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.
One of the pivotal moments in Alcorn’s music education arrived in 1990 when she met composer and philosopher Pauline Oliveros, who introduced her to the deep listening approach to music. Alcorn began reviewing old and new music with an alternate ear, which greatly inspired her while writing music of her own. In 2000, Alcorn made her solo debut with the full-length album Uma, and she found continued appreciation with her ensuing albums, especially 2006’s And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar and 2010’s Touch This Moment.
“I view the instrument I play, the pedal steel guitar, not as an object to be mastered, but as a partner with which to share with the listener a meaning, depth, and hopefully profound awareness of each fragile moment we’re together,” Alcorn wrote on her website. “There are basically four directions to the music I play and have played for years – the composition and recording of my own music, adaptation of adventurous works of music written by others that speak to me in a personal way, free improvisation with like-minded musicians, and collaborations with various outlier musicians on the fringe of music and society who have important things to say.”
Later on, Alcorn would relocate to Baltimore, Maryland, where she ingrained herself in a new community as a performing artist, teacher, and music writer. One of her pieces, the essay “The Road, the Radio, and the Full Moon,” was included in the book The Best Music Writing of 2006. Though she was known best for her solo music, Alcorn was an avid collaborator who loved pushing the boundaries of her instrument by weaving it through the instrumentation and improvisation of others, including Pauline Oliveros, Eugene Chadbourne, Jandek, Peter Kowald, Ellen Fullman, Caroline Kraabel, Lê Quan Ninh, Joe McPhee, LaDonna Smith, Mike Cooper, and Johanna Varner.
In 2017, Alcorn received the Baker Artist Award, and she took home the Instant Award in Improvised Music alongside saxophonist Joe McPhee in 2018, too. She continued writing and playing music her whole life up until the very end, with her final record, the In-Yu EP, coming out in 2024. She was reportedly in the process of recording a trio album with Lori Freedman and Mat Maneri, and was scheduled to perform at this year’s Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee.