Any minimally resourceful writer could devise a few clever points of comparison between Buddy Charleton and Tura Satana, so let me resist that dull sort of stab at an eyebrow-raising opener. I heard about Buddy's death on Monday of last week, from my friend Bill Kirchen, who was en route to the funeral in northern Virginia. Buddy was one of the pedal steel masters of the instrument's second generation, a group that includes Buddy Emmons, Lloyd Green, Pete Drake, John Hughey, and Tom Brumley. These men made startling, sophisticated elaborations on the fundamental language invented by Joaquin Murphey and Jerry Byrd among others -- by artistic analogy, they were like Preston Sturges to Buster Keaton, or Bellow to Singer. There is a particular balance of finesse, mathematical progressiveness, and bold personal voice that seems to reside uniquely in this group, which came to maturity in the Sixties. Focusing more finely, Buddy was one of a group of three steel men (the others were Tom Brumley and Jimmy Day) who contravened the obvious route of influence in the Nashville scene of their era, when an insular group known as the A-Team played on most of the town's big-label recording sessions, and thereby exerted a disproportionate defining influence on country playing technique and on the perception of what sounded like country music and what didn't. Buddy, Tom, and Jimmy worked hard on the road, making a lot of steady small-bore impact, night by night and person-to-person. Thus they had a primary identification with a particular bandleader, and with a group sound that, in contrast to the A-Team's work, was evolved under the pressures of directly felt audience approval, bandmates' round-the-clock company, and the leader's commercial imperative to brand himself distinctively.

Buddy's boss was Ernest Tubb, and the legendary edition of the Troubadors with whom he made his mark included Leon Rhodes on guitar and Jack Greene on drums. You can see and hear a sample of Buddy's  thrilling playing here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViY2WXvVXYU. His tremolo, time feel, vocabulary, and tone all owe a lot to the other Buddy --Emmons -- who preceded Charleton in Tubb's band. Watching this, I was impressed by how relaxed his hands are -- observe the casual flex of his left pinky behind the bar, and how both his hands use the rest spaces, by springing elastically away from the neck or closing or otherwise silently extending the motion of the music (or just conserving energy). How intimate and mysterious is the relation between physique and sound. I never got to meet Buddy, and don't have much to say about him except that the records he made with Tubb and Rhodes are some of my favorite records ever made. I love, love, love this music. Rest in peace.

Tura Satana is beloved by exploitation film fans as the wildly dynamic star of The Doll Squad, The Astro-Zombies, and above all, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Though I'm not necessarily proud to admit it, I've thrown away hours and hours of my non-repeatable life watching Pussycat, which I think shows Russ Meyer at the height of his cartoony, comic, logophilic, emotionally stunted, black-and-white brilliance. I've got a soft spot a mile wide for people who stoically endure financial risk, the disapproval of the smart set, and the outrage of the "public" and all their starchy spokesmen on behalf of a highly personal set of artistic values. Tura's obituaries have recounted the miseries she underwent before becoming a popular Los Angeles stripper and then B-film queen. Nature has its own set of subtle punishments for the people who raped and imprisoned and otherwise abused Tura when she was a girl, but film outdoes nature by allowing the victim to stamp a resounding foot on the obscure graves of her pathetic tormentors. Thus we accurately sense, just underneath the parody of female powerfulness in the images of Tura snarling at a gas station attendant, or snapping a handsome young athlete's spine in two on the California desert floor, or assaulting a retarded man called "The Vegetable" with her Porsche, an uncartoonish, for-real power, one that is inspiringly positive in its defiance of death and entropy and forgetfulness. So thanks (a belated thanks) to beautiful, backbusting, big-breasted Tura Satana, and to good old America, where a pretty woman with sharp wits can move up from stripping.