Pete Wade, a prolific and versatile Nashville studio guitarist who played on scores of blockbuster hits — including Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms” and Sonny James’s “Young Love,” two of the most popular country records of the middle to late 1950s — died on Wednesday at his daughter’s home in Hendersonville, Tenn., near Nashville. He was 89.
His daughter, Angie Balch, said the cause was complications of hip surgery.
A member of the loose aggregation of top-flight session musicians known as the Nashville A-Team, Mr. Wade played on numerous records regarded as classics. Among the best known were Loretta Lynn’s “Fist City” (1968), Lynn Anderson’s “Rose Garden” (1970), Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” (1977), George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today” (1980) and John Anderson’s “Swingin’” (1983).
All five of those records were No. 1 country hits; “Brown Eyes” and “Rose Garden” also won Grammy Awards and crossed over to the pop Top 10. “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” another Grammy winner, was added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry in 2008.
“Pete Wade treated all of them the same way,” the music journalist Peter Cooper said, referring to the many artists Mr. Wade accompanied, at an event celebrating his legacy at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in 2016. “He listened, he comprehended, he added what would help, and he left out anything that would distract or water down.”
An empathetic musician whose clean tone and less-is-more approach lent themselves equally to rhythm and lead playing, Mr. Wade, who also played fiddle, bass and steel guitar, had a special affinity for collaborating with steel guitarists.
On “Crazy Arms,” for example, he contributed electric tic-tac guitar — a technique used to mimic the beats of the upright bass — to create a propulsive rhythm that accentuated the keening runs of the steel guitarist Jimmy Day. Later known as “the Ray Price beat,” the driving 4/4 shuffle that resulted became as enduring a part of the American musical vernacular as the hambone rhythms of Bo Diddley or the one-chord vamping of James Brown’s JBs.
“Crazy Arms” spent 20 weeks at the top of the country chart in 1956.
“I tried to do what they wanted to hear, and what the song called for,” Mr. Wade explained in an interview at the 2016 Country Music Hall of Fame event. “If they asked you to do a certain thing, I’d try to break my neck to do it. But if they let you go and do what you feel like, well, you’d do that.”
As the lead guitarist on “Young Love,” Mr. Wade played the song’s lilting melody line, helping to establish the pop-leaning approach that, as heard on recordings of similar vintage by Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline, became known as the Nashville Sound.
“Young Love” was No. 1 on the country chart for nine weeks in 1957. For one week, it also topped the pop chart.
In his decades as a studio musician, Mr. Wade worked with Chet Atkins, Owen Bradley, Billy Sherrill and every other major producer in Nashville, a testament to both his even temperament and his adaptability as a guitarist. He also backed a broad array of non-country artists, among them Julie Andrews, Joan Baez, Perry Como, Little Richard and Dinah Shore.
Herman Bland Wade was born on Dec. 16, 1934, in Norfolk, Va., the second of three children of Edward and Lula (Bland) Wade. His father was a mechanic for the Norfolk Western Railroad; his mother worked in a pharmacy. (His grandmother disliked the name Herman and decided to call him Pete.)
Young Pete and his older brother, Bob, played in bands together throughout their teens; all the while, Pete sought to emulate the dazzling guitar work of Hank Garland and Grady Martin, which he heard on the Grand Ole Opry. Encouraged by Jerry Rivers and Don Helms of Hank Williams’s band, the Drifting Cowboys, Mr. Wade moved to Nashville in 1954. At 19, he joined Mr. Price’s Cherokee Cowboys.
Mr. Wade worked with Mr. Price on and off for almost a decade. During that time, he also toured with Kitty Wells, Elvis Presley and others.
In 1969 he helped establish the country-rock band Area Code 615, which consisted entirely of session musicians. The group released two albums and accompanied Linda Ronstadt on her 1970 album, “Silk Purse.”
With the rise of a new generation of Nashville session musicians in the 1980s and ’90s, Mr. Wade’s services became less sought after. He nevertheless continued to do studio work, playing on influential recordings by Johnny Cash, K.D. Lang, Reba McEntire and the alternative rock band Ween.
Less active in the 2000s, Mr. Wade became something of a musical elder statesman, performing at tributes to his fellow A-Teamers and at Country Music Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. He published a memoir, “My Life, My Guitar, My God’s Plan” (written with Scot England), in 2021.
Besides his daughter, he is survived by two sons, Tracy and Michael; a sister, Shirley Andersen; two granddaughters; and four great-grandchildren. His wife of 62 years, Mary (Stafford) Wade, died in 2019.
Though Mr. Wade began his career largely as a member of touring bands, it didn’t take long, once he had settled in Nashville, for him to discover that his true passion was session work.
“You listen to that in your headphones, and it sets up a feel,” he said in 2016, referring to the thrill of experiencing a record take shape in the studio. “You got to play. It makes everybody feel like playing.”
Read More: Pete Wade, Guitarist on Countless Nashville Hits, Dies at 89
