Tommy Detamore died on Wednesday, August 5, ending a career that reached across country recordings, live shows, and studio work. Sunny Sweeney said she had spoken with him three days earlier, and they had discussed a new project they were going to work on.
Detamore was a pedal steel player, engineer, and producer whose credits ran from Ray Price and Johnny Bush to Robert Earl Keen and Sunny Sweeney. His work also reached Ty Myers’ 2025 album The Select, where he served as master engineer, a reminder that his role was not limited to one instrument or one era.
Cherry Ridge Studio in Floresville
In 1991, Detamore opened Cherry Ridge Studio in Floresville, Texas, and the room became a destination for artists from Texas and beyond. That base let him move between performance and engineering without leaving the country scene he had helped shape for decades.
His path into that work started early. In high school, he took up guitar, then studied pedal steel under Buddy Charleton in college in Virginia before moving to Texas in 1981 to play steel guitar for Darrell McCall. By 1982, he had become the mainstay steel guitar player behind Moe Bandy and toured with him for seven years.
Sunny Sweeney and Robert Earl Keen
Sweeney’s reaction carried the sharpest personal detail. “With the most giant broken heart, I want to wish my great friend and mentor, Tommy Detamore, smooth sailing up to heaven,” she said. “I just spoke with him three days ago and we discussed a new project we were gonna work on.”
She added that he produced her first album, Heartbreakers Hall of Fame, and that “His fingerprints are all over all of my music since day one.” She also said, “I called him Tommy Jesus cause he could fix anything musically.” Those comments fit the broader record: Detamore worked with Jim Lauderdale, Micky Dolenz, Dallas Wayne, Doug Sahm, Augie Myers, The Texas Tornados, Raul Malo, Bill Kirchen, Redd Volkaert, Gary Nicholson, Mando Saenz, Tommy Alverson, The Derailers, Eleven Hundred Springs, Johnny Falstaff, Amber Digby, Jesse Daniel, and others.
The Grand Ole Opry and beyond
Detamore’s footprint extended well past the studio. He performed with Moe Bandy on The Grand Ole Opry, Hee-Haw, and Nashville Now, and he also played guitar and steel guitar at Trinity Baptist Church in San Antonio and served as Pastor of Music at Oak Hills Baptist Church in Floresville.
Bill Kirchen’s Grammy nomination for the Detamore-engineered song Poultry in Motion shows the scale of that technical work. The unanswered question now is the cause of his death, and that matters because the timeline is so tight: a new project was under discussion just three days earlier, then the news came on Wednesday, August 5.
