“Roy Buchanan”

“Roy Buchanan”

This months posts are about the artist and not a specific song. Our first blues artist is for “the greatest unknown guitar player in history” Roy Buchanan. He is also known as the man who told The Rolling Stones no thank you when they asked him to be their guitarist after Mick Taylor quit the band. After getting turned on to Roy back in 1979 we never missed a live show that he performed in the San Francisco Bay Area. As like most blues guitarists a studio recording did nothing to show how much talent that they really have.

This paragraph excerpt from Roy’s dedicated web site by Don Mare Pickups says it best. “In Buchanan’s hands the Tele came alive. He could play blues so sweet, or accent country music with sounds like a steel guitar. He learned to make the guitar cry by striking a note, bending it, and making the sound swell by manipulating the volume knob with the pinky on his right hand. Using the pinky on the volume control and his ring finger on the tone control gave him a wah-wah sound. He did it his way, the hard way.” So we would like to share a couple of our favorite Buchanan tunes.

Off of his first solo record back in 1972 we have “Pete’s Blues”.

His classic song “The Messiah Will Come Again”

The very first song we ever heard from Roy was “Green Onions”.

And finally from 1985 the first album that Roy was given complete control over and it’s title song, “When a Guitar Plays the Blues”. This is a live version that we found and thought you might enjoy.