Guitar bass, mandolin, ukulele, banjo, steel drum

Born: Nov. 3, 1926, Mineral Springs, Va.

First session: 1949, on Red Kirk's recording of Lovesick Blues for Mercury,

Notable sessions: Played on 26 of Webb Pierces 27 No. 1 country hits; Coal Miner's Daughter, Loretta Lynn; King of the Road, Roger Miller, played lead guitar on Marty Robbins' Singin' the Blues; Burl Ives; and Debby Boone; co-writer of the Louvin Bros.' You're Runnin' Wild.

Rhythm guitarist Ray Edenton played so many recording sessions stationed next to Buddy Harman that he could tell instinctively what the drummer was about to do. We'd try anything," Edenton recalls of those days in the studio. "We played every day together. We could almost think like each other." Edenton grew up in a musical family. His grandfather was a great old-time fiddler and Ray played music at an early age with brothers and cousins. in 1949 he went to WNOX in Knoxville, where he performed on the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round and got to know the star-studded cast, among them the Carters, Homer & Jethro, Chet Atkins, Bill Carlisle and Carl Smith. Sidelined by a long illness Edenton returned to entertaining in 1952 when on a trip to Nashville he was offered a job fronting a show for comedy duo Jamup & Honey. Edenton worked in bands with Marty Robbins, Webb Pierce, Cowboy Copas and George Morgan before quitting the road to try to establish a more stable home life for his young family. He worked the Opry and local TV shows, but as the sessions picked up in the early '60s, he devoted himself full time to studio work.

In one particularly busy stretch, Edenton did 22 sessions in five days. He could play many different instruments and often did, but rhythm guitar was his speciality. By his estimate, he played somewhere between 12,000 to 15,000 sessions, although he has no way to get an accurate count.

"When I got here, I saw all these great (lead) players here, and I started playing rhythm," he says.  I had learned a lot of the chords and things that a lot of the country players didn't play so with Chet, especially, and Jerry Byrd, I got to playing all kinds of music, all kinds at songs, and that helped my playing tremendously."

The above text was taken from the newspaper Tennessean in an article authored Jay Orr.