One evening in September 2020, Darin Shiflett sat down with his wife Amanda for a candlelight dinner on the balcony overlooking the lake at their Dallas apartment. That’s when his brother Stacey phoned: “You’re about to get a call from a guy you don’t know, but you need to take it. He’s an old friend of mine.”
Before they could finish their conversation, the stranger’s number flashed on Shiflett’s phone. It belonged to Kelcey O’Neil, a machinist and steel guitar repairman in South Carolina who had just acquired the trademark for Emmons Guitar Company, an esteemed pedal steel guitar maker that went out of business in 2014.
“Immediately, I was intrigued,” Shiflett says. “This is the Cadillac of steel guitars. As a kid, I wanted one. I had to get an entry-level steel guitar and I couldn’t afford an Emmons.”
Six months later, the two men relaunched Emmons Guitar in Sevierville. As managing partner, Shiflett, 48, handles operations and marketing. O’Neil, who’s 15 years younger, oversees parts and service. (He knows the steel guitar inside and out but, like a lot of the bygone manufacturers, he doesn’t play.) Both are heavily involved in the making of each handcrafted instrument, with Shiflett preparing the 400-plus parts for each one and O’Neil assembling it “like a big giant Lego system.”
To date, they’ve sold about 110 Emmons ReSound’65 pedal steel guitars – the reincarnation of the 1965 Original, which Shiflett describes as “the best they ever had,” with fewer than 50 made altogether – to superstars like Jelly Roll and Slash. “Once we got going,” Shiflett notes, “we encountered explosive growth.”
The two men complement each other’s strengths and personalities like bandmates who have jammed together for years. They even share the same hair style.
“Darin is probably like a favorite uncle as a business partner,” says O’Neil. “He brings fun and joy to the often-arduous task of running a business, while maintaining a good sense of composure and order through the growing pains of a new venture. He excels at relationship-building with the team and clients. I, on the other hand, am more at home in the technical side of things, overseeing final quality and processing service needs.”
Revival close to heart
Starting at age three, the homeschooled Shiflett sang in church and played everything from guitar and piano to harmonica and, as a young teen, steel guitar, all by ear. For a while, he aspired to be a country singer and even got some air play on the radio.
Instead, he worked his way through manufacturing, from shop rat to foreman to fabricator before settling into sales and design. At one point he worked for an Atlanta-based specialty construction company, helping build out the Centennial Olympic Towers and Florida’s Universal Studios. By the time he got the surprise call from O’Neil in 2020, he was having the time of his life at an experiential marketing firm in Dallas, still self-taught every step of the way.
“When you look back through the years,” Shiflett says, “it all orbited around every single thing that it would require to pull off the resurrection of a brand that had died, with only two people.”
For a while, O’Neil’s buddies had been extolling the virtues of the old Emmons guitars and hinting that the brand should be revived. Curious, he did a Google search and discovered that the trademark for the defunct company had expired in 2018. With the help of a specialized lawyer, whom he happened to call the day before someone else applied, he went through the yearlong process and acquired the right to use the Emmons name.
“My initial reaction to the news that the Emmons trademark had expired was disbelief, awe and panic – in that order,” O’Neil admits. “When [the application] was finally approved, I felt probably equally elated and overwhelmed, because this baby was now mine to raise.”
His spur-of-the-moment call to Shiflett gave way to more serious discussions, with Shiflett advising his new friend on how to create a business plan. Finally, O’Neil tossed out an idea: “I can build guitars but I know nothing about building a business or scaling a company, and it sounds like you know both. What would you think about being partners?”
Shiflett was at first skeptical. “At this point, the company had run itself into the dirt,” he says. “There was some bad reputation. There was some ill will. And I’m looking at this, thinking, ‘This is a mess. This is going to be a lot of work to try to clean this up and resurrect it from the dead.’ And gosh, I hadn’t played steel guitar in 20 years.”
Agreeing to let the proposal simmer for six months, on March 1 the next year, Shiflett recalls, “I got a very green light that my season at Lime Media in Dallas was over.” Shiflett and his wife moved to Sevierville, and O’Neil did the same after realizing the two needed to be in the same place if they had any chance of reverse engineering the Emmons Original.
Pulling from the past
One night, Shiflett suddenly woke up with a single word in his head. Unable to go back to sleep, he searched for the definition on his phone. “It was really kind of the awakening of what we were trying to do,” he says. “And it encapsulated our heart in bringing back the Original.”
It took about a year to create a working prototype of the push-pull ReSound’65 (pronounced “re-zownd”), which uses a different system of pedals and levers to adjust the pitch than the “all-pull” mechanism found in most modern guitars. When the partners took it to Nashville and Texas to let A-listers test it out, Shiflett says, “We got rave reviews all the way around. And before we could even go to market, we already sold eight or 10 just from concepts.”
Hand-polished to a jeweler’s mirror finish, the all-aluminum ReSound’65 boasts a retro look and vibe. Says Shiflett, who test-drives each one, “After you put 60, 80, 100 hours into building a guitar with parts and pieces of metal and wood, with all that work and all that polishing, when you finally get it together and you string it up and you sit behind it and you turn the amplifier on, it has a voice. It has a soul. It comes alive.”
Shiflett also likes to point out that the pedal steel guitar isn’t just for traditional country artists. Take Jelly Roll, for example, for whom Emmons Guitar customized a ReSound’65 last year. When the popular artist made the conversion from rap to country, Shiflett notes, he hired a talented African American pedal steel guitarist.
“We love this because of the diversity. This is taking the steel guitar to where we knew it could go,” he says. “We’re glad to see it not being played as what everybody associates it with: old Western swing or country music from Texas. It’s just way more diverse than that.”
Cross-culture appeal
Shiflett and O’Neil have also secured a number of branding sponsorships with pedal steel guitarists for country entertainers like Clint Black, Gene Watson and the Malpass Brothers, as well as former Bon Jovi band member Kurt Johnston and “Peewee Charles,” who toured with Gordon Lightfoot for many years. “Some people didn’t even realize these bands had a pedal steel guitar,” says Shiflett.
The Emmons team is currently building a professional ReSound’65 D10 model for Saul Hudson, aka Slash, the acclaimed lead guitarist of Guns N’ Roses.
“Jelly Roll is not the first progressive to have [a pedal steel guitar],” Shiflett says. “The guitar is so expressive. It can be played in jazz, heavy metal, anything that you can do on an electric guitar, all those crazy riffs and overdrives and hammer-ons. A pedal steel guitar will do that with ease.
“People are figuring this out, so we get to be a part of that renaissance, of that discovery. My idea is to see a 20-something-year-old Latino who’s playing this thing as an influencer, doing Hispanic-type music. And then at the same time, you’ve got an African American community playing it with Jelly Roll, doing Sacred Steel stuff [in churches], and Gene Watson doing his traditional 1960s and ’70s straight-up Nashville country. It’s just so cool.”
To spread even more awareness about the versatility of pedal steel guitars and demonstrate the uniqueness of the brand, the Emmons owners allow the public to watch the assembly process and ask questions.
Shiflett notes 95% of the guitars are sold online, with customers choosing their color, style, even financing. “Then what we began to find out is, because we’re in Sevierville and it’s such a destination town, it was just criminal not to have something for all these tourists.
“We get a chance to tell them about pedal steels and let the kids play them,” Shiflett says. “It’s just a crazy journey.”
Picking for the public
Opening the once-private space to visitors has also encouraged other musicians, even rock’n’roll electric guitarists and banjo pickers who’ve never tried pedal steel guitar, to play one. In the works: a recording studio, with Emmons Media Group producing the music.
The company has also partnered with Fender, with a showroom and store featuring an array of entry-level and pro accessories. The connection between the two instrument makers is nothing new; Leo Fender, who started the world’s leading guitar company, was close friends with Emmons Guitar Company founder Buddy Emmons back in the day. “The guitar associations were so small they would often share each other’s fabrication shops,” Shiflett says.
The resuscitated Emmons brand still thrives on relationships, Shiflett points out. “We like forging and developing relationships with our clients, with our subcontractors, our employees. Everybody’s like family. I think that’s the biggest difference at Emmons. Profit is not the No. 1 thing here. You have to make money and things have to survive, but ultimately you’re dealing with people.”
For O’Neil, the life-changing leap to acquire the trademark and restart the company has proved more rewarding than he ever thought possible. “The revival of the Emmons brand has brought me varying levels of joy, stress, gratitude, frustration and a lot of other feelings,” he says. “It has mostly brought me joy, though, as music is meant to bring joy through the expression of the players and the instruments that make it. And no brand has done that better than Emmons.”
That joy is contagious, Shiflett adds. When visitors sit down, rest a foot on a pedal, and strum a note for the first time, “they look like they just did something amazing. They look up and smile. I don’t care if it’s a 12-year-old or if it’s a 70-year-old that’s always wanted to try and play. They giggle. They get giddy. And they just get so excited.
“The joy that the steel guitar brings – it’s very rewarding to be able to be a part of that in a world so very divided by politics or people, racial tension, craziness. None of that matters when we start doing music. It goes away.”