Dickie Harris

While Dickie Harris is not the guy who played trombone on "Out of Sight", he did pick pedal steel with Ernest Tubb & the Texas Troubadours, which is also out of sight, or at least "perty durn good" as they might say in Texas. Tubb was fussy about pedal steel, wanting a certain melodic integrity as well as a stylist whose moves integrated well with the perpetually evolving but well-established style of his group. One aspect of this, for example, would be Billy Byrd -- pedal steel players who donned the Texas Troubadour hat had be the type who wouldn't rebel when Byrd ended every one of his solos with the same lick, tour after tour, year after year. They also had to be able to endure the poker games aboard the bus and let the leader win from time to time. Harris, who is indeed often mixed up with the veteran jazz and soul trombonist Dicky Harris, was in superb company in terms of the list of pedal steel performers who went through the Tubb ranks. At one reunion of bandmembers held a few years after Tubb's demise, at least a half-dozen members of the International Steel Guitar Hall of Fame were present, including Harris, Don Helms, Jimmy Day, Buddy Emmons, Buddy Charlton, Kemo Head, and Johnny Cox. Harris co-wrote the weeper "Old Dreams" recorded by Charlie Louvin. The pedal steel player is also no relation to Rick Harris, a session man who covers a variety of stringed instruments. ~ Eugene Chadbourne