Tom Bradshaw (musician)

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Born February 14, 1935 in Skiatook, Oklahoma, Tom Bradshaw was inducted into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in 2006 for significant contributions to the instrument and its community of players. Bradshaw has operated Pedal Steel Guitar Products, a mail order business in steel guitar accessories, since 1967. In 2006 Bradshaw bought the Webb Amplifier Company and will manufacture this product, a specialty amplifier for steel guitarists.

Bradshaw produced seminal steel guitar albums, including Curly Chalker's Counterpoint and Nevada Breaks, Bobby Black's California Freedom and Honky Cat, and Bobby Garrett's Thumbs Up. He also produced a 20-volume set of resurrected steel guitar classics, re-releasing out-of-print albums by Jerry Byrd, Herb Remington, Speedy West, Lloyd Green, Buddy Emmons, Jay Dee Maness, Red Rhodes, Jimmy Day and Noel Boggs.

He also produced steel guitar shows, starting in 1967 with Maurice Anderson. Those early periodic events eventually evolved into the Steel Guitar Conventions that are now held over Labor Day weekend annually in St. Louis, Missouri.

As publisher of Steel Guitarist magazine in 1979 and prior to that was a columnist and writer for Guitar Player for several years, he was pedal steel's foremost journalist of his time, documenting players' histories and the instrument's evolution. He coined the term "copedent" to reveal in graphic form how steel players structured their pedal steel guitar's tunings, chords and string pitches by the employment of pedals and knee levers on their instruments.