Link Wray

Link Wray (born May 2, 1929, Dunn, North Carolina, U.S.—died November 5, 2005, Copenhagen, Denmark) was an American guitarist and songwriter who is often credited with introducing the power chord (a simplified chord, commonly played on the electric guitar, based on the root and fifth notes of the major scale), which greatly influenced the sound of rock and roll and laid the groundwork for heavy metal and punk. Wray was hailed as a pioneering guitarist by his contemporaries, and he is credited as being among the first electric guitarists to experiment with distortion and fuzz-tone effects, which became hallmarks of rock and roll guitar playing.

Early life

Wray spent his early life in rural North Carolina. He was the middle son of Lilian Mae (née Coats) Wray, who was of Shawnee descent, and Fred Lincoln Wray, Sr., who claimed some Cherokee heritage. His family was poor, and they moved regularly, scraping together meagre earnings from farmwork and itinerant street preaching. Wray struggled with measles as a child, and his eyesight was compromised as a result (he often wore dark sunglasses as a protective measure). He later recalled that, though he and his brothers attempted to pass as white, they lived in fear of the Ku Klux Klan. The Wray family eventually moved from North Carolina and settled in Virginia.

Wray learned to play guitar at an early age, taking his first lessons from a traveling circus guitarist at age eight. In the late 1940s he began performing Western swing music with his brothers. He contracted tuberculosis while serving as a U.S. Army medic in the Korean War (1950–53) and had one of his lungs removed because of the disease. His condition made singing difficult, so he focused on performing instrumental music.

Career

After returning from war, he reunited with his brothers and their cousin Shorty Horton and formed a series of musical groups. While living in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1955, they recorded country songs as the Palomino Ranch Hands. As rock and roll began to surge in popularity, they changed their name to the Wraymen (sometimes billed as the Raymen). The band appeared on the popular Washington, D.C.-based dance television program The Milt Grant Show throughout the mid- to late 1950s. It was during this time that Wray honed his raw electric guitar sound by playing power chords through an amplifier he had modified by puncturing holes in its speakers, creating a distorted and menacing tone.

In 1958 Wray and his group recorded an instrumental song for the small Washington, D.C., record label Cadence. Archie Beyer, the label’s owner, declined to release it initially, but his teenage daughter, Jackie, loved the song. She said it reminded her of the rumbles, or street gang fights, in the stage musical West Side Story (1957). Jackie suggested the title “Rumble,” and Cadence released the song as a single in 1958. “Rumble” became an instant hit despite being temporarily banned by radio stations in New York City, Boston, and Detroit for fear that its wild sound would incite violence. The song reached number 16 on the U.S. pop charts in 1958. Wray and His Wraymen leveraged the popularity of “Rumble” to sign with Epic Records. Epic released the single “Raw-Hide” (1959), which reached number 23 on the pop charts. The following year, Wray and his band left Epic, and in 1961 they released the instrumental song “Jack the Ripper,” initially on their own Rumble record label and later on the Philadelphia-based Swan Records label. While the track was a hit, it proved to be Wray’s last, as he struggled to maintain relevance. He continued to play music at clubs and bars on the East Coast until the mid-1960s, when he announced his retirement from performing.

Wray then settled into a reclusive existence in rural Maryland, where he continued to record songs. In 1971 he released the self-titled album Link Wray, which featured country-tinged rock with gospel-style vocals, much in the style of the Rolling Stones’ music of that time. The album received critical acclaim, but it was not commercially successful. He moved to San Francisco in the mid-1970s and released a handful of other albums throughout the remainder of the decade to diminishing acclaim and sales. During this time, however, Wray was frequently recognized by fellow musicians, such as Pete Townshend of the Who and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, as a groundbreaking, influential guitarist.

Wray married Olive Julie Povlsen in 1979, and the couple later moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, where Wray remained for the rest of his life. His rollicking instrumental “The Swag” appeared on the soundtrack of John Waters’s dark comedy film Pink Flamingos (1972), and “Rumble” can be heard in scenes from Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction (1994) and the movie Independence Day (1996). In the mid-1990s, Wray briefly returned to performing amid a surge in appreciation of his work. The documentary film Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World (2017) highlighted the impact of Wray and other Indigenous musical artists on the development of rock and roll. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023.

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