![]() Wray’s most famous song thus serves as the title of Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, a documentary exploring the Native American presence in, and influence on, popular music. He’s one of many Native artists – Jimi Hendrix, The Band’s Robbie Robertson, jazz vocal icon Mildred Bailey – whose heritage was largely hidden, even as they shaped musical history. Indeed, Link Wray, the leather-clad rocker prowling the stage with mega-bravado, grew up poor in rural South Carolina in the days when the Ku Klux Klan would ride by his house in the middle of the night, and when the Klan was just as likely to come after you for being Indian as for being black. ![]() “To visualize these guys that are like, the Mount Rushmore of rock stars playing air guitar to a Shawnee Indian, it just blew my mind.” “Jeff Beck told me that he and Jimmy Page used to jump around the bedroom at his mom’s house playing air guitar to Link Wray,” says guitarist Stevie Salas. But this wordless call to arms did get through to the masses, and certain members of the audience to which it spoke would internalize Rumble’s sound and spirit and with them create a new and fantastically unholy genre of larger than life guitar music.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |