Scotty Moore Invented The Role of Rock’N’Roll Guitarist
“When I heard Heartbreak Hotel, I knew what I wanted to do in life. It was as clear as day,” Keith Richards once said. “All I wanted to do in the world was play and sound like that. Everyone else wanted to be Elvis, I wanted to be Scotty.”
The Scotty in question was Scotty Moore, Elvis Presley’s guitarist.
Despite occasional solo forays and the veneration of artists such as Richards, Bruce Springsteen, and Jeff Beck, Moore’s name was not as widely recognized as it should have been.
Moore moved from Gadsden, Tennessee, to Memphis in the early 1950s with bassist Bill Black, then playing in Doug Poindexter’s Starlite Wranglers.
The band recorded an album at Sun Studios in 1954, where Moore befriended Sun’s owner, Sam Phillips, and stopped by the studio for coffee after leaving his job at a dry cleaning plant.
Through this friendship, Moore met Presley, and he and Black were invited to record with the young singer.
Legend has it that the session had been slow until Presley started “acting like a fool” during a break, singing a version of Arthur Crudup’s blues song “That’s Alright.” Black and Moore joined in, and Phillips recorded.
There the chaos began.
When you hear Moore play with Presley, on tracks like Heartbreak Hotel, Hound Dog, Blue Suede Shoes, Mystery Train, Jailhouse Rock and more, you notice the ingenuity of his style.
In the Starlite Wranglers, a hillbilly-inspired band with a fiddle and steel guitar, his playing owes much to his adoration of country star Chet Atkins.
Like Atkins, and Merle Travis before him, Moore played fingerstyle on his Gibson, using a pick and relying primarily on his thumb and first two fingers.
But when he began recording with Presley, his style began to change; he described much of his work as “hole-filling,” a dash of country, a pinch of blues, and all the licks he knew would satisfy Phillips.
Even when rock and roll was flourishing, the lead instrumentalists were often also the singers: Little Richard, for example, or Jerry Lee Lewis or Chuck Berry.
In Presley’s configuration, the singer played rhythm guitar and Moore took the lead, as part of the backing band Blue Moon Boys (along with Black and drummer DJ Fontana).
It’s hard to fully explain the impact of this, except to say that the role of the lead guitarist and their relationship with the singer in many major rock bands simply wouldn’t have been the same without Moore.
Read any interview with Moore and you’ll be struck by the man’s unpretentious air; he made no claims to grandeur or invention when talking about those early days with Presley, rather seeming to suggest that the distinctive sound they created was born of spontaneous joy.
Source: theguardian.com
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Scotty Moore. Audio CD
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