Mick Hartley

I was going to offer some kind of defence of Alan Johnson’s ‘Hideously White‘ list of guitarists, but I see it’s all been settled amicably. Still, it got me thinking.

I’m old enough to remember that whole ‘Can Blue Men Sing the Whites’ business, when blacks (American blacks) were supposed to have a special connection to The Blues, presumably from some race memory of picking all that cotton. Looking back you can see that it’s more like, only blacks had (for a while) the moral authority to play the blues. I still have a bit of that: I never rated Clapton all that highly, and cling to the belief that there were loads of black guitarists who could have blown any of those white boys away. Buddy Guy, Albert Collins, Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson, Albert King…. The best live guitar I ever saw was BB King back in the Seventies. No fancy fret work – just sheer almost unbearable emotion.

So….rock music (a white music) took up the electric guitar from the blues giants: Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and the rest, via Clapton and Keith Richards (and Hendrix of course), and it became a defining feature of the music, reaching some kind of ghastly apotheosis in heavy metal’s screaming volume-turned-to-11 solos. But black music went off in a different direction. Soul, funk, rap. Loads of guitars, but no guitar heroes. They were just part of the band, or, more likely, session musicians, part of the rhythm section. With, say, James Brown, the horns featured more than the guitars. I can name Maceo Parker on sax, but can’t think of the name of any guitarists in his bands. Even the bass player ( Bootsy for instance, the funkiest man on the planet) or the drummer, featured more than the guitarists.

So really, it seems to me, if you wanted to come up with a list of electric guitar moments as a way of sticking two fingers up to some clerical buffoon, then you might well, if you’re looking at recent music, come up with just such a ‘hideously white’ list as Alan’s. But for me, I’d go back to the blues masters. That was as good as the electric guitar ever got.