 and began building guitars full time. He bought a company called Pedalmaster so he could use the name on his instruments. He built a machine shop and a woodworking shop, buying equipment from a New Orleans vo-tech school that had closed.

Grass snakes slither by outside the 1,600 square foot machine shop. Cooled by window units, it holds a monstrous milling machine that can measure to a thousandth of an inch. “These things are so precise,” he says. “If you mess up something, it’s very expensive. It has to be tuned just as true as a piano.”

The floor is heaped with metal shavings; a garbage can full of them waits to be emptied. (About once a month a man comes in to sweep out the shop and sometimes takes a hose to it.)

Thomas estimates he has built between 600 and 700 pedal-steel guitars. Buyers from Australia, Japan, and Finland pay $2,450 for a singleneck standard (three floor pedals and five knee levers) and $3,550 for a doubleneck standard (eight floor pedals and five knee levers). “You can get so customized the price can run four to five thousand dollars,” he says. “Sometimes I build my own bodies. A customized body can be so exotic it may take me six weeks just to build the cabinet.” He continues to use “beautiful, decorative woods” such as tiger-stripe and bird’s eye maple. But many players today choose Formica, which is less likely to dent.

Thomas’s most expensive guitar cost $10,000. “All the metal parts were 24-carat-gold-plated,” he says. “[The buyer] just wanted the finest guitar he could get. I said, ‘If you got the money, I got the time.’”

Some customers ask to have their guitars signed. “I just had to do that,” he says. “From the very outset, the deal was, when it left here it would have my name on it.”

His shipping company builds a Styrofoam case for the instrument and inserts that into a heavy cardboard box. A recent shipment to Australia cost $675, but the average cost in the U.S. is $150. 

Thomas is one of few people who build left-handed steel guitars. “I’ve probably built more of them than any man in the country,” he says. “I’m just about the only person left who will build one. They’re too complicated. You have to build them backwards. You simply reverse the pattern of the guitar.”

Clad in jeans, short-sleeved western shirt with snaps, white socks, and loafers, Thomas, 84, easily flips a forty-pound doubleneck to show off its underpinnings, then sets it back on the floor. As he turns over his hands to demonstrate the placement of tone bar and picks, you notice the pinky finger on his left hand is missing. “I cut that off with a saw six or seven years ago,” he says matter-of-factly.

Then he sits down and plays “Deep Water” by his hero Bob Wills. The plaintive sound ripples and swoops, filling the cavernous shop. His gaze drifts off, and you know he’s rolled back the clock seventy years, hearing once more “that electrified wailing sound” of his youth.

Ruth Laney is fascinated by those she calls Antiquarians--people who are in love with the past. A writer based in Baton Rouge, she has written for national magazines. She can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net. Roy Thomas’s web site is www.pedalmastersteelguitar.com.