Top guitar solo of all time..

The Number One Guitar Solo of All Time.

The most influential blues solo of all time has to be on Hank Williams 1947 hit 45 Move It On Over.

Probably played by Chet Atkins accompanying Hanks band the Drifting Cowboys.

In a sense Atkins unlocked the whole history of blues and jazz guitar in one one chorus solo on a shitkicking country and western weepy.

Thats cool.

As one gets further and further into the history of country and rock and roll music this solo shows up in a million permutations.

Previously blues and white music were separated by an invisible line, the triplet meter and the baudy and risque. Cross fertilisation was there, but never overt to the record buying public.

The solo itself starts out as a clear and intune outline of the first two  bars of a standard  'slow' 12 bar progresssion till Chet starts playing BB King style flourishes and glissandos all of his own.
All understated but  power and sophistication are all there and the careful listener will find the unique “phrasing” in lots of other strange places.

But there it is.

Get this one down and you have got it all.

The clarity and power of this record arrived at the same time as the great leap forward in electric guitar construction and more leisure time for bedroom cowboys who had the yen to replicate this style and add their own thing which resulted in the explosion of music in the 1950s.

Buddy Holly was the next great virtuoso but that is another story and  the maestro jazzers like Jimmy Hall and all the rest of the crew were in on it too.

A little of the good stuff goes a long way.

Whipty doo.