Influential pedal steel guitarist Buddy Emmons, who recorded with country music greats and toured as a bass player for Roger Miller, has died at age 78, the Nashville Musicians Association said.

“In terms of pushing the boundaries of the steel guitar, he was like Jimi Hendrix was to the electric guitar,” said Dave Pomeroy, president of the association.

Emmons arrived in Nashville in 1955 to play with Little Jimmy Dickens’s Country Boys, then considered the liveliest band in country music.

Emmons, who is credited with recording the first steel guitar jazz album (Steel Guitar Jazz in 1963), toured and recorded with Ray Price, Ernest Tubb, the Everly Brothers, Linda Ronstadt, Willie Nelson, Gram Parsons and Ray Charles. He even for a time abandoned the steel guitar to tour as Miller’s bassist.

In recent decades he appeared occasionally on the radio programme A Prairie Home Companion.

“His contributions are immeasurable to the steel guitar world,” said fellow pedal-steel great Lloyd Green. “He was one of the first great modern pedal steel players, and he set the stage for the players like myself who came along a decade later during Nashville’s golden era.”

Green called Emmons a top-five great among pedal steel guitar players.