![]() ![]() ![]() “All I listened to as a kid was the Don Kelley Band,” he says in his thick drawl over a plate of barbecue before he hits the stage. McQueary’s father turned him on to Kelley, and by the time he was seventeen, he was subbing in on Sunday nights before becoming a full-time player in 2020. Don Kelley himself retired in the early months of COVID, leaving McQueary, upright bassist Joe Fick, and drummer Billy Van Vleet to continue in his absence. Robert’s is the last vestige of true honky-tonk music on neon-soaked Lower Broadway, and onstage is Luke McQueary, who is absolutely shredding his solo on Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” The twenty-two-year-old guitarist and Kentucky native is a member of Kelley’s Heroes, a spin-off of the legendary Don Kelley Band, which ruled the Robert’s stage for more than twenty years and served as a vital incubator for rising musicians. On a dreary January evening in Nashville, the line to get into Robert’s Western World stretches more than twenty people deep. ![]() But rhythm is always the driver of rock and roll, and it seems like a lost art today.” -MH ![]() “I play my part within a framework of another. The two have developed an almost innate chemistry, and Vaden is just as comfortable playing rhythm or lead, putting out three albums of his own that show off his versatility. “I was instantly hooked.” He began playing professionally at eighteen, when he realized he was better at playing guitar than “playing a high school student,” and after a stint with Southern legends Drivin N Cryin, he joined Isbell’s band, the 400 Unit, in 2013. “It was so noisy, angry, and loud,” he recalls. Vaden fell in love with rock guitar after his parents took him to see a 1996 Farm Aid show in Columbia, South Carolina, headlined by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. But it’s tough to come up with a modern-era double guitar attack as potent as Sadler Vaden and Jason Isbell. Keith Richards and Brian Jones (or Mick Taylor, or current partner Ronnie Wood). History is filled with great guitar duos: Duane Allman and Dickey Betts. Sadler Vaden on stage with Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit at Bourbon and Beyond Music Festival in Lexington, Kentucky. ![]()
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