As soon as you hear those first three chords, you’ll recognize it immediately. They’re from “Rumble,” the 1958 song that has the distinction of being the only instrumental banned from radio. Censors feared it might encourage juvenile delinquency.
The musician’s name — Link Wray — you might not know. Nor the fact that he was a Native American of the Shawnee tribe. He’s the starting point of Catherine Bainbridge and Alfonso Maiorana’s illuminating if occasionally meandering “Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World.” As the film points out, Wray is also the starting point of rock ’n’ roll, or at least the power chord. Iggy Pop, Slash from Guns N’ Roses, and Steven Van Zandt from the E Street Band — some of the dozens of musicians, critics, and music historians interviewed — each testify that Wray’s music and that song specifically inspired them to play.
That is among the many fascinating discoveries in “Rumble,” a solid if conventional documentary that includes archival film and photos, recordings and TV performances (remember “Shindig!”?) along with the interviews. Though loosely structured, its occasional digressions — such as Robbie Robertson, one of the members of The Band and a Mohawk Indian, reminiscing about touring with Bob Dylan in Britain in 1966 — are almost always rewarding.
But at its best it presents a lucid analysis of how indigenous music not only influenced rock, but jazz and the blues and even hip-hop. It demonstrates by comparison how traditional Native American music weaves its way into other genres in surprising ways. Like those power chords in Wray’s “Rumble” — tweak them a bit and they sound like traditional chanting. And listen closely to the drum solos that the late Randy Castillo — of Isleta Pueblo and Apache origins — played for heavy metal bands such as Ozzy Osbourne and Mötley Crüe and you’ll hear echoes of primal tribal rhythms.
Almost all popular music, it seems, can be traced back to unheralded Native American musical pioneers.
In the 1920s, blues icon Charley Patton merged his Choctaw and African-American origins to create music that influenced generations of artists to follow, including Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf — who in turn inspired the Rolling Stones. In the 1930s, Mildred Bailey introduced to her singing the kind of gliding elision she heard sung in her Coeur d’Alene reservation, a style that would be picked up by Ella Fitzgerald and Bing Crosby. As nonagenarian Tony Bennett says in the film, “From 16 to 20 years old . . . that’s the only thing I listened to, Mildred Bailey. She was a great jazz singer!” And in the 1960s, Cree Indian Buffy Sainte-Marie took part in the folk music movement in Greenwich Village and the Cherokee/African-American/Scottish Jimi Hendrix took rock guitar playing to unsurpassed heights.
Perhaps Hendrix and his disparate, mixed origins epitomize best one of the chief lessons of “Rumble”: America’s strength lies not in exclusion, but in the combination of all its cultures, including that of the original inhabitants.
“Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World” opens Friday at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline.
www.coolidge.org/films/rumble-indians-who-rocked-world