Film airing on PBS highlights Native American links to rock
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. >> As a child, Fred Lincoln “Link” Wray Jr. hid under a bed when the Ku Klux Klan came to his parents’ home in rural North Carolina. Racist groups often targeted the poor family of Shawnee Native American ancestry as the Wrays endured segregation in the American South just like African-Americans.
Wray eventually took all that rage of his early years and crafted a 1958 instrumental hit “Rumble” using a distinct, distorted electric guitar sound that would influence rock ‘n’ roll musicians from Iggy Pop and Neil Young to Pete Townshend of The Who and Slash of Guns N’ Roses. Though the song had no lyrics, it was banned in the 1950s for allegedly encouraging teen violence.
Wray is one of many Native Americans musicians whose stories are featured in a documentary set to air on the PBS series “Independent Lens “showing how Native Americans helped lay the foundations to rock, blues and jazz and shaped generations of
musicians. “RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked the World” will be broadcast online and on most PBS stations Monday.
The film is the brainchild of Apache guitarist Stevie Salas,
who has performed with the likes of Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger. It was during a tour with Stewart that the Oceanside, California-raised Salas began to wonder about other Native American rock musicians who came before him. “I was there with Rod Stewart and thinking, ‘Am I the only Indian to have ever played at (New York’s) Madison Garden?’” Salas told The Associated Press. “So I started to investigate.”
Soon Salas, now 54, stumbled upon Wray, a musician he’d admired but had no
idea he was Native American. Then he found out about the Norman, Oklahoma-born Jesse Ed Davis, a guitarist of Kiowa and Comanche ancestry who performed with John Lennon.
The hobby searching for Native American rock musicians eventually launched an exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, then a film.
“People need to know about Link Wray. People need to know about Jesse Ed Davis,” Salas said.
But rock musicians aren’t the only popular performers “RUMBLE” seeks to highlight. The documentary touches on blues pioneer Charley Patton, an early 20th Century Mississippi Delta guitarist of Choctaw and African-American ancestry. The film shows how some of Patton’s music preserved on rough vinyl recordings is similar to traditional American Indian songs. Those traditions were fused with black music.