Redd Volkaert

electric blues · blues · roots

Redd Volkaert is a Canadian-born country and blues guitarist, born March 6, 1958 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and regarded as one of the leading Telecaster players in honky-tonk and Western swing. He began working Canadian clubs at sixteen, moved to Los Angeles in 1986 and then to Nashville in 1990, where he played the Broadway bar circuit and toured with acts including Johnny Paycheck and George Jones. In 1997 he joined Merle Haggard's band the Strangers, taking the lead guitar chair once held by Roy Nichols; Haggard remarked that he sometimes heard Nichols playing when he closed his eyes, a comparison that established Volkaert's reputation in the honky-tonk world. He settled in Austin, Texas around 2000 and held a Saturday afternoon residency at the Continental Club for roughly two decades, a standing gig that made him a fixture of the city's roots scene and a regular sideman on Austin sessions. In 2009 he won a Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance as one of the guitarists on Cluster Pluck, a track from Brad Paisley's instrumental album Play that also featured James Burton, Vince Gill, Albert Lee, John Jorgenson, Brent Mason and Steve Wariner. His own albums include Telewacker (1998), No Stranger to a Tele (2001) and Reddhead (2008), and he has recorded with George Jones, Dolly Parton, Dwight Yoakam, Buck Owens, Alison Krauss, Rhonda Vincent, Ray Price and the Statler Brothers. He plays vintage Fender instruments, among them a 1953 Telecaster, a 1951 Nocaster and a 1958 Esquire, and his style combines chicken-picking, chord-melody and jazz-inflected phrasing at speed. He relocated to Virginia in 2020 during the pandemic shutdowns and now lives in Galax, holding a regular residency at the Floyd Country Store while continuing to tour and teach.

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