The name Buddy Harman is probably known only to the most committed fans, but the records on which he played drums are familiar to everybody. In a career as a Nashville session man lasting half a century, he provided the percussive backbeat to literally thousands of recordings, including Roy Orbison’s Oh, Pretty Woman, Patsy Cline’s Crazy, Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire and Tammy Wynette’s Stand by Your Man.

He also played on recordings by artists as diverse as Elvis Presley and Simon and Garfunkel.

Murrey Mizell Harman was born in Nashville in 1928. His mother played drums in a family band but although he went on to make his mark in country music, his initial inspiration came from jazz drummers such as Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich.

After playing in bands while serving in the US Navy he took a formal course in percussion in Chicago and began his professional career as a drummer in Nashville in 1951 on a Moon Mullican session.

The following year he joined the backing band of the singer Carl Smith and as Nashville grew as a major recording centre, by the middle of the decade Harman had become the first-call drummer in the city’s A-team of session players on what came to be known as Music Row.

He went on to drum on an estimated 18,000 recordings and was credited with inventing the hard-driving country shuffle that came to characterise the Nashville sound and which he first displayed on Ray Price’s 1956 hit Crazy Arms. Until then, drums had been regarded as little more than an afterthought in country music, a muffled sound buried deep in the recording with little other function than to keep time, if they were used at all.

Harman also took a job as the in-house live drummer at Nashville’s famous Grand Ol’ Opry.

Perhaps his greatest asset was his musical versatility, for in addition to playing straight country on recordings by artists such as Price and Loretta Lynn, he proved that he could pound out a rock’n’roll beat with the best of them while backing Orbison, playing straight pop on the Everly Brothers’ Bye Bye Love and Presley’s Little Sister, swing on Roger Miller’s King of the Road and quietly understated folk on Simon and Garfunkel’s The Boxer.

Among his more unusual sessions, on Ringo Starr’s 1970 Nashville-recorded country album, Beaucoups of Blues, he switched to the bass as decorum dictated that he could hardly eject the Beatles’ legendary sticks man from his drum stool.

He continued playing numerous sessions — often up to three a day — and performing regularly at the Grand Ol’ Opry into the new century.

He also had a spell in the 1980s playing drums in Jerry Lee Lewis’s touring band and worked for the Nashville Association of Musicians, tracking down royalties for session musicians whose work was used uncredited in television and film soundtracks.

He is survived by his wife, Marsha, two daughters and three sons.

Buddy Harman, drummer, was born on December 23, 1928. He died of congestive heart failure on August 21, 2008, aged 79