Tommy Detamore, Producer Behind Cherry Ridge Studio, Dead at 70

T ommy Detamore died Wednesday, August 5, at his home in Texas. He was 70. His wife Sandra confirmed it on Facebook the next day, calling the death "so sudden" and asking people to give the family room to plan a funeral. No cause has been released, and as of this writing, none has come from the family either.

For most people outside Texas country music, that name won't mean much. Inside it, Detamore was the guy half the players called when they wanted a record to sound right.

He grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia. Played in bands through high school, then college, where he picked up the pedal steel guitar in the late '70s. His teacher was Buddy Charleton, a name that still gets mentioned with some reverence among steel players.

In 1981, Detamore moved to Texas to play steel for Darrell McCall. The Moe Bandy gig came a year later. Seven years on the road, stops on the Grand Ole Opry, Hee Haw, Nashville Now. Standard touring-musician stuff for the era, except most touring musicians don't end up running one of the more respected studios in the state a decade later.

That happened in 1991, when he opened Cherry Ridge Studio in Floresville. Small town, not a place you'd expect a working studio, but it built a reputation fast among Texas country and Americana artists who wanted a producer who understood the music from the stage side, not just the board.

Doug Sahm was recording there when he died in 1999. Detamore finished the album, The Return of Wayne Douglas, and it came out the following year on Sahm's own label.

The list of people who passed through Cherry Ridge over the next two decades is long: Ray Price, Johnny Bush, Ronnie Milsap, Jim Lauderdale, Sunny Sweeney, Robert Earl Keen, plenty of others whose names carry more weight in Texas than they do nationally. He's credited on more than 150 albums as a producer, mixer, or mastering engineer. Some of those were big-name projects. A lot of them weren't, just working bands from around Floresville who wanted their sound handled by somebody who'd actually toured, not somebody who learned the genre off records.

The awards came steadily but never really seemed to be the point. A Grammy nomination in 2001 for Best Country Instrumental, for his engineering work on Bill Kirchen's "Poultry in Motion". Record Producer of the Year from the Academy of Western Artists in 2008. Eventually, induction into the Texas Steel Guitar Hall of Fame.

This year he picked up two more honors. Steel Guitar Player of the Year at the Texas Country Music Awards, and a "Hero of Western Swing" award from the Cowtown Society of Western Music in Wichita Falls, given just weeks before he died. He wasn't well enough to be there for it. A friend accepted on his behalf.

Sunny Sweeney, whose debut album Detamore produced, posted that the two had talked three days before he died about a new project they were planning. She said he had some of the best ears in the business.

Jim Lauderdale's statement was shorter. Something about it being hard to find words right now, and that his heart was with the family. That was pretty much it.

Under Sandra's original post, other people added their own memories, mostly about sessions that ran late because Detamore wanted one more take. Nothing dramatic. Just the kind of detail that keeps coming up when musicians talk about him.

Sandra's post also listed a few of his nicknames around the studio: Dr. Tom, Sir Punchalot, Drama Papa, The Man. She didn't explain where any of them came from, and honestly, neither has anyone else.

Part of what's made this hard for people who knew him is how recently he was still working at full tilt. He was the master engineer on Ty Myers' 2025 album The Select, which introduced his sound to an audience that had probably never heard of Cherry Ridge Studio. And just a few weeks before he died, a project he'd produced and played on went platinum. Sandra mentioned it in her post almost in passing, like it was one more thing that had just happened to be true that week.

Funeral plans are still being worked out. Sandra and their son, Thomas, have asked people to give them time. No details on a service yet.