‘Rock Island Line’: The song that first turned David Gilmour onto rock ‘n’ roll
The moment he became a core member of Pink Floyd following original songwriter Syd Barrett’s troubled departure from the band in 1968, lead guitarist David Gilmour lent an unmistakable playing character to their evolution away from anglo-eccentric psychedelia toward the vast expanses of space rock.
Lifting their celestial ambitions to soaring heights, Gilmour’s expressive and masterful command of phrasing and vibrato conjure solos that are both dramatic yet always inhabit the band’s sonic hover of cerebral intrigue.
Yet, heady progressive concepts were lightyears away growing up in 1950s south Cambridgeshire. Like many future stars of his generation, the rock ‘n roll beamed from America altered Gilmour’s course in life; Bill Haley & His Comets’ ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel‘ inspired the young Gilmour to pick up the guitar.
Teaching himself to play using folk singer Pete Seeger’s guitar tutorial record and book set, Gilmour joined a local blues group as Pink Floyd was first materialising in London. One blues icon from America’s musical foundations, Gilmour is credited as providing the first song he studiously mastered.
“Lead Belly. I loved him when I was very young, loved his 12-string guitar playing,” he explained. “I always enjoyed the 12-string. His story, he was in prison, he got released from prison on a murder charge because he was such a great singer,” Gilmour told BBC Radio 2 in 2006. “But for me, ‘Rock Island Line’ was one of the first things I’ve learned. Also is one of the things that you can actually learn one chord, get your fingers on that guitar in one position and not move from there. You can do the whole song and sing this old song to yourself. So it’s a great thing, part of my childhood”.
Like many of the blues folk repertoires of the era, the origins of ‘Rock Island Line’ can be traced back to 1920s’ Chicago, possibly to the city’s historic Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. Lead Belly, real name Huddie Ledbetter, was witness to the traditional piece’s first-ever recording, accompanying cultural preservationist and musicologist John A Lomax to Arkansas’ Tucker prison farm. This would continue, til Ledbetter knew the song so well he rearranged it and began cutting phonographs in the ’40s.
Ledbetter could bellow the blues with a hard-nosed authority, in and out of prison all his life and likely sharing an affinity with the singing Tucker inmates he took notes from. Swerving several jail terms in Louisiana between 1915 and 1939, Gilmour wasn’t wrong when he claimed Ledbetter was granted freedom from his musical gifts. Sent down for murder in 1918, Texan governor Pat Morris Neff granted Ledbetter clemency from a 30-year sentence after receiving a song pleading for mercy, walking free in 1925.
It’s a peculiar formative artist that shaped Gilmour’s formative guitar lessons, but Ledbetter’s raw folk grit manages to stir all kinds of artists, Bob Dylan claimed his rough blues “changed my life,” and brought to wider fame through Nirvana’s cover of Ledbetter’s interpretation of the haunting Appalachian ‘In the Pines’. The last word on bruising blues, you can bet Lead Belly is due for another resurgence.
