Mac Gayden, the co-writer of the 1967 pop hit song Everlasting Love and an innovative guitarist who recorded with Bob Dylan and helped establish Nashville, Tennessee, as a recording hub for artists working outside the bounds of country music, died Wednesday at his home in Nashville. He was 83.
His cousin Tommye Maddox Working said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.
Gayden’s most illustrious achievement – his percussive electric guitar work on Absolutely Sweet Marie, a track on Dylan’s 1966 double album Blonde on Blonde, most of which was recorded in Nashville – went uncredited for decades. It was only recently, when a new generation of researchers discovered the omission, that he received his due.
Gayden, who was self-taught, had a knack for inventing just the right rhythm or mood for an arrangement. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Nashville was just beginning to break out of its conventional country bubble, he had a particular affinity for collaborating with cultural outsiders, among them Linda Ronstadt and the Pointer Sisters.
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“Mac Gayden was a genius, genius, genius – the best guitar player I ever heard,” Bob Johnston, the producer of Blonde on Blonde, once said.
On JJ Cale’s 1971 single Crazy Mama, Gayden played bluesy slide guitar with a wah-wah pedal, creating an uncanny sound later employed to droll effect on the Steve Miller Band’s chart-topping 1973 pop hit The Joker.
“A few years ago, a writer called me ‘father of the wah slide’,” Gayden wrote in his 2013 autobiography, Missing String Theory: A Musician’s Uncommon Spiritual Journey. “It’s humbling to realise I developed a stylistic approach to playing slide.”
But Gayden’s greatest – and most enduring – success came not for his playing but for Everlasting Love, a declaration of boundless devotion written with Buzz Cason, who died last June.
A perennial favourite at weddings, the song reached the US top 40 in four consecutive decades: it was a hit for R&B singers Robert Knight in 1967 and Carl Carlton in 1974, for Gloria Estefan in 1995, and for pop duo Rex Smith and Rachel Sweet in 1981.
U2 released a bare-bones take of the song as one of two B-sides of their 1989 single All I Want Is You.
McGavock Dickinson Gayden was born June 5, 1941, in Nashville, one of six children of Hamilton Virgil and Ann (Dickinson) Gayden. His father was an obstetrician gynecologist; his mother was an equestrian.
Gayden completed high school in Nashville in 1958. After two years at George Peabody College for Teachers, he joined the US Army Reserve and saw active duty during the Cuban missile crisis.
Gayden played in local bands during this period. In the early 1960s, he joined the Escorts, a pop combo led by prolific studio musician Charlie McCoy, and through him Gayden gained entry to Nashville session work, including the chance to play on Blonde on Blonde.
As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, Gayden and several other alumni of the Escorts formed two improvisational country rock bands, Area Code 615 and then Barefoot Jerry.
Area Code 615 was best known for Stone Fox Chase, the chuffing instrumental that became the theme for the BBC television music show The Old Grey Whistle Test.
Gayden is survived by his wife of 51 years, Diane Boyte (Haynie) Gayden, three daughters and a son. – The New York Times
