The Times: Toby Lee, the 16-year-old being called a guitar legend
The teenager from Oxfordshire is a schoolboy with the blues
Toby Lee: “I’m going to be honest. I’m quite a nerd”
TERRY LEE
It’s not easy being a teenager in 2021. It could even give you the blues. What it rarely does, however, is make you want to play the blues, the musical style that emerged from black communities in the American south at the turn of the 20th century and went on to form the foundation of 1960s and 1970s rock. Toby Lee, a 16-year-old from Oxfordshire who has been celebrated by such greats as Buddy Guy and Joe Bonamassa as the best blues guitarist of his generation, is a rare exception.
“I’m going to be honest: I’m quite a nerd,” Toby says, actually looking quite stylish in a flat cap and patterned shirt as he speaks from his parents’ living room in Oxfordshire, a custom-built Gibson335 electric guitar leaning on the wall behind him. “If I’m not playing guitar, I’m taking a guitar or a pedal apart to figure out how it works. I have a mechanical mind and I’m into things my friends aren’t into, but I quite like that. It’s something different to talk about.”
Toby has toured across America and Scandinavia, playing everywhere from BB King’s Blues Club in Memphis (aged ten) to the Blues Heaven festival in Denmark (at the ripe age of 13). He landed the part of the shy guitar prodigy Zack Mooneyham in the West End production of School of Rock when he was 12 and appeared on Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show a year later. His videos have had more than 400 million views.
He is a member of the Gibson Alliance, a group of about 25 top players — fellow members include Slash of Guns N’ Roses and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top — and the guitar company even built him a Gibson 335 electric guitar according to his specifications, right down to the age of the wood.
Like all the blues greats, however, Toby has a hard road to travel. While figures such as Bessie Smith and Skip James dealt with jealous lovers and societal scorn, Toby has been facing the challenges of studying for GCSEs and trying to get his schoolfriends interested in the music of the 1930s blues pioneer Robert Johnson. “I give them one of my earphones and say, ‘Listen to this,’ ” he says of his mission to spread the word of the blues through rural Oxfordshire. “And they reply, ‘Get this out of my ear.’ ”
Aquarius by Toby Lee is out on June 11. Take the Wheel is out now
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