81-Year-Old Bob Wood Shreds “Crossroads” on Nashville Radio Show
Bob Wood enjoyed some fame on the interwebs recently when a video of the 81-year-old guitarist shredding at a Nashville music store went viral. In the video, Wood is shown casually tearing up the fretboard as he tackles the standard “Bésame Mucho” on his Epiphone Sheraton archtop.
The guitarslinger has kept busy ever since, as you can see in the newly filmed video shown below, in which Wood lays down some slick licks on the Robert Johnson song “Crossroads,” accompanied by Canadian country music singer and guitarist Lindsay Ell.
The performance took place last week on The Bobby Bones Show, a nationally syndicated weekday radio program out of WSIX-FM in Nashville. Bones got the idea to team up the guitar veteran and the up-and-coming singer-songwriter due to their shared shred skills.
“A couple weeks ago, 81-year-old Bob Wood went viral for casually playing guitar like a champ,” notes a post on the show’s web site. “So Bobby thought who better to bring in to play with Bob than the younger, female version of him—Lindsay Ell.”
Wood and Ell trade licks on their version of the blues classic, with Wood playing his Sheraton and turning in plenty of the fast licks that wowed so many viewers who saw his earlier video. If this is your first exposure to Ell, you’ll get a good chance to hear her guitar and vocal work as well.
You can learn more about how Wood’s video went viral in this interview with the guitarist. From the look of things, his 15 minutes of Internet fame are far from over. Enjoy!
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Christopher Scapelliti is editor-in-chief of Guitar Player magazine, the world’s longest-running guitar magazine, founded in 1967. In his extensive career, he has authored in-depth interviews with such guitarists as Pete Townshend, Slash, Billy Corgan, Jack White, Elvis Costello and Todd Rundgren, and audio professionals including Beatles engineers Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott. He is the co-author of Guitar Aficionado: The Collections: The Most Famous, Rare, and Valuable Guitars in the World, a founding editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine, and a former editor with Guitar World, Guitar for the Practicing Musician and Maximum Guitar. Apart from guitars, he maintains a collection of more than 30 vintage analog synthesizers.
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