I got a text yesterday from my friend Jon Hyde. We share a passion for the pedal steel guitar. Jon actually plays one, which I’m not smart enough, adept enough, or crazy enough to even attempt.

If a text could be breathless, Jon’s was.

Speedy West’s original pedal steel has been found.

Speedy West’s original pedal steel has been restored.

Speedy West’s original pedal steel is going to be displayed and played tonight at a steel guitar get-together at a private home near Portland.

Let me back up, in case the pedal steel guitar is foreign to you.

First there was the guitar, perfected in Spain. Then there was the Hawaiian guitar, an instrument developed in the islands that was tuned to a major chord and played on the lap with a piece of pipe or metal. (There was a huge Hawaiian music craze in the States in the early 20th. Black musicians took the Hawaiian approach and created the bottleneck blues style.) Then there was the lap steel guitar, a metal-body instrument that was amplified and played in the lap or on a stand. Then came the console steel, which answered the need to play steel guitar in several keys; it was a massive instrument on a stand that boasted with two or three necks offering different tunings. The pedal steel guitar was the next advancement. It offered pedals added to the console steel so that the player could change tunings without changing necks. Later the pedals were used to change the tuning of specific strings, and then—why not?—knee levers were added as well.

The only instrument designed, built and played by people dismissed by many as unwashed hillbillies turns out to be an insanely sophisticated and complex instrument that asks the player to master finger picks, a metal bar, at least four foot pedals, two knee levers, and, usually, multiple necks in different tunings. It’s totally unique, crying sound has become synonymous with country music. Dave Harmonson,  a friend who is a great steel player, calls it “the sad machine.”

Let me back up again, in case Speedy West is a new name to you.

Speedy West is revered and worshiped by pedal steel fans because he was the original badass wildman on that infernal instrument. Starting with his ear-opening work on Tennessee Ernie Ford and Kay Starr’s huge 1950 hit, “I’ll Never Be Free”—the first of Speedy’s unique, what-the-hell-was-that solos—West spent the next five years playing on over 6,000 recordings, backing up top artists like Doris Day, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. Very few of those recordings have legs today, but the dozens of Capitol sides that West recorded with electric guitarist Jimmy Bryant between 1951 and 1956 are still mesmerizing guitarists and music fans the world over. Bryant and West were the fastest pickers ever on their chosen instruments. (They didn’t call him “Speedy” for nothing—check out “Caffeine Patrol.”) Their unison playing of bebop-inspired riffs at insanely fast tempos still seems technically impossible, and the duo relentlessly challenged each other to come up with new and ever wilder sonic effects in the studio. These guys were brilliant AND crazy. No one has ever topped Speedy West for getting space-age, dazzling sounds out of the pedal steel guitar.

Speedy’s classic recordings were done with a four-pedal model made by Paul Bigsby, an instrument maker based in Los Angeles, in February of 1948. It’s considered to be the first “modern” pedal steel in that the console, legs, pedal rack, and connection rods were designed to be disassembled at the end of a gig and packed into a case. Before this critical innovation, pedal steels were nearly as cumbersome as pianos. Speedy switched to a Fender pedal steel in 1956 and sold his Bigsby. Ever since, the pedal steel subculture has been occasionally inflamed by rumors of sightings of West’s Bigsby instrument, but none turned out to be true.

Which brings me back to Jon Hyde’s text message, which included the phone number of Bob Muller, the host for the unveiling of the Holy Grail of pedal steels being held at his house that very evening. I called Bob and asked whether he’d allow a non-playing interloper into his event, and he gave me his address and told me to stop by.

I pulled up to Bob’s house in a new subdivision in a Portland suburb a little after the advertised starting time of 6 p.m. There were a slew of cars parked in Bob’s cul de sac. His gracious wife greeted me at the door and told me to head upstairs. I walked into a music room, complete with a sound system and a small stage, that was packed with people trying to make room for themselves amongst Bob’s seventeen personal pedal steels and several spectacular jukeboxes.

The guest of honor was Deke Dickerson, the owner of Speedy West’s original pedal steel. Deke is an ace rockabilly and country guitarist and singer from California who is also a passionate collector of instruments and a prolific music writer and historian. (Save some for us mere mortals, Deke!)

Deke took up a microphone and kicked off the evening by telling the remarkable story of how he came to own Speedy’s steel. After West sold the instrument, it ended up in the hands of a Bakersfield steel player who made some ill-advised modifications to it. The new owner was fond of drink and also seems to have been spectacularly lazy, because for years he refrained from unpacking and packing Speedy’s rig and just kept it, fully assembled, in the open bed of his pickup truck. Naturally, at some point the instrument was stolen.

Deke then flashed us forward to many years later and the Bakersfield office of Buck Owens, who had opened his own museum full of instruments that he had collected. Someone walked in one day and let Buck know that there was a pedal steel guitar just sitting in a nearby trash heap. Buck and a friend eventually checked into it and rescued the pedal steel. It was in no shape to be displayed—it looked like it had been out in the weather for years. Buck later loaned the steel and many other instruments to the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.

Deke entered the picture a few years ago. On a tour of the Country Music Hall of Fame collection, he was shown the beat-up old pedal steel they had gotten from Buck Owens. Dickerson got excited. His trained eye had told him that this wreck might be something very special. He asked the folks at the Hall of Fame to dig out a photo of Speedy West playing his original Bigsby steel. The wood pattern and other details of the trash-heap instrument matched the photo. Deke had found the Holy Grail of lost pedal steels.

Deke owned a nice guitar that had once belonged to Don Rich, Buck Owens’ longtime guitarist, and it only took a brief email exchange with Jim Shaw, Buck’s office manager, to arrange a trade of that guitar for the old pedal steel at the Hall of Fame. Now Deke owned the Holy Grail.

Dickerson’s next move was to contact Todd Clinesmith, an excellent musician and famous maker of steel and resonator guitars based in western Oregon who is an expert on vintage instruments. (Check out his web site at https://www.clinesmithinstruments.com/.) Clinesmith agreed to take on the effort to restore Speedy’s neglected steel to something like its original glory. He spent the next year and a half on the project, much of that looking for spare parts or making his own when they couldn’t be found.

And so there, standing smack in the middle of the small stage in Bob Muller’s music room, was Clinesmith’s resurrection of Speedy West’s 1948 Bigsby Pedal steel, in all its birds-eye-maple glory, down to the gorgeous reproduction of the famous custom façade with Speedy’s name and the plaque that Paul Bigsby had included on the original guitar to identify his handiwork.

The whole idea of the evening at Bob Muller’s was Deke Dickerson’s desire to give the members of the relatively large pedal steel community in western Oregon the chance to not only see the restored West steel, but to play it. Some of the local steel players who had gathered to pay homage to Speedy’s steel demurred, since the instrument had also restored West’s unique personal tunings, rendering it almost incomprehensible to musicians used to the standard steel tunings. But several steelers took their turn behind Speedy’s three fabled necks, accompanied by a snare drummer, a standup bassist, guitarist Russ Blake, a fiddle player, and Dickerson on acoustic rhythm guitar.

Todd Clinesmith was one of the first to give the steel a whirl. He was followed by Jeremy Wakefield, one of the most talented steel players in the country. He and Russ Blake did a good job of giving us a taste of the unison playing of Speedy and Jimmy Bryant and demonstrating some of the wild sound effects that the rig could generate. They also backed up Dickerson and Mary Rondthaler as they recreated the musical partnership between West, Ernie Ford, and Kay Starr on “I’ll Never Be Free.”

They were succeeded by 84-year-old Dale Granstrom, a local legend who has been playing professional in local bars and clubs for seventy years and who still works regularly. Dale and his peer, guitarist Keith Holter, told stories about driving down to California in 1951 to meet Paul Bigsby and to see Speedy West do his magic in a club. Dickerson owns a myrtlewood Mosrite guitar that Granstrom built in the mid-1950s, and he talked to us about Dale’s beautiful craftsmanship. “When you don’t have much money, you build your own stuff,” Granstrom explained matter-of-factly. Host Bob Muller and Russ Blake also stepped up to play a tune apiece on the shining Bigsby.

At around 9:30, after all the players who wanted to had taken Speedy’s steel for a spin, and after all the requisite group photos and shots of the steel players and Speedy West fans next to Klinesmith’s gorgeous restoration had been secured on cell phones, the crowd began to break up. I thanked Deke Dickerson and Bob Muller and drove back to Portland to the sound of “Stratosphere Boogie,” Razor & Tie’s CD compilation of the best work of Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant. Their unique technical brilliance with an equal measure of inspired madness, preserved for us forever. It’s one of the great, happy mysteries how two musicians so obviously made for each other managed to connect in this big wide world.

Here’s to the pedal steel players. They’re all crazy, bless ‘em.

Thanks to Deke Dickerson for sharing Speedy’s steel and for his help with the details on this post.