Susan Alcorn, the revered pedal steel guitarist who brought the instrument beyond its traditional role in country music, died on Friday, January 31. Baltimore’s High Zero Foundation shared the news online, writing, “We will never be the same and we are forever grateful to have shared so much music with YOU, Susan.” The musician’s husband, David Lobato, told WRTI that Alcorn died of natural causes. Susan Alcorn was 71 years old.
After coming to the pedal steel guitar through country bands, Alcorn pursued a solo career in which she refined her approach to the instrument on a virtuosic level. Her innovative and award-winning performance style drew from free jazz, classical music, Indian ragas, bluegrass, and Indigenous traditions, among other genres. In practice, that fusion gave her music the sound and smoothness of liquid, no matter what rhythmic or atonal structure lay beneath it.
Born in 1953, Alcorn was raised by a musical family; her mother played piano and sang in the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, her father mimed famous singers at parties, and, together, they accrued a massive vinyl record collection. Soundtracking her childhood were greats like Igor Stravinsky, Duke Ellington, and Peggy Lee, before she dove deeper into folk, blues, and obscure psychedelic bands like Mad River and the Freak Scene. Once she entered high school, Alcorn was spinning bluegrass and 20th-century classical music in equal amounts, both of which would greatly influence her direction as a musician.
When she and her family relocated to central Florida, Alcorn developed a fondness for country blues musicians and the sound of fretless stringed instruments, in particular, especially after watching elder men play lap steel at a park. It wasn’t until years later, while living in Chicago, that she first considered picking up a pedal steel guitar herself. After falling in love with Muddy Waters’ evocative performance style during his shows at the club Alice’s Revisited, she saw a country band with a pedal steel guitarist and was mesmerized. “The steel bar seemed to gently float on top of the strings, and it had this sort of round metallic sound that I had never before heard live,” Alcorn told The Quietus in 2010. “So the next day I found a shop that sold these instruments, bought one, and began bugging anyone I could find who could teach me something.”
By the time she was 21, Alcorn had immersed herself in the pedal steel guitar and was playing in country and western swing bands in Houston, Texas. The musically traditional views of the local country scene taught her that improvisation was best in small doses, particularly for the pedal steel guitar. Instead of allowing the routine criticism she faced to dispirit her, Alcorn learned how to better match the specifications and roots of the county and bluegrass genre by studying greats like Buddy Emmons, Lloyd Green, and Bukka White—and, then, after learning the rules, gravitated toward breaking them once again. To flourish, she drove to the Third Ward to study jazz improvisation with Dr. Conrad Johnson and how to embrace dissonance on the guitar.
