Buchanan, Roy - Live: Amazing Grace (CD) |

Roy Buchanan was my good friend for twenty years. I still remember the first time I heard him play. It was in the late 1960s at the SilverDollar in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. As I walked into the club, infectiously sensuous, sinewy guitar lines enveloped me like a python. No one else played guitar that way. Mostly, they played safe. Roy played tough. His music was raw emotion, like lava spewing from an erupting volcano. But when he played sweet, your eyes watered.As a boy, Roy was first influenced by the sanctifyin' gospel music that poured out of the windows of the Pentecostal church near his home. In his early years, he was also exposed to the crackling electrified country music later dubbed "the Bakersfield sound" pioneered especially by country legends Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. Roy left home in his mid-teens and journeyed to Los Angeles where he absorbed deep blues and the sparkling jump sound of the west coastcool rhythm and blues music being played in black clubs. Johnny Otis' two guitar sensations, Jimmy Nolen and Pete "Guitar" Lewis, had a big impact on Roy's creation of his own sound. Scotty Moore, Elvis Presley's guitarist, also served as a major inspiration.By the mid-1950s, though still a teenager, musical influences had flowed into Roy like rivers emptying into a lake. For thirty years Roy played the best bar blues in the country. Guitar players from all over the area, then from all over the country, and eventually from all over the world, migrated to the clubs to hear him coax astounding rhythms and unimaginably brilliant leads from his battered, but ever faithful, Telecaster. This CD allows you to go back in time into those clubs and hear Roy as he was meant to be heard. It is a great gift to us all.- Alan ScheflinSan Francisco, California, May 2009

• Format Detail: CD Jewel Case
• Format: CD
• Label: Powerhouse Records
• Catalog Number: CD-POW-128