![]() Too anticipatory of everything that came after him. The only music he didn’t try was klezmer. There was always a Dylanesque kind of distancing going on with Link, a self-mythologizing and a willingness to embody the fantasies of America’s past if it meant bigger sales. You know the look even if you don’t know Link Wray: black leather jacket open to a hairless navel, gold cross on a long chain, not a trickle of sweat, muttonchops looking for a fight. Though the one he came back to most often, the one you tend to find online, is Elvis before the Quaaludes and Seconal took hold, Keith Richards born two decades sooner in a Piedmont backwater. In photographs, he inhabited all of these roles. A dust bowl drifter or highwayman bard, perhaps a robed desert mystic or soulful chainsaw killer. Even his name-the hard-bitten, monosyllabic Link Wray-has the ring of invention. The basic outline of his life reads like a miscellany of twentieth-century American folklore: a Shawnee Indian from North Carolina river country who learned the blues from a black man named Hambone (who happened to be a traveling circus performer) and who invented the power chord before falling into obscurity, only to rise, Lazarus-like, from the dust of rural Maryland to cut an Americana classic in a converted chicken shack, true stardom eluding him, until, slipping again into heroic defeat, he decamped to Europe, where he drew his last breath under the watchful, imperious eyes of a younger wife. Link Wray-power-chord progenitor-made his most transcendant music in a chicken shack
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