Slide Guitar Rock
tagStarted 1968Peak 1970-1976Last big hit still active
Located in 1 route
Blues rock built around the bottleneck or steel slide: glassy, vocal-like glides in open D and open E tunings, sustained crying notes, and microtonal bends fretted playing can't reach. Tone runs warm and singing over loose shuffles and slow-burn changes, the slide carrying melody like a second voice atop electric, often dual-guitar arrangements.
History
Electric slide migrated from the Delta into rock when Duane Allman, inspired by Jesse Ed Davis on Taj Mahal's 1968 'Statesboro Blues,' took up a Coricidin bottle. The Allman Brothers' 1971 At Fillmore East set the template; Ry Cooder, Lowell George and Bonnie Raitt expanded the vocabulary through the 1970s. Sonny Landreth and Derek Trucks carried the lineage onward into later decades.
Defining artists
Essential listening
- Statesboro Blues (Live at Fillmore East) — The Allman Brothers BandSpotifyYouTube
- Something to Talk About — Bonnie RaittSpotifyYouTube
- Dixie Chicken — Little FeatSpotifyYouTube
- Congo Square — Sonny LandrethSpotifyYouTube
- Midnight in Harlem — Tedeschi Trucks BandSpotifyYouTube
- Vigilante Man — Ry CooderSpotifyYouTube
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_guitar
- https://americana-uk.com/classic-americana-albums-ry-cooder-into-the-purple-valley-warner-1972
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luck_of_the_Draw_(album)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Landreth