Jimi Hendrix Was The Roy Buchanan of Rock & Roll & Other Rural American Stories
“Jimi Hendrix Was The Roy Buchanan of Rock & Roll & Other Rural American Stories"
Roy Buchanan never really fit. He was an old man in rock & roll terms, by the time anyone much knew who he was. This was when the saying went “Never trust anyone over 30”—when Vietnam and the anti-war movement were raging, the civil rights movement was in full swing, and various other rebellions were in their infancy, from Woman’s rights to Gay rights. The world separated into two camps, then, the old and the young, a generation gap that was more a yawning chasm, than a cultural disagreement. Much like today. The difference is that today, we see mostly manufactured outrage, which transcends age. In that sense it is very different than the segregated world of the 194os and 50s when Roy Buchanan was growing up.
Roy Buchanan wasn't a 1960’s rocker. Not really. He wasn't a hippie. In 1971, when the PBS documentary “The World's Greatest Unknown Guitarist” was released, Buchanan was a 32-year-old, six foot one inch, 210 lb. Southern man, with an extended comb-over and goatee. Roy looked more like a Beatnik hold-over from the previous decade, meets country music outlaw, than Eric Clapton or The Rolling Stones. Although both images of Roy—the contemporary of Elvis and Fats Domino, or a fellow traveler of a younger generation of players like Hendrix and Jeff Beck, were both slightly out of focus. Roy fit in either camp, but never completely.
In terms of time and place, Roy Buchanan was a 1st generation, Elvis-era rocker, having begun his major recording career in 1958 with Dale Hawkins. He also recorded with country artist Merle Kilgore, among others, and performed with pre-rock & roll, R&B pioneer, Johnny Otis when the word “Rock & Roll” barely existed, except as a sexual euphemism.
Johnny Otis was the White, son of Greek immigrants who lived his adult life as a Black man. Demonstrating, even then, that multiculturalism and identifying as something other than what’s on your birth certificate, isn't really new. Otis began his career in the 1940s, playing with some of the most influential Black R & B and jazz bands of the time. He was a singer, songwriter, bandleader, and talent scout. The man who discovered Jackie Wilson, Little Willie John, Big Mamma Thornton, Little Esther, Big Jay McNeely, and Etta James, among others. In 1950, Johnnie Otis won R & B artist of the year, when R&B was thought of as “Race Music,” which was another word for segragated “Black Music.” He was accepted as “High Yellow.” Meaning, a Black man with a “Cracker” in the woodpile. In reality, Johnny Otis was a White man whose immigrant family moved into a Black neighborhood when he was a boy, bought a small grocery store, no different than immigrants today. The one big difference, Otis never left the segregated neighborhood. He married a Black woman and lived his life as a Black man. Until the day he died.
Like Johnny Otis, Roy Buchanan wasn’t easy to define, at least, artistically speaking, even if his racial designation was clear—and, like a lot of gifted musicians living in the legally segregated South, he absorbed the scope of American popular music and culture, both Black and White, including jazz, country, rock a billy, R&B, and, especially, the blues, all played with something of a psychedelic edge, even if nobody would've understood what the word “Psychedelic” meant, back in 1961 when Roy recorded “Mule Train Stomp.” Or, a year later when he recorded “The Potato Peeler.” Even then, you could hear all of the essentials of Buchanan’s style. The heavy sustain, the over-driven telecaster tone that was his trademark, the volume swells, the pinched harmonics, and the tonal crunch and distortion of Roy’s guitar were genuinely unique. So much so that recording technology would have to advance another 6 or 7 years to begin to effectively capture what Roy was doing. In other words, if country music ever produced its own version of Jimi Hendrix, it was Roy Buchanan, whose rapid-fire blues-picking, pedal steel bends, wah-wah effects, pinched harmonics, and volume swells were as radical to country music, early rock & roll, and rock a billy, as Hendrix was to the rock music of the late 1960s. The difference being that Roy got there first, years before Jimi Hendrix, during a period when sidemen and session players seldom ever got public credit for their work.
Musicians have long ignored artificial barriers, in an effort share their common language. Most of those barriers tend to be about marketing, more than music. Some barriers, like racial segregation, were moved aside as far back as the 1920s, nearly 100-years-ago, decades before the earliest stages of the civil rights movement. Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden became musical compadres, in spite of the potential negative career ramifications. Another extraordinary interracial duo from the same period was the innovative Black guitarist and singer, Lonnie Johnson. And the equally innovative, Eddie Lang, who was White. Lang was forced to use the pseudonym Blind Willie Dunn to avoid legal issues. It should be remembered that segregation was the law. Disregard it at your own peril. But many musicians did. Red Rodney—Charlie Parker’s young, White, red-headed trumpet player during the 1940’s was passed off as a Black man named “Albino Red” when Parker’s band toured the South, where institutional racism was enforced by local and state governments. It wasn't some ragtag group of toothless Southern crackers that kept racism alive and well in rural America. It was politicians, most of whom were Democrats, working to maintain the feudal system that benefited the large plantations. They were the ones who gained the most from the cheap Black labor. Apartheid in South Africa was substantially driven by labor unions, as well, who understood that allowing Blacks to compete in a free and fair labor market would be catastrophic to Whites who were outnumbered 10 to 1, all in the wrong direction.
Even today, music is segregated, but generally, for marketing reasons. It’s easier to corner a niche market by finding an underutilized audience than it is to throw your musical net to wide and miss a chance at a neglected market. Chess records did this in the late 1940s and 1950s, almost by accident, when Leonard and Phil Chess recorded Muddy Waters and found out just how many Black migrants, leaving the South, were thrilled to hear their down-home music alive and well in a big city like Chicago. And the Chess brothers weren't alone, small independent labels sprang up all over the U.S., as far back as the 1920s, recording jazz, country, blues, bluegrass, and eventually, R&B and Rock & Roll. It was America’s booming economy that drove change, in the form of jobs, jobs, and more jobs, giving poor Blacks and poor Whites their first taste of real economic freedom. With money in their pocket, there was always some entrepreneur, regardless of race, who was eager to meet their demands. Roy Buchanan, the son of poor White sharecroppers, was as much an expression of that cultural and economic revolution as Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden were 30 years earlier.
In 1955 and 56. Martin Luther King’s Alabama bus boycott coincided with the release of Chuck Berry’s “Maybeline” and Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” featuring what was essentially a Black country/R&B artist, and a White R&B/country musician, integrating musical forms. Radio and television gave them a platform from which to express this new integration. A burgeoning post-war economy facilitated the process, which actually began two generations earlier, as the U.S. emerged as the greatest industrial power on earth by the beginning of the 20th century.
It was the politicians that did as little as possible to push the pace of change, until, it became safe to do so, and only then.
By 1971, when the PBS documentary about Roy called, “The Greatest Unknown Guitarist in The World,” was televised, the world culturally and technologically had caught up to Roy, enough to make his story worth telling. The documentary took a journey across America, giving Roy a chance to exhibit his distinct artistry, as he performed with Johnny Otis, Merle Haggard, as well as the great jazz guitar virtuoso Mundell Lowe. It also showcased Roy’s startling technique as he sat and played alone at his parent's house, where Roy was reunited with his family and treated like a prodigal son.
This initial burst of interest in Roy led to an extensive solo career, where he played music by Jimi Hendrix, Hank Williams, Errol Gardner, and Elmore James, in equal measure, with the same psychedelic edge, mystifying technique, and relentless creativity. The records were a mixed bag of what was basically his live show, performed with his backing band, recorded quickly and on the cheap. This was typical of jazz and blues, but very different from the rock music of the period, where bands like The Rolling Stones were expected to spend a fortune, living in European chateaus, waiting until they found their muse. In that sense, “Roy Buchanan & The Snake Stretchers” were a tough act to sell to a young audience who expected their guitar heroes to be like Cream-era Clapton or The Jimi Hendrix Experience. They weren't supposed to play Hank Williams “Hey Good Lookin’.”
But the guitar freaks bought the records, regardless, and the reigning rock guitar gods made the necessary pilgrimage to hear Roy play in a local bar in Washington’s more rural area, even before Roy was really known. Jeff Beck went. So did Jerry Garcia. So did Les Paul, the guitar deity of a much older era. He too was a Roy fan who laughed about Roy’s idiosyncratic ability to get from point A to point B on the guitar neck, using the road less traveled by more conventional guitarists.
Roy Buchanan was never much of a singer or songwriter. He wasn't a thin, cute, teenage-looking boy like Ricky Nelson or The Beatles. He was more like Lonnie Mack, another roadhouse guitar legend. Neither man was ever going to appeal to an army of pre-teen girls, which is what the big record labels wanted. Both men were stunningly original guitar stylists, though. Both men fell between the cracks of popular culture and fame, although, they remained legends and major influences on other guitar legends, who kept their names alive. They even toured together with another 50’s blues guitar deity, Albert Collins, as a reminder of America’s deeply rooted, but not so-distant musical past—all three alive and picking, and playing with as much fire as ever.
Everything, however, has a time and place, especially in the constant changing framework of American popular culture.
On August 14, 1988, following a night of heavy drinking and public unruliness, Roy Buchanan hung himself in his jail cell. If I said it was a cruel but fitting end for an itinerant, 1st generation American rock & roll musician, born dirt poor in the Ozarks, it wouldn't be entirely inappropriate. We almost expect our rural American heroes to die the hard way. The same way they lived.
It should be remembered that Roy Buchanan was born within the familial memory of both Jessie James and Abraham Lincoln, when the South still lived with the sting of the Civil War, where bullets and cannonballs from that war could be found in the fields like artifacts of a lost world. One that still existed, but just barely.
Coda: Sometime, probably in 1961 or 62, a 17-yr old hotshot guitar-slinger named Robbie Robertson was playing with rock-a-billy star Dale Hawkins, Roy’s former boss. Robbie was at this earliest stage of his career, meeting Roy on the musical battlefield, guitar in hand, cocky and sure, but also wary, having faced Roy under similar circumstances once before. After playing a torrid solo, where Robertson staked his claim, Roy began to manipulate his guitar like a latter day Merlin, creating the sound of bombs exploding, helicopters landing, screeches, squeals, bell-like chimes—all, unrecognizable as a guitar—at least, as anyone else played it. When Roy began to attack his guitar in a more or less conventional way, even then, nothing was as expected. It seldom is when genius is involved. Later, Roy cryptically told the young Robertson that he was part wolf—“That’s why I can do, what I do." Although skeptical, the younger protege listened carefully. A half century later, Robbie Robertson recounted the story with the same mystified sense of awe that he felt at the dawn of his lengthy career. In the case of Roy Buchanan and other mythic figures of popular culture, the facts alone are seldom ever enough. In such cases, the myth may not be specifically true, but, sometime, it’s as close as we ever to get deciphering the enduring mystery of talent.
Meaning, “Half wolf,” as a description for Roy Buchanan’s legend, seems as good an answer any.
Mark Magula
Roy Buchanan never really fit. He was an old man in rock & roll terms, by the time anyone much knew who he was. This was when the saying went “Never trust anyone over 30”—when Vietnam and the anti-war movement were raging, the civil rights movement was in full swing, and various other rebellions were in their infancy, from Woman’s rights to Gay rights. The world separated into two camps, then, the old and the young, a generation gap that was more a yawning chasm, than a cultural disagreement. Much like today. The difference is that today, we see mostly manufactured outrage, which transcends age. In that sense it is very different than the segregated world of the 194os and 50s when Roy Buchanan was growing up.
Roy Buchanan wasn't a 1960’s rocker. Not really. He wasn't a hippie. In 1971, when the PBS documentary “The World's Greatest Unknown Guitarist” was released, Buchanan was a 32-year-old, six foot one inch, 210 lb. Southern man, with an extended comb-over and goatee. Roy looked more like a Beatnik hold-over from the previous decade, meets country music outlaw, than Eric Clapton or The Rolling Stones. Although both images of Roy—the contemporary of Elvis and Fats Domino, or a fellow traveler of a younger generation of players like Hendrix and Jeff Beck, were both slightly out of focus. Roy fit in either camp, but never completely.
In terms of time and place, Roy Buchanan was a 1st generation, Elvis-era rocker, having begun his major recording career in 1958 with Dale Hawkins. He also recorded with country artist Merle Kilgore, among others, and performed with pre-rock & roll, R&B pioneer, Johnny Otis when the word “Rock & Roll” barely existed, except as a sexual euphemism.
Johnny Otis was the White, son of Greek immigrants who lived his adult life as a Black man. Demonstrating, even then, that multiculturalism and identifying as something other than what’s on your birth certificate, isn't really new. Otis began his career in the 1940s, playing with some of the most influential Black R & B and jazz bands of the time. He was a singer, songwriter, bandleader, and talent scout. The man who discovered Jackie Wilson, Little Willie John, Big Mamma Thornton, Little Esther, Big Jay McNeely, and Etta James, among others. In 1950, Johnnie Otis won R & B artist of the year, when R&B was thought of as “Race Music,” which was another word for segragated “Black Music.” He was accepted as “High Yellow.” Meaning, a Black man with a “Cracker” in the woodpile. In reality, Johnny Otis was a White man whose immigrant family moved into a Black neighborhood when he was a boy, bought a small grocery store, no different than immigrants today. The one big difference, Otis never left the segregated neighborhood. He married a Black woman and lived his life as a Black man. Until the day he died.
Like Johnny Otis, Roy Buchanan wasn’t easy to define, at least, artistically speaking, even if his racial designation was clear—and, like a lot of gifted musicians living in the legally segregated South, he absorbed the scope of American popular music and culture, both Black and White, including jazz, country, rock a billy, R&B, and, especially, the blues, all played with something of a psychedelic edge, even if nobody would've understood what the word “Psychedelic” meant, back in 1961 when Roy recorded “Mule Train Stomp.” Or, a year later when he recorded “The Potato Peeler.” Even then, you could hear all of the essentials of Buchanan’s style. The heavy sustain, the over-driven telecaster tone that was his trademark, the volume swells, the pinched harmonics, and the tonal crunch and distortion of Roy’s guitar were genuinely unique. So much so that recording technology would have to advance another 6 or 7 years to begin to effectively capture what Roy was doing. In other words, if country music ever produced its own version of Jimi Hendrix, it was Roy Buchanan, whose rapid-fire blues-picking, pedal steel bends, wah-wah effects, pinched harmonics, and volume swells were as radical to country music, early rock & roll, and rock a billy, as Hendrix was to the rock music of the late 1960s. The difference being that Roy got there first, years before Jimi Hendrix, during a period when sidemen and session players seldom ever got public credit for their work.
Musicians have long ignored artificial barriers, in an effort share their common language. Most of those barriers tend to be about marketing, more than music. Some barriers, like racial segregation, were moved aside as far back as the 1920s, nearly 100-years-ago, decades before the earliest stages of the civil rights movement. Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden became musical compadres, in spite of the potential negative career ramifications. Another extraordinary interracial duo from the same period was the innovative Black guitarist and singer, Lonnie Johnson. And the equally innovative, Eddie Lang, who was White. Lang was forced to use the pseudonym Blind Willie Dunn to avoid legal issues. It should be remembered that segregation was the law. Disregard it at your own peril. But many musicians did. Red Rodney—Charlie Parker’s young, White, red-headed trumpet player during the 1940’s was passed off as a Black man named “Albino Red” when Parker’s band toured the South, where institutional racism was enforced by local and state governments. It wasn't some ragtag group of toothless Southern crackers that kept racism alive and well in rural America. It was politicians, most of whom were Democrats, working to maintain the feudal system that benefited the large plantations. They were the ones who gained the most from the cheap Black labor. Apartheid in South Africa was substantially driven by labor unions, as well, who understood that allowing Blacks to compete in a free and fair labor market would be catastrophic to Whites who were outnumbered 10 to 1, all in the wrong direction.
Even today, music is segregated, but generally, for marketing reasons. It’s easier to corner a niche market by finding an underutilized audience than it is to throw your musical net to wide and miss a chance at a neglected market. Chess records did this in the late 1940s and 1950s, almost by accident, when Leonard and Phil Chess recorded Muddy Waters and found out just how many Black migrants, leaving the South, were thrilled to hear their down-home music alive and well in a big city like Chicago. And the Chess brothers weren't alone, small independent labels sprang up all over the U.S., as far back as the 1920s, recording jazz, country, blues, bluegrass, and eventually, R&B and Rock & Roll. It was America’s booming economy that drove change, in the form of jobs, jobs, and more jobs, giving poor Blacks and poor Whites their first taste of real economic freedom. With money in their pocket, there was always some entrepreneur, regardless of race, who was eager to meet their demands. Roy Buchanan, the son of poor White sharecroppers, was as much an expression of that cultural and economic revolution as Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden were 30 years earlier.
In 1955 and 56. Martin Luther King’s Alabama bus boycott coincided with the release of Chuck Berry’s “Maybeline” and Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” featuring what was essentially a Black country/R&B artist, and a White R&B/country musician, integrating musical forms. Radio and television gave them a platform from which to express this new integration. A burgeoning post-war economy facilitated the process, which actually began two generations earlier, as the U.S. emerged as the greatest industrial power on earth by the beginning of the 20th century.
It was the politicians that did as little as possible to push the pace of change, until, it became safe to do so, and only then.
By 1971, when the PBS documentary about Roy called, “The Greatest Unknown Guitarist in The World,” was televised, the world culturally and technologically had caught up to Roy, enough to make his story worth telling. The documentary took a journey across America, giving Roy a chance to exhibit his distinct artistry, as he performed with Johnny Otis, Merle Haggard, as well as the great jazz guitar virtuoso Mundell Lowe. It also showcased Roy’s startling technique as he sat and played alone at his parent's house, where Roy was reunited with his family and treated like a prodigal son.
This initial burst of interest in Roy led to an extensive solo career, where he played music by Jimi Hendrix, Hank Williams, Errol Gardner, and Elmore James, in equal measure, with the same psychedelic edge, mystifying technique, and relentless creativity. The records were a mixed bag of what was basically his live show, performed with his backing band, recorded quickly and on the cheap. This was typical of jazz and blues, but very different from the rock music of the period, where bands like The Rolling Stones were expected to spend a fortune, living in European chateaus, waiting until they found their muse. In that sense, “Roy Buchanan & The Snake Stretchers” were a tough act to sell to a young audience who expected their guitar heroes to be like Cream-era Clapton or The Jimi Hendrix Experience. They weren't supposed to play Hank Williams “Hey Good Lookin’.”
But the guitar freaks bought the records, regardless, and the reigning rock guitar gods made the necessary pilgrimage to hear Roy play in a local bar in Washington’s more rural area, even before Roy was really known. Jeff Beck went. So did Jerry Garcia. So did Les Paul, the guitar deity of a much older era. He too was a Roy fan who laughed about Roy’s idiosyncratic ability to get from point A to point B on the guitar neck, using the road less traveled by more conventional guitarists.
Roy Buchanan was never much of a singer or songwriter. He wasn't a thin, cute, teenage-looking boy like Ricky Nelson or The Beatles. He was more like Lonnie Mack, another roadhouse guitar legend. Neither man was ever going to appeal to an army of pre-teen girls, which is what the big record labels wanted. Both men were stunningly original guitar stylists, though. Both men fell between the cracks of popular culture and fame, although, they remained legends and major influences on other guitar legends, who kept their names alive. They even toured together with another 50’s blues guitar deity, Albert Collins, as a reminder of America’s deeply rooted, but not so-distant musical past—all three alive and picking, and playing with as much fire as ever.
Everything, however, has a time and place, especially in the constant changing framework of American popular culture.
On August 14, 1988, following a night of heavy drinking and public unruliness, Roy Buchanan hung himself in his jail cell. If I said it was a cruel but fitting end for an itinerant, 1st generation American rock & roll musician, born dirt poor in the Ozarks, it wouldn't be entirely inappropriate. We almost expect our rural American heroes to die the hard way. The same way they lived.
It should be remembered that Roy Buchanan was born within the familial memory of both Jessie James and Abraham Lincoln, when the South still lived with the sting of the Civil War, where bullets and cannonballs from that war could be found in the fields like artifacts of a lost world. One that still existed, but just barely.
Coda: Sometime, probably in 1961 or 62, a 17-yr old hotshot guitar-slinger named Robbie Robertson was playing with rock-a-billy star Dale Hawkins, Roy’s former boss. Robbie was at this earliest stage of his career, meeting Roy on the musical battlefield, guitar in hand, cocky and sure, but also wary, having faced Roy under similar circumstances once before. After playing a torrid solo, where Robertson staked his claim, Roy began to manipulate his guitar like a latter day Merlin, creating the sound of bombs exploding, helicopters landing, screeches, squeals, bell-like chimes—all, unrecognizable as a guitar—at least, as anyone else played it. When Roy began to attack his guitar in a more or less conventional way, even then, nothing was as expected. It seldom is when genius is involved. Later, Roy cryptically told the young Robertson that he was part wolf—“That’s why I can do, what I do." Although skeptical, the younger protege listened carefully. A half century later, Robbie Robertson recounted the story with the same mystified sense of awe that he felt at the dawn of his lengthy career. In the case of Roy Buchanan and other mythic figures of popular culture, the facts alone are seldom ever enough. In such cases, the myth may not be specifically true, but, sometime, it’s as close as we ever to get deciphering the enduring mystery of talent.
Meaning, “Half wolf,” as a description for Roy Buchanan’s legend, seems as good an answer any.
Mark Magula