Today as I was listening to A Hard Road by John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers for the first time, the song that most caught my attention was their cover of Freddie King’s “The Stumble”. Since I had recently added The Very Best of Freddie King to my iTunes collection, I knew I probably had the original:
Sure enough I had the version by Freddie as well as another by Jeff Beck I immediately queued them to play next: Freddie followed by Beck. In the meantime, I pulled up the Wikipedia article to find out more about this rollicking electric guitar solo + what is the wah wah effect. There’s not much there but the article does have a list of artists that have covered it. My eyes immediately found Gary Moore who was more or less a disciple of Peter Green, Mayall’s guitar player on his version of “The Stumble”. Having just downloaded a chunk of Moore’s work the night before, I anxiously scanned the files for his version of “The Stumble”. I dropped it into iTunes just as Beck’s version faded out.
As Moore’s version blasted my ears, I went to YouTube for further insight. I wasn’t able to find the Freddie King version but I did find Green, Beck and Moore as well as a couple of interesting versions.
Continue reading “The Stumble”