Willie Simpson

Tag: guitar rock

  • Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Up Ahead My Head, and Documentary

    Since my last post on the insanely great Sister Rosetta Tharpe, I’ve come to learn a great deal about her thanks to a wonderful hour long documentary on her produced by the BBC. The documentary tracks her sensational life and career in complete loving detail. The main thing you take away from the film is…

  • Prince's Timeless Performance of While My Guitar Gently Weeps

    Prince is one of my heroes, so you might be wondering why the Prince page on my website is fairly barren.  Well, the truth is, I’d probably have every Prince music video and performance I could get my hands on if I could, but Prince and his legal team make it damn near impossible to…

  • Eric Clapton, Have You Ever Loved a Woman

    The incredible and sweaty bluesman you see in the beginning is Freddie King.  Don’t be confused, this is a Clapton video, but its culled from a never released Martin Scorsese PBS documentary on Clapton’s heroes called, “Nothing But the Blues.”  Well, it was shown, but never released on DVD, one of the mysteries of modern…

  • Chet Atkins, Mr. Sandman, Mrs. Robinson

    So one day, on a crummy radio in the 1940s, Chet Atkins was listening to Merle Travis play guitar.  He thought for sure that what Merle was doing was picking with his thumb and two fingers, because if he was just using his thumb and index finger, it would have been impossible.  It turned out…

  • Les Paul and Mary Ford, The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise

    I thought it appropriate to segue from one guitar god to another, this time to Les Paul.  For those who don’t know, old Les was one of the pioneers of electric guitar rock, inventing his own solid body guitar in 1940, arguably the first ever.  He tried selling the design to Gibson, but they rejected…

  • Jimi Hendrix, Hear My Train A Comin'

    You’d suspect on a site like mine, there would be no shortage of Jimi Hendrix material to peruse through, but alas, this is the first one I’ve got.  It’s not for lack of love for the man, as in fact, I possess great quantities of the emotion for the guy.  I sit firmly in the…

  • Carl Perkins and Friends, Rockabilly School

    It’s a star studded part 97 on my youtube countdown, and the stakes are getting higher, and the stars are getting hotter as we close in on 100!  This time I have the undeniably fantastic performance of Carl Perkins and his super friends from the 1985 concert Blue Suede Shoes: A Rockabilly Session.  Get this. …

  • Cream, Tales of Brave Ulysses

    Part 64 of my youtube countdown introduces Cream, or “the late great Cream” as John Lennon once said in 1968.  That’s right, Cream was a streaking comet of psychedelic blues perfection, blasting through the pop music charts from 1966 to 1968 selling 35 million albums in just two years!  Cream was considered the world’s first…

  • Jeff Beck and Tal Wilkenfeld, Freeway Jam + Blue Wind

    In part 41 of my youtube countdown, we take a look at some prodigies. One is an old prodigy by the name of Jeff Beck, the guitar virtuoso of the guitar virtuoso factory known as the Yardbirds (Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page.) The other is the opposite of old, a sexy 24 year old bass whiz…

  • Chuck Berry, Johnny B. Goode, and Maybellene

    Part 21 of my youtube countdown continues with a special Two for Tuesday!  A few weeks ago we saw Chuck Berry rip up “Roll Over Beethoven” on a French TV show in 1958.  It was one of the most iconic moments of all time, and guess what, we’re going back to that very same show…