All-American Brit Guitar Hero Heads to Santa Barbara’s SOhO

Electric guitar master Albert Lee may be thoroughly British in his lineage, and via such associations as an Eric Clapton partnership and mutual admiration society. But he’s got a strong strain of American roots in his system, musically, as touching down in Nashville, Los Angeles, and beyond.

From at least one stylistic angle, Lee has lived up to the refrain in one of his classic tunes, “Country Boy”: “I’m just a country boy at heart.” On the recording of that classic, from his 1979 debut album Hiding, Lee spins off into some ear-bendingly fine and spidery guitar-solo work on the extended ending.

Lee is a master of the standard country tool that is the Fender Telecaster: He’s been dubbed “Mr. Telecaster,” although his ax-of-choice is now swapped for a custom Ernie Ball model. Mixing fingerstyle and a speedy pick, Lee has demonstrated his status as a silky, twangy virtuoso, first heard widely in Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band — including memorable shows at the Arlington Theatre — and in a host of sideman and solo guitarist-singer contexts.

Lee will appear in the latter, spotlighted persona at SOhO next Tuesday, June 20, in one of his rare performances in Santa Barbara, where he briefly lived.

His local connection came via his ’70s work with his fellow Englishman in Santa Barbara Joe Cocker, whose “girl Friday,” Karen, was Lee’s girlfriend-turned-wife. “She was a real estate agent in Santa Barbara,” Lee told me in an interview. “She found a place for Joe. We hooked up and we’ve been together ever since 1974. A friend of hers and later of mine, Richard Richardson, had a music shop on State Street, Fancy Music. Of course, [guitar pickup guru] Seymour Duncan is a really good friend of mine. He lives and works there, and his factory is there. So I have had connections with Santa Barbara for a long time.”

Although he came up in the ’60s London scene in sync with blues-based rock heroes Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Clapton, Lee points out that “throughout the ’60s, they really got into the blues players, and I was buying George Jones and Buck Owens records,” he laughs. “But we all came from that ’50s rock ’n’ roll background, with Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, and Buddy Holly, especially for me.” Lee released the album Gypsy Man: A Tribute to Buddy Holly in 2019.

He looks back at his seminal time with Emmylou Harris as “a breath of fresh air, really. We were playing new stuff. It was country-rock, in a way, but also, we were looking back toward artists like the Louvin Brothers and Buck Owens, who were getting to be forgotten in Nashville. We were picking the best of the music that we loved at that time. It just opened up country music to a whole new, younger audience, especially on the West Coast.”

Now 79, Lee is heading back out on tour, with copious personal history, songs, and licks to draw on. He reasons that “other artists who made a fortune with various bands over the years will do a tour every year or every other year, and they’ll have to start practicing. That’s been no problem for me,” he laughs, “because I never stopped playing.”

Albert Lee performs at SOhO (1221 State St.) on Tuesday, June 20, at 7 p.m. See sohosb.com.