Bruce Tull, the guitarist and pedal steel player whose spare, unhurried playing helped define the 1990s alt-country band Scud Mountain Boys, died on June 22, 2026, at his home in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He was 71.

Born Bruce Kermit Tull on June 9, 1955, he grew up in Midwest City, Oklahoma. A curious and searching mind, he eventually made his way to New England to pursue a doctorate in economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It was there, in 1991, that he met the musicians who would become his lifelong friends and bandmates. As Rolling Stone noted, the group first played together as an electrified rock outfit called the Scuds before finding the quieter sound that made their name.

That sound arrived gently. Gathering night after night around the kitchen table at Tull's home, the band traded their amplifiers for acoustic instruments and a hushed, after-hours intimacy. Seated as they played, Tull, singer and songwriter Joe Pernice, Stephen Desaulniers, and Tom Shea reimagined themselves as the Scud Mountain Boys, a name that would become a touchstone for a generation of listeners drawn to slow, aching country songs.

Tull's contributions reached well beyond his guitar and pedal steel. He recorded and mixed the band's 1995 debut, Pine Box, capturing the performances live to a four-track cassette right there at the table, a homemade approach that gave the music its close, lived-in warmth. The band followed with Dance the Night Away that same year and, in 1996, the album many consider their finest, Massachusetts, released on the Seattle label Sub Pop. According to Stereogum, those records earned the band a devoted following within the alt-country world even after the group went its separate ways in 1997.

A fixture of the Western Massachusetts music community, Tull spent years producing and playing on local records by acts such as Lo Fine, Haunt, and Goldwater the Second, lending his ear and his steady hands to musicians far beyond his own band. When the Scud Mountain Boys reunited in 2012, he was again at the center of it, and the following year they released a new collection of songs, Do You Love the Sun.

His bandmates remembered him with unguarded tenderness. "No combination of words will ever accurately describe the beauty of Tull," Pernice wrote in a tribute, adding that he, Desaulniers, and Shea were "just hollowed by his passing."

Bruce Tull leaves behind a body of work that prized feeling over flash and listening over showing off. He was the rare musician equally at home as a player and as the quiet hand behind the board, the one who helped everyone around him sound a little truer to themselves. In the gentle records he made and the many local artists he helped lift up, his generous and unmistakable touch endures.