Robert Randolph

In an interview, pedal-steel guitarist Robert Randolph once suggested that somebody would come along and be the instrument’s Jeff Beck or Jimi Hendrix.
When I asked him recently where that put him in the pedal steel’s development, the singer/songwriter/guitarist appeared to backtrack a little. “Somebody has to put me there,” he said of the class of guitar revolutionaries that includes Hendrix. “I wouldn’t put myself there.”
But based on his own criteria, that class is probably where Randolph belongs.