If you can recall the final shot in Martin Scorsese’s 2006 Irish mob movie , then you’ve experienced the genius of Roy Buchanan. Moments after Mark Wahlberg’s Massachusetts State Police Sergeant Dignam guns down Matt Damon’s mob mole Colin Sullivan, the camera pans round to capture a rat scurrying along the balcony rail of Sullivan’s apartment. As the gnawing rodent reaches centre frame, Roy Buchanan’s blues-fuelled instrumental version of the country standard bursts into life.
, released in 1972, remains the finest moment in the career of the man who was damned with the accolade ‘the guitarist’s guitarist’. Lauded by the likes of , (who covered the blues-rock thriller ) and, more recently, , Buchanan never attained any real fame or fortune during his lifetime. These days he’s as infamous for apparently turning down an offer to join and his mysterious death in a Virginia jail cell in 1988 as he is for his music.
Yet Buchanan’s legacy as a guitarist punches way above that of many of the rock stars who held him in such high regard. Born in Ozark, Arkansas in 1939, Leroy ‘Buch’ Buchanan was a master of the who elevated Leo Fender’s humble “working man’s” electric guitar to the level of a Stradivarius violin. It was Buchanan, along with fellow doomed genius Danny Gatton, who seeded the ongoing obsession with Telecaster tone.
He pioneered the use of Fender’s first-born six-string’s volume and tone controls as on-board effects. Despite the mass.