{"id":327504,"date":"2025-12-21T03:19:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-21T03:19:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/327504\/"},"modified":"2025-12-21T03:19:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-21T03:19:13","slug":"the-guitarist-eric-clapton-bravely-compared-to-elvis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/327504\/","title":{"rendered":"The guitarist Eric Clapton bravely compared to Elvis"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Eric<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ Showtime Documentary Films)<\/p>\n

Sat 20 December 2025 17:09, UK <\/p>\n

For a lot of musicians today, when looking back through the annals of music history, it can be easy to find heroes in the landscape of the 1960s. Whether it is Bob Dylan, Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton<\/a>, that one decade seemed to be populated with heroes upon heroes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It makes for easy pickings for those looking to gain some inspiration. But the beautiful thing about music is, no matter how far back into the history books you go, each edition of the volume of rock can be found admiring one that came before it. So while we might now look back at Nirvana, The Smiths, Led Zeppelin or The Beatles as sources of influence, they looked back further themselves.<\/p>\n

The giants of 1960s rock usually had their conversion moment when seeing Elvis Presley for the first time. The hip-shaking magnetism of the new age rocker did enough in the US to find itself beamed across the Atlantic and into the homes of the UK, where it would change lives and begin a bountiful butterfly effect.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Beatles may have just been a bunch of scruffy lads from Liverpool interested in the arts, but once they saw Presley shaking his ass playing \u2018Jailhouse Rock\u2019, they knew that they had found their new religion and would spend the rest of their lives chasing after what the \u2018King of Rock and Roll\u2019 could do<\/a>. Presley may have impacted rock fans, but Eric Clapton had his conversion moment when listening to Buddy Guy for the first time.<\/p>\n

Because for every great song Eric Clapton ever made, it all circled back to the blues. Considering how much of his background is in traditional blues scales, \u2018Slowhand\u2019 was probably born in the wrong country and about ten years too late, usually taking inspiration from everyone from Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters, depending on what song he was playing.<\/p>\n

\"Eric<\/a>Eric Clapton performing live in 1978. (Credits: Far Out \/ Chris Hakkens)<\/p>\n

Compared to the other Delta blues players, Guy came all the way up to Chicago to find the sophisticated side of the blues. While Chicago blues is now more known for The Blues Brothers and the fancy suits everyone would wear as they played, Guy was never one to go along with the program when he played.<\/p>\n

Muddy Waters may have had a way of speaking through his instrument, but Guy seemed like the precursor to someone like Jimi Hendrix<\/a>. He may not have had the same showmanship as the hippie genius, but he could still squeeze as much as he could out of his instrument, almost like he was in a fierce battle against it that would surely leave one of them broken by the end of any song.<\/p>\n

Since Guy was coming up concurrently with the beginning of rock and roll, Clapton thought that the blues legend could have gone toe-to-toe with Presley, recalling at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, \u201cHe was for me what Elvis probably was for most other people. My course was set, and he was my pilot. Since those early days, Buddy has become the core reality of what the blues is supposed to sound and look like.\u201d<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s easy to kick back and try your hand at playing the bluesy riffs of BB King, where do you think Clapton got that fire in his belly when he first became a member of The Yardbirds? Hendrix hadn\u2019t even come along yet, so hearing him wail across those early blues hits was hearing the British equivalent of what Guy had been doing, including those fantastic bends that made the guitar sound like it was crying.<\/p>\n

Clapton would later come to appreciate the more subtle takes on the blues from people like Johnson<\/a>, but any blues guitarist who has ever wanted to really attack their instrument can take some cues from Buddy Guy. He wasn\u2019t meant to be sophisticated every time he played, but when you heard him tear into a solo, you knew that you were hearing something that was pulled straight out of his heart.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ Showtime Documentary Films) Sat 20 December 2025 17:09, UK For a lot of musicians…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":307463,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[72531,96,36499,128,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-327504","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-buddy-guy","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-eric-clapton","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327504\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}