Slash and Marty Stuart Headline Sho-Bud's Ryman Return This October

A guitar brand that helped invent the pitch-bending twang of the Nashville Sound is bringing its comeback story to the city's most storied stage. Sho-Bud Guitars will host “Sho-Bud Showcase Live” at the Ryman Auditorium on October 27, 2026, gathering an all-star lineup that spans country royalty and rock legends to celebrate the pedal steel guitar's outsized influence on American music.

The bill includes Slash, Lloyd Green, Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, Robert Randolph, Don Felder, and Marcus King, according to WKRN News 2. The showcase is presented by the Sho-Bud Music Foundation, and as reported by Backstage Country, the single-night jamboree is designed to bridge traditional country and rock genres under one roof. Randolph, the showcase's pedal steel virtuoso, was also recently spotlighted as a featured performer in Hoodline's coverage of a Columbus food festival.

Public tickets went on sale August 14 at 10 a.m. Central Time through AXS.com, with all-in pricing starting at $106.25, per the same outlet's reporting. Seating spans both the lower and upper levels of the historic auditorium. Every dollar raised will benefit five nonprofits: Project Harmony, The Peter Frampton Myositis Foundation, The Cerebral Palsy Foundation, The Tennessee Suicide Prevention Network, and Friends Life Community, the report notes.

A Family Brand Reborn After Decades in Limbo

Sho-Bud's roots run deep in Music City's musical infrastructure. The brand was founded in 1955 in Madison, Tennessee, by steel guitarists Harold “Shot” Jackson and Buddy Emmons before relocating operations to Nashville in 1963, per background compiled by Backstage Country. Jackson had previously played steel and dobro on the Grand Ole Opry alongside Roy Acuff and Kitty Wells before helping build the company that would come to define an entire genre's sound.

The company changed hands in the early 1980s, passing to Fred Gretsch, and the Sho-Bud name spent decades largely dormant. That changed in December 2024, when Shot Jackson's grandchildren, Will and Dawn Jackson, reacquired the brand and officially restarted commercial instrument production in 2025 — ending a stretch during which the family had operated under the separate Jackson Steel Guitar Company name. The October Ryman date is not the relaunched brand's first outing: Sho-Bud staged earlier “Sho-Bud Showcase Live” concerts in Los Angeles on April 24, 2025, and in Nashville on August 4, 2025, before scaling up to the Ryman stage this fall.

The Broadway Address That Built the Nashville Sound

Sho-Bud's historic factory and shop once stood at 416 Broadway in downtown Nashville, a location that today houses the honky-tonk Robert's Western World, according to Atlas Obscura. The bar still keeps a “Sho-Bud Balcony Bar” and a guitar-shaped exterior sign as tribute to the building's former life as a instrument workshop on Lower Broadway.

That workshop produced some of the most influential steel guitars of the era. In 1972, session player Lloyd Green — one of the acts booked for the Ryman showcase — collaborated with Sho-Bud on the “LDG” model, a single-neck SD-10 pedal steel finished in birdseye maple and emerald green lacquer, built lighter after Green determined he rarely used the second neck on standard double-neck steels during his studio sessions. Around the same period, David Jackson, who managed production at Music City Manufacturing Company between 1970 and 1981, patented a pedal-actuated pitch-changing string puller mechanism that became the most widely replicated string-pulling design in the guitar industry.

A Ryman Stage With Its Own Corporate Backstory

The Ryman Auditorium itself has been in the news for reasons beyond its concert calendar. The venue is controlled by Opry Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of Ryman Hospitality Properties, which put the Grand Ole Opry House up for sale earlier this year. Ryman Hospitality Properties sold a 30% minority stake in Opry Entertainment Group to Atairos and NBCUniversal back in 2022 while retaining a 70% controlling interest in its live-entertainment assets, which also include WSM 650 AM and the Grand Ole Opry House.

None of that corporate maneuvering figures into the October showcase itself, which is squarely framed as a homecoming for a family business and a fundraiser for its five beneficiary charities. For the Jackson family, putting Sho-Bud's name back on a Ryman marquee, alongside Slash and Marty Stuart, closes a loop that started with a Madison, Tennessee workshop seven decades ago.