This week, the Buddy Emmer Blues Band welcomes the youngest player ever to be featured at Harrah’s Tuesday Night Blues. The guitarist from Roseville is so young that he’s Green – Ryder Green.
Straight-ahead blues is the format for the weekly show, which perfectly suits the 19 year old. The first musician in his family, Green started playing guitar at a 6 and began to develop his blues chops when he was 11 at a weekly jam at the Valencia Club in Penryn.
“The blues guys were very welcoming but also very hard on me to the degree that it was necessary,” Green told Tahoe Onstage. “That’s where I began to get a better grasp on not only playing but performing.”
Although he’s underage, Green has performed at the Folsom Powerhouse Pub, San Francisco’s Biscuits and Blues and Little Lou’s BBQ in Campbell, where the Ryder Green Band won the competition to represent the Golden Gate Blues Society at the 2017 International Blues Challenge in Memphis. One judge in the Campbell competition was Kid Andersen, who played at Harrah’s last month and is the esteemed producer from Greaseland Studios.
The band was knocked out of the competition after the quarterfinals, but to play on the famed Beale Street was remarkable for an 18 year old. Ryder played two nights in the Blues City Café, performed at a youth showcase at the Purple Haze and joined a jam at Club 152 along other young rising blues players Chase Walker and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram. He also witnessed “the best show I’ve seen” at the New Daisy with Walter Trout and Eric Gales.
Other IBC representatives who have played with the Buddy Emmer Blues Band’s Tuesday Night Blues show are Jason King and Rick Hammond, both from the Reno Blues Society.
Green said he was put in touch with Emmer by Andy Santana, who recently played at the Tahoe show.
Green said his influences are Gales, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Chris Cain, Matt Schofield and Freddie King. He said he will play a couple of Freddie King songs on Tuesday. The show is from 8 p.m. until midnight.
The format includes three sets: one by Emmer’s band, the second with the band, backing the featured artist who plays his original music, and the third being an improvisational jam of blues standards.
“Tahoe has really got it going on up there,” Green said. “I would love to get in the rotation.”
-Tim Parsons
Related story: Tinsley Ellis coming to Sacramento after release of new album.
One Response
As a former officer of the Sacramento Blues Society and a co-founder of the Royal Hawaiian Blues Air Force (blues society in Kona), I am happy to attest to the skill in the blues of this yound man. Clean and gritty..as it should be