Buddy Fite

Buddy Fite’s guitar style is completely unique in that once you hear him, you can always pick him out. His combination of walking bass line, rhythm and lead at the same time is almost unbelievable.

An interesting note is Buddy’s approach to the guitar fingerboard. He approaches it as a keyboard player would, in that he doesn’t think in terms of fret position. In fact, some of his favorite influences are Art Tatum and Errol Garner.

At 22, Buddy returned to Portland and played called the Cotton Club. There he met Omar Yeoman who played with the Ink Spots. He recommended Buddy to Billy Ward and the Dominoes, Buddy went to Chicago for an audition and got the job. The other band members were Shelly Manne and Ray Brown.

For the next four years, Buddy played locally in Portland and also did yearly NAMM shows for Sunn Amplifiers as a demonstrating artist. At a NAMM show in Chicago, Les Paul walked by and heard Buddy playing. Les walked up on stage and pulled his guitar cord out saying anyone who plays that good shouldn’t be around. This started a series of four to five years of famous NAMM show jams which included Buddy, Les Paul, Brice Bolen, and Art Van Damme—to name a few.

When asked about his philosophy at playing the guitar, one of the many things he will mention is that he would always learn which notes wouldn’t work in a song first, then he was free to play all the others. He feels we all have the music inside and if we really listen to it, it will come out.

When asked how he got to be so good, he answers that he plays the way he does because nobody ever told him he couldn’t. —Denny Handa

Buddy Fite grew up in the country, in the small towns of western Washington state. His first brush with a musical instrument was with a ukulele at the age of six.

At eight years of age he started taking lessons on the Hawaiian steel guitar (six string). Buddy refused to read the music; instead, he would have a friend play the lessons on the piano and Buddy would then memorize them. When his teacher found out about it, she told him he was a waste of time. He continued on anyway.

By the time he was 10, Buddy was playing steel guitar at grange halls in Orchards, Washington, with a six-piece country band. Two years later he was playing with Claire Musser and the Powder River Ramblers country band. At 13 he formed his own band, playing fairs. It was during this time that he met Willy Nelson, who was a disc jockey at K VA N—a radio station in Vancouver, Washington.

When he was 14 to 15 years old, Buddy played Friday and Saturday nights at Tiny Dumont’s park. During this period, Willy Nelson was hired on as a guitar player to replace another band member. The next year, Buddy was playing steel guitar on the Louisiana Hayride. Some one on the show recommended Buddy to play on a Bob Hope USO tour for $500 per week, but Buddy didn’t fill out the papers.

While working in a machine shop in Portland, Oregon in the years between his 16th and 18th birthdays, Buddy bought a Johnny Smith album and listened to it day and night. He remembers loving the har monies and then practicing them relentlessly.

Around this time Buddy began to play both regular guitar and pedal steel at a country club in Portland called The Grove. Later that year, he went to Oakland, California and played at another club, called the Hi-Hat. The owner-manager of a band, called The Naturals, heard Buddy and asked him to play bass with his band. He bought Buddy the gear, but Buddy didn’t even know how to tune the bass, so he tuned it to the top four strings of the guitar.