SANDY -- Some legends just seem to live on, quietly and without much fanfare.
Legends like Alvino Rey, the man most likely to end up as Utah's best-kept musical secret.He of the "Talking Guitar." The driving musical and business force behind Utah's famed King Sisters. Innovator. Big band leader. Electronic tinkerer. Internationally famous jazz musician.
The man enshrined in the Pedal Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in St. Louis as "the Father of the Pedal Steel Guitar."
Now 90 years of age, Rey lives quietly at his Sandy home high on the bench north of Dimple Dell.
"I'm not doing much of anything" these days, he says.
Not much except turning out an occasional album on compact disc, flying off somewhere to play a concert or convention now and then. Still playing his music.
The last year has been a difficult one for Rey, coping with the loss of his wife, singer Louise King.
It took cancer to end a touching love story that spanned 60 years of marriage and covered hundreds of thousands of miles.
But life goes on, and Alvino Rey still has his music and memories of a legendary career that has spanned more than 70 years.
"It's ironic, but most guitar players of the last two generations don't even know about him," said Lynn Wheelwright, a northern Utah luthier who writes historical articles for guitar publications and is a friend of Rey's.
"Alvino is really the unsung hero of innovating the electric guitar," he said. ""He was one of the original and foremost promoters of the electric guitar in the 1930s.
"He was either the first or one of the first musicians to play electric guitar on the radio," noted Wheelwright, who is listed on the Internet as an "honorary historian" for the Gibson Guitar Co.
"Alvino owned the second production model electric guitar ever built," he added, "and he started using it immediately."
The guitar historian said Rey "was highly regarded by Gibson, which relied on his expertise to help develop early electric guitars. In fact, Alvino assisted Gibson in 1935 in the design of its first electric guitar."
Rey's contribution to the development of the pedal steel was even more vital, said Wheelwright.
Hawaiian or "lap" steel guitars were used for swing jazz during the Big Band era of the 1930s and 1940s, and Rey was one of the instrument's foremost proponents.
In the 1930s, he became the first musician to play an electric steel guitar on West Coast radio.
Soon, he began tinkering with adding a pedal or two to the instrument to get shifts in the tuning. That led to some research and development work with Gibson that eventually evolved into the pedal steel guitar that is now featured widely in country music.
"Gibson sent Alvino the first pedal steel guitar the company built," said Wheelwright.
Rey has received numerous honors for helping pioneer electric pedal and lap steel guitar music over the years. In addition to his place in the pedal steel hall of fame, Hawaiian steel players thronged to a convention last summer that recognized his contributions to the musical genre.
Not bad for a kid born in San Francisco in 1908 and christened Alvin Henry McBurney.
Developing an affinity for electronics about the same time he climbed out of the cradle, Alvin built his first radio at the age of eight and soon became one of the youngest licensed ham radio operators in the country.
"Electronics was always his first love," said Wheelwright. "His music just kept getting in the way."
Rey still holds one of the oldest active ham licenses in the country and is on the radio almost daily, often in the early morning hours.
Young Alvin's parents moved to Cleveland while he was still in his early teens and bought him his first instrument: a banjo.
"He asked for a saxophone," Louise King would later write in "The Swinging Years," her autobiography about the King Sisters and her own life. "But his mother thought the mouthpiece unsanitary and substituted a banjo."
While paying his dues playing in Cleveland area bands, the young musician quickly mastered the guitar as well as other instruments.
Rey soon hooked up with New York band leader Phil Spitalny in one of the top eastern groups of the day and later went on to play with the Horace Heidt Orchestra in San Francisco.
It was during that period when a friend encouraged Alvin McBurney to adopt a stage name. Alvino was the Spanish version of Alvin, "Rey" is Spanish for "king."
The name was to prove prophetic, because it was after he joined the Heidt orchestra that Rey would encounter the King Sisters and meet his future wife.
Heidt had hired a group of singing sisters from Ephraim, Utah, after hearing them sing over KSL Radio. They proved to be a hit with listeners, and Louise particularly was a hit with Alvino.
They were married after a five-year courtship, and later, in 1939, Alvino and the King Sisters broke away to form their own orchestra and tour prominent Big Band venues all over the nation.
The band became very popular in 1941, playing engagements at such historic places as the Palladium and the Coconut Grove.
His orchestra and the King Sisters also made movies for RKO, appearing in popular productions such as "Sing Your Worries Away" and "Larceny With Lace."
The "Metronome Magazine All-Star Band" poll of 1942 annointed Rey as the nation's top guitar player, and he was also voted to the "All-Star Band" in another survey of the nation's top musicians.
But it was World War II and duty was calling. In 1943, Rey was offered the rank of captain if he would form a military orchestra similar to Glenn Miller's.
Rey declined, opting to teach at a naval electronics school instead. During the last few months of his service, however, he did a brief stint as conductor of the Armed Forces Band.
As Big Band music died off after the war, Rey reduced the size of his band and kept busy playing smaller clubs that were replacing dance halls around the country.
He also developed the famous "Talking Guitar" routine in which it would seem as though he could really make his instrument speak.
Television found the King Family and Alvino Rey in the 1960s, providing two different runs at a weekly show and a subsequent flurry of holiday specials that continued on into the 1970s.
"That was a wonderful experience, but it was very hard work memorizing a new program every week," he recollects.
The past 20 years have still been busy for Rey, but his schedule of concert performances and recording projects has gradually diminished with advancing age.
His recent work included a 1997 release titled, "When You're Smiling," a compilation of 50 years of his most requested banjo tunes.
Brigham Young University was the beneficiary of Alvino Rey's musical legacy last year when he presented the school with his personal music library, which include Rey's own work and that of many of the Big Band era's top arrangers.
"It's a whole lifetime of music," Rey notes. "Big band, small band, symphonies . . . and they're trying to put it together at BYU to make it available to anyone who wants to use it."
Meantime, Rey is enjoying his golden years making still more music and living a quiet life here in the Salt Lake Valley.
"He's a very private person who keeps to himself . . . he never sings his own praises," said Wheelwright. "But he kept the guitar in the forefront of music for many years and was the only band leader of his time using a guitar to front an orchestra.
"Because he had such a popular band that was on radio all the time, he kept the newly developed electric guitar in public view and really established its credibility," the historian added. "Yet, most Utahns under the age of 45 don't know who he is or have a clue what he did."
But then, legends like Alvino Rey usually aren't prone to beat their own drums much.
"I have two or three more CDs on the fire, including another banjo project," he says. "But I'm working awfully slow. I don't have any deadlines."