Paul Franklin is a 32-time nominee for Musician of the Year at the Country Music Association Awards. The revered Nashville session musician has also been nominated once for Musical Event of the Year.
So far, his number of wins is exactly zero. That’s a CMA record, and not one Franklin likes to tout on his website filled with stellar accomplishments.
But this year may change that. The award is meant to recognize great instrumentalists. Franklin is indisputably among them. Franklin has lent his steel pedal guitar to thousands of recordings, and it may finally be time to recognize his record of achievements. In country music alone, Franklin’s credits include hundreds of albums, including with Kenny Rogers, Shania Twain, Willie Nelson, Randy Travis, Trisha Yearwood, Carrie Underwood, Rascal Flatts, and a twinkling star named Taylor Swift. Outside the genre, he’s played with Barbra Streisand, Lionel Richie, Etta James, Toni Braxton, Megadeth and Sting.
Born in 1954 in Detroit, the musician was still in grade school when he started playing professionally.
“I think I played my first bar at 10 years old,” he told fellow musician Bill Lloyd in a 2013 onstage interview with the Country Music Hall of Fame.
At the time, Franklin observed, Detroit was filled with people like his parents: white workers from Kentucky and Tennessee drawn to jobs in the car factories. “Alcohol and country music go together, so there were a lot of bars to play at,” he joked.
And in the Motor City, country partied with jazz, funk and soul in surprising ways. In 1970, Parliament’s debut album featured a song called “Little Ole Country Boy.” You can hear little old Paul Franklin grooving away on the single; he was only 15.
Two years later, he was touring with one of country music’s biggest stars, Barbara Mandrell, and appearing with her on the popular CBS variety show Hee Haw.
Paul Franklin’s steel pedal guitar can be heard everywhere in popular music, from the 1972 soft rock hit “It’s So Nice to Be With You” by Gallery to his virtuosic appearances in Dire Straits songs such as “Walk of Life.” He was regularly booking three sessions a day in the late 1980s, as he told the Country Music Hall of Fame audience, and played the pedabro, a steel player innovated by his father, on a Randy Travis hit, “Forever and Ever, Amen” from 1987. It became associated with his style. Two years later, Franklin received his first CMA nomination. He would continue to be nominated with barely a break between years.
But Franklin’s name did not appear on an album cover until 2013. Bakersfield, his album with singer and songwriter Vince Gill, was a tribute to the classic country sound emerging from a California destination for migrants during the hardscrabble days of the Dust Bowl.
“The great thing about Paul is, even though he’s his own stylist in definitive playing, he’s got …the history in his heart,” Gill told NPR in 2013. “That’s the most important place – that he knows what Ralph Mooney played like. He knows what Buddy Emmons played like. He knows all these greats that were such a huge part of this history that gives him a vocabulary that’s deeper than anybody I’ve ever known that’s played the instrument.”
For years, Franklin has played with a Nashville band of all-star session musicians called The Time Jumpers. When NPR profiled the band in 2009, Franklin was modest about his participation. “I don’t think there’s a steel guitarist in town that wouldn’t jump at this gig,” he said.
In 2024, Franklin is again up for the CMA’s Musician of the Year alongside guitarists Tom Bukovac, Rob McNelley, Charlie Worsham and fiddle player Jenee Fleenor. Perhaps this will finally be his year.