When a die-hard fan spray-painted “Clapton is God” on a London wall in the middle of the British blues boom, it was evident that a modernized interpretation of the blues had successfully captured the imagination of contemporary audiences.

By Clapton's own admission, playing the blues, let alone reshaping it for a new era, required not superhuman talent but plain-old hard work. As he continued to push the genre forward in Cream — after a glimpse of Buddy Guy's live show convinced to form his own power trio —– other artists helped take it to new places in the following decades. Clapton believes Robert Cray did that better than anyone.

“It’s the most difficult thing to write, a modern blues,” Clapton told Rolling Stone in 2017 mused. “The only person I know who can do it well is Robert Cray. It comes straight out of him. I saw him recently this year, and he’s still doing it. He’s on fire, the real thing.

“I wish I could be like that,” he added. “Really, I’m a musician. I try to be a singer and songwriter, and it’s interesting to me. But I would never think of myself as that.”

Clapton, of course, speaks with humility — his success includes 17 Grammy awards. But he felt Cray had the whole package, with his guitar playing and voice working together in perfect harmony.

Despite getting a metaphorical pat on the back from a blues legend, Cray wasn't a purist. Part of his brilliance came from the fact that he peppered his blues with elements of gospel and soul, the musical styles of his upbringing. Blues was, in fact, not his primary source of inspiration.

“My dad would play gospel music on Sundays,” he tells Guitar Player. “It was Swan Silvertones, Sensational Nightingales, the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi — and Alabama — and all kinds of stuff like that. During the week, it would be Ray Charles, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, Sarah Vaughan...

“It’s funny, because as a kid I heard all that music, and then, as kids do, of course, you listen to your own music. When I got into my late teens and picked up the blues bug, I started taking my parents’ records from the house, and then embellished that collection by buying my own records. So getting the gospel music or getting Curtis Mayfield or the Impressions was all just part of what I grew up on.”

He also played an accidental role in inspiring the hit film The Blues Brothers, having played bass previously in the house band from the film Animal House. While those two instances are comedic footnotes to a journeyman career, Cray is as authentic as modern blues can get.

Unfortunately, for all of Cray's and Clapton's mutual admiration, their friendship wouldn't last. Cray took exception to his friend's decision to sing some lines on Van Morrison's anti-lockdown song, "Stand and Deliver," and ended their relationship.

As he told Clapton, he was particularly taken aback by the lines “Do you wanna be a free man / Or do you wanna be a slave? Do you wanna wear these chains / Until you’re lying in the grave?”

“His reaction back to me was that he was referring to slaves from, you know, England from way back,” Cray told The Washington Post.

Cray, who was born in Georgia during segregation, found the reply wanting. He was further dismayed to see a photo of Clapton and guitarist Jimmie Vaughan posing with Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, in September 2021. As The Washington Post noted, Abbot had “recently signed the country’s most restrictive abortion law and a Republican-backed measure to limit who can vote in the state.”

In addition, Abbott is opposed to vaccination mandates, as is Clapton, who has posted statements against vaccines and described scientific data as "propaganda."

In response to the photo, Clapton's business manager Michael Eaton said at the time that posing with the governor didn't amount to an endorsement of his positions.

“[Clapton] is a great believer in freedom of choice which drives his position on vaccinations,” said Eaton. “And his views on other matters would reflect that belief in freedom of choice.”

It all brings to mind the old saying: You may lose your friends, but you never lose the blues.

Samantha Fish believes the future of blues guitar is in safe hands — and she can point to five players leading the charge.

The Kansas City guitarist, who was championed by the likes of Joe Bonamassa, Slash and Devon Allman as she emerged from the blues underground, has singled out a handful of contemporaries carrying the blues-rock torch into a new era. At the top of her list are Christone Kingfish Ingram and Derek Trucks.

“I just got off the road with Christone Kingfish Ingram, and he’s pretty amazing,” she tells Guitar World. The pair recently shared the bill on Slash’s S.E.R.P.E.N.T. festival alongside Warren Haynes, Grace Bowers, Larkin Poe, Eric Gales and plenty of others.

Her praise for Trucks is even stronger.

“I think Derek Trucks is one of the greatest there is,” she says, “not just in blues playing but any playing. He’s an alien.”

Trucks has been performing for almost his entire life. He landed his first paid gig at age 11 and was playing blues clubs with Buddy Guy before his 13th birthday — experiences that, he later revealed, taught him one of his most important lessons about performing.

Fish’s remaining picks are no less enthusiastic.

“I like Gary Clark Jr.,” she says. “He’s very tasteful, and he’s got a great tone.

“Eric Gales is incredible,” she adds. “He just blows everybody away. Luther Dickinson is one of my favorite contemporaries, too. He’s awesome.”

As for Fish herself, she’s credited 10 albums with shaping both her life and her vibrant guitar style. Alongside the more obvious picks — “Who doesn’t have a Rolling Stones record in their top 10?” she asked Guitar Player last year — sits one intriguing outlier: the MC5’s Kick Out the Jams.

“This record came into my life fairly recently,” she explains. “I started getting hip to the Detroit rock and soul scene while I was making the Chills & Fever album. I was going through something of a musical evolution, just taking everything in, and eventually that led me to Kick Out the Jams.

“They were punk in the very early days, and that’s where my heart is. Once you get into them, though, you’re really into them. This record really affected me at a time when I wanted to feel something in a big way.”

She’s also detailed the five most important riffs in her life, saying one R.L. Burnside song shaped her musical upbringing and served as a four-minute masterclass in groove.

Fish believes today’s blues players should continue pushing the genre forward rather than treating it as something to preserve unchanged. Speaking to Guitar World last August, she argued that the music has always evolved through artists willing to challenge expectations.

“Even when Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf went electric, which is what we consider to be traditional blues now, they were outsiders. People were saying, ‘This isn’t blues.’ And now it’s our gold standard. It’s the artist’s job to push boundaries and find their voice.

“And, of course, you worry about losing people. You worry about gaining people. That’s the business side of what we do. But at the end of the day, I feel like you have to make art that you can stand by. The rest of it, it kind of sorts itself out.”

Brian May has been crowned the greatest rock guitarist of all time, topping a 2020 Total Guitar poll and finishing second in a 2012 Guitar World readers’ poll. But the Queen legend has never been one to wax lyrical about his own abilities. In fact, when May was asked to name the guitarists who truly left him humbled, he pointed to a late ’90s great whose playing he considered nothing short of elemental.

May’s own rags-to-riches story is the stuff of rock legend. He built the Red Special with his father out of materials that included wood from an old fireplace, then went on to fill stadiums around the world and sell millions of records with Queen. Yet he has often been remarkably self-deprecating about what he can do with his homemade electric guitar in his hands.

He once said his playing sounded like “an angry wasp” next to Jimi Hendrix’s cataclysmic guitar work, while describing Ritchie Blackmore as a “fireball” who influenced his playing like few others. But in 2019, May made it clear that another Stratocaster-slinging guitarist had left an equally profound impression on him.

“This is the kind of guitar playing that melts me,” he wrote on Instagram, sharing a clip of Stevie Ray Vaughan performing “Life Without You” from his 1985 album Soul to Soul (via FarOut).

“Stevie Ray Vaughan, lost in a world of his own, here allows his fingers to be a channel for the burning passions inside him. Like Jimi Hendrix, he effortlessly makes his guitar sing to us, speak to us of wonders beyond words. Even with both hands behind his back!”

May went on to express his regret that he never met Vaughan.

“I so wish I had met SRV,” he wrote. “But one of the favorite moments in my life was when one of his friends told me, after he was gone, that he liked my playing. This man was truly one of guitar playing’s greatest champions. An elemental monster.”

May wasn’t the only legendary guitarist to draw a comparison between Vaughan and Hendrix. Jeff Beck, who toured with the Texan bluesman, once told Vaughan to his face that he reminded him of Hendrix — a comparison that Vaughan reportedly took to heart.

May, meanwhile, had discovered Hendrix in a far less glamorous setting: he found one of the guitarist’s albums in the trash, an encounter that sparked an obsession with his firebrand playing. But he never lost his own voice along the way.

That individuality is ultimately what makes both Hendrix and May such towering figures in the history of rock guitar, even if May has always been quick to downplay his own greatness.

“All I ever did, really, was play the way I feel and make the guitar my voice,” he once said. “I play like I would like to sing. I’m not the world’s greatest singer. I’m not the world’s greatest guitarist either, but thank you for saying so. I can speak with the guitar; I can make it sing; and that’s all I do. It just comes inside.”

And while May has been humbled by more than one guitar hero over the years, his own body of work — from Queen’s greatest recordings to his solo career and beyond — makes clear that he has long since earned his place among the electric guitar’s most distinctive voices.

Life in the studio hasn’t always been straightforward for the Rolling Stones. But as the band prepares to drop their second album in three years, having released two in the last 20 before that, it’s safe to say they’ve hit a late-career hot streak.

With Andrew Watt behind the desk once more, and Paul McCartney guesting on his second consecutive Stones record, the British blues rockers are in a rich vein of form, and it seems the writing of Foreign Tongues was in stark contrast to some of their most celebrated records, which, behind the scenes, were sometimes lethargic and drug-addled, at other times tempestuous, or quite possibly a cocktail involving all three.

“It was done pretty quickly,” Mick Jagger tells Zane Lowe of the process that has defined the Stones’ operation in the 2020s. “On the last album, Hackney Diamonds, Andrew and I had a plan. We used to be in the studio and spend ages in there, all night, trying to make up songs that weren’t written, and so we said ‘We’re going for the bulldozer approach’ so no one has too much of a chance to take a song to pieces and say, ‘I don’t really like this, I don’t think it’s going to work.’

“We wanted to do it as fast as possible, and then people get into it, and they put their own stamp on it, change it, and make it better,” he explains. “And we more or less did the same thing here. You hope to get one and a half songs done; to get one done, and everyone knows the next one sort of thing. There were good vibes in there.”

It’s an approach that, admittedly, wouldn’t have been possible when the band relocated to the south of France as tax exiles, as they turned an idyllic villa basement into their makeshift recording studio in the early 1970s.

Keith Richards, the story goes, was so deep into a drug haze at that time that he didn’t even make it into the basement some days, and it was a drug debt that is said to have seen Nellcôte raided, and a score of guitars stolen. However, one has recently and miraculously reappeared. Regardless, it’s no wonder that, as critically acclaimed as Exile on Main St. would prove to be, Jagger calls it “lousy”.

Keef, who has also been speaking to Zane Lowe, was asked how the room a band records in affects the music and its quality.

“It can be very important, and you never know until you get in there and start playing,” he notes. “You’ll always get something out of it, but some rooms you have to fight, and others, you realize that they’re welcoming you in.

“At the same time,” he counters, “you get some really good records out of rooms that initially you’re feeling you’re having to fight with. When you’ve fought, and you’ve made up, they’ve got their own character.”

Richards was one of the driving force during the making of Exile, and looks at the album more fondly.

“I think it was the first album where we didn’t have a 45 [rpm single] hit on it,” he told Guitar World in 2010. “It was an album album. All those musical styles were part of what we’d been picking up while touring America; we were soaking stuff up like sponges wherever we could find it.”

He admits that the cluster of material they took with them to France was “a work in progress,” with the band back then preferring to go the distance and thrash out the material on their own terms, and the “dusty” songs were, he says, very much a product of the environment.

With Jagger and Richards in their advancing years, it’s no surprise that the former is preferring a more wham-bam-thank-you-mam approach even if Richards is still spoiling for a fight.

“Nothing comes easy,” he says. “If it does, it’s not as good as it should be. There’s nothing like a tussle.”

The band has come a long way from the Beatles, who gifted them their first hit single. Watt is helping fuel the band’s latest resurgence, and he thinks he knows the recipe for a successful rock song.

Robin Trower's performance at Stockholm Concert Hall on February 3, 1975, has become one of the most celebrated live recordings of the decade. Released the following year as Robin Trower Live!, it captured the electric guitarist's power trio at the height of its powers.

But the album almost never happened.

"We were very lucky that tape was rolling that night," Trower tells Premier Guitar with a smile. "We were performing in a proper concert hall, and it sounded fantastic, which inspired us to play in top form.

"It was very refreshing, because most of the time we were playing in these hockey arenas that sounded awful. We weren't even aware that they were recording it."

At the time, Trower was touring behind Bridge of Sighs, the album that established him as one of rock's new guitar heroes on the strength of songs like "Bridge of Sighs" and "Day of the Eagle." Drawing a crowd to Stockholm Concert Hall wasn't difficult, even if the elegant, wood-paneled venue was better known as the home of the Swedish Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the site of Nobel Prize ceremonies than for hosting walls of Marshall amps.

The crucial detail, however, was invisible to the band. Swedish Radio had recorded the performance without Trower's knowledge.

Only later, after receiving a tape of the broadcast — a common practice for radio stations at the time — did Trower and his band realize they had the makings of a live album.

There was just one problem. James "Jimmy" Dewar's vocal track was unusable because his microphone had picked up too much spill from the rest of the band, particularly the drums. Rather than rebuild the album in the studio — as Kiss would infamously do with much of Alive! the following year — the band kept the repairs to a minimum.

"Jimmy sang it all again," Trower says. "He polished it off in about an hour — just ran through it in real time."

Now, 50 years after the concert and nearly as many since the album's March 1976 release, Robin Trower Live! has been expanded and remixed. The new edition restores the complete 12-song performance in its original running order, replacing the seven-track LP sequence, with a fresh remix by Richard Whittaker.

For Trower, though, there was no hidden ingredient behind the performance.

"There was no magic amp or special guitar," he says. "Almost everything I owned was pretty new. I just went to Manny's, the legendary guitar shop in New York City, bought a 100-watt Super Lead Marshall, and listened to about six or eight Strats acoustically before settling on a black-and-white one with a maple neck.

"If there's any secret to my tone," he adds, "it's that all my guitars have relatively high action and heavier strings. It's all about getting the strings to ring acoustically, and that's what translates into a great electric sound."

Ironically, Trower might never have become synonymous with the Stratocaster had Jethro Tull’s Martin Barre not nudged him toward Fender's iconic model in the first place. Although the Strat became central to his sound, Trower has long resisted comparisons to the player who defined it for a generation: Jimi Hendrix.

• Robin Trower Live! (50th Anniversary Edition) is out now. See Robin Trower for more.

Everyone has a favorite guitar solo — Brian May included.

While the Queen guitarist drew tonal inspiration from Rory Gallagher and has called Ritchie Blackmore an incendiary trailblazer of electric guitar, neither man played what he considers the greatest solo ever recorded. That honor, for May, belongs to Eric Clapton on “Key to Love,” from Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton.

“It’s the hottest, burning, high-passion piece I’ve ever heard in my life — still to this day,” May reveals (via Classic Rock). “I just love it. It totally rips, and I’ll never get over that. That’s one of my great inspirations.”

Clapton was just 20 when he left the Yardbirds to join John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, a move that coincided with what Jeff Beck later described as a streak of jealousy when his former band beat him to a U.S. breakthrough. In hindsight, though, Clapton hardly needed to worry: his brief tenure with the Bluesbreakers produced one of the defining blues-rock records of the era — an album that would go on to inspire future guitar giants, including Eddie Van Halen, who credited Clapton as a primary influence.

Though “Key to Love” runs just over two minutes, its loose, swinging groove builds toward a climactic stretch where Clapton unleashes roughly 30 seconds of unrestrained lead work.

“He burned in that solo!” May gushes. “The whole track revolves around that solo. Every time I put it on, I’m just waiting.

“John Mayall’s great,” he adds, “but you’re waiting for that moment when Eric rips out, and suddenly he’s whacking into those top notes. It’s incredible. Absolutely spine-chilling.”

May and Van Halen later paid tribute to Clapton on May’s 1983 solo EP Star Fleet Project, where the pair went head-to-head on the 13-minute blues workout “Blues Breaker.” Clapton, however, said he felt “almost insulted.”

“I think he hated it,” May said with a laugh in a 2023 interview with Guitar Player. “But he’s entitled. Eric could do anything and he’ll still be our hero. There’s probably lots of things I disagree with Eric about, but that doesn’t change anything. He’s been one of the greatest inspirations of my life, and that’ll never change.”

For May, Clapton’s playing didn’t just set a standard — it raised his own. And despite any critical remarks, the mutual respect between them is clear: they’ve shared the stage on several occasions, a quiet acknowledgment that the admiration runs both ways.

Grace Bowers has returned to YouTube, relaunching her channel with a wholly new approach just months after quitting the platform altogether.

The young hotshot guitarist had proclaimed her discomfort at being gawked at by older generations, insisting that she wanted to appeal to her own age.

Her U-turn comes with a change of tack, as she ruminates on the person and player she was when she broke out several years ago, and on the one she is today.

“Let’s try this again, huh?” she writes on her channel’s community page. “I’m making changes. I’m not bothered by just comments; I’m bothered by the things I had to deal with in real life. Things I didn’t think about when I was 14, posting videos for fun.”

She goes on to say that her focus is now on making “music for the girls in the front row. Not the weird dude with a tripod tryna look up my shorts.”

The guitarist broke out at a young age by uploading cover songs to the platform, quickly garnering the respect of some big-name players and the press. But she’s also had to contend with sexism and agism, as she’s forged a career that’s seen her release an acclaimed blues album, Wine on Venus, in 2025, jam with Peter Frampton, and play the Grammys.

Bowers has previously stated that she wants to pivot away from the blues to explore other musical styles, and her Ozzy tribute last year certainly proves she has the chops. It appears she wants to unshackle herself from the ‘savior of the blues’ that she’s had bandied around her, given her age and profile.

“I’m not a prodigy,” she asserts. “I’m not carrying a torch. I’m not here for old heads to sexualize me, as I have been for the past few years. I’m creating music that I have never felt is so true to who I am.

“I’m not letting anyone push me around anymore,” she continues. “I’ve been through a lot this year as I get ready to turn 20 next month. You’re either in it with me or not. I’m not who you want me to be, and I can’t wait for this next era of music.”

A follow-up post later said to expect less guitar content, although music videos seem to still be on the cards as she tees up a new release.

Based on the reels she has recently posted on both Instagram and YouTube Shorts, her content now appears to be taking a more informative, biographical approach. Reels have covered everything from ‘How to get into music as a teenager’ to speaking out against AI to promoting women’s rights.

It’s a bold and defiant move from a guitarist who has been seen as blue guitar’s next best thing – we won’t use the phrase ‘torch bearer’ – for many years now. She is, in effect, stepping away from the fanbase that has gotten her this far, but it’s also a move that puts her creative and personal wants and needs before all else.

What doesn’t change is Bowers’ talents, and if she wants to put them towards art that she is more personally attached to, that can only yield great results.

Samantha Fish admits she used to be trigger-happy with her lead playing, piling on ideas whenever she was given a solo spot. It took some blunt studio advice to change how she thinks about the role of the guitar in a song.

Guitar solos are one of the most demanding forms of electric guitar expression. Get them right, and they can define a career — Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption” didn’t just showcase technique, it reshaped what the instrument could be. Get them wrong, though, and they risk coming off as self-indulgent at best, or meme-worthy at worst.

In her early days recording and performing live, Fish was eager to demonstrate everything she could do as a blues guitar player, often at the expense of the music itself.

“When I was young, any time I got the opportunity to do a guitar solo, I’d throw in every trick,” she tells Guitar Interactive Magazine. “I’m in the blues world, so at a lot of jam sessions it’s about improvising around the original form, and I’d be like ‘Here’s this lick, here’s this lick.’”

That instinct — which is common among developing players trying to prove themselves — meant the focus often drifted away from the song. What she needed was a reset in perspective.

That moment arrived during the sessions for her 2015 album, Wild Heart, when she was working with Luther Dickinson.

“I was trying to do a solo — ‘trying’ being the operative word here – and he came in like, ‘It’s all bullshit!’” she recalls. “He said, ‘There’s a melody in the song; you can hear the hook when you’re singing. You need to cop that and build something around it — create a counterhook and build off that.’”

“I’ve realized that’s what you do; you create a hook, you build off of that, you weave something exciting, and if you can return to that hook at the end of the solo when it comes to fruition, that’s where the cheers come from,” Fish notes. “There’s something about that return to the earworm.”

The lesson stuck. Rather than treating solos as a showcase for technique, Fish began approaching them as extensions of the song’s central melody—something to serve the composition rather than overwhelm it.

“In music, what are we trying to do other than write great melodies that really engage with people?” she ponders. “As a guitar player, I was getting bogged down with trying to show what I could do. Sometimes the best approach is to lie back, listen, breathe; come up with a real simple idea, and figure out how to execute it with the most drama and dynamics.”

Looking back, she now considers her early approach a misstep, even describing her debut-era instincts as “shitty.” Her recent work, including Paper Doll Live, reflects a more disciplined, song-first philosophy that highlights how far her playing and writing have evolved.

While few guitarists have built a more distinctive voice than David Gilmour, there's one player whose position he has long envied: Eric Clapton.

Not because Clapton is more famous, or because of his technique, but because of the freedom his blues background affords him.

“I have to confess to a certain sort of jealousy of Eric Clapton’s position,” Gilmour says. “He has his wealth of material, and he's such a consummate blues player that he's got a wealth of other people's material that he can play that's not so well known. He can take out a new band every time.

“That would be a nice position to be in. Then reality kicks in. But I'm not in that position.”

It's a surprising admission from a guitarist whose own catalog includes some of rock's most celebrated solos. Yet Gilmour has never viewed himself as a traditional blues player in the Clapton mold.

In fact, he says his signature style was shaped partly by necessity.

“I wasn't gifted with enormous speed on the guitar,” he told Rick Beato in 2024. “There were years when I was younger when I thought I could get that if I practiced enough. But it just wasn't ever really going to happen.”

Rather than chase technical flash, Gilmour gravitated toward melody and phrasing, drawing inspiration from early hero Hank Marvin.

“Hank was just playing a tune,” he said. “I think I come from there.”

That melodic approach would become the cornerstone of Gilmour's playing with Pink Floyd, helping him forge a style that stood apart from both blues traditionalists and the generation of electric guitar heroes obsessed with speed. He’s said before that his style is “an amalgamation of folk and blues.” As a young guitarist, he studied the work of Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Peter Green, borrowing ideas while gradually developing a voice of his own.

“You bend a note, hold it, then shake it,” he said of his vibrato technique in a 1983 interview. “It's kind of like the way classically trained singers hold a note for a couple of seconds, then add vibrato. I've always enjoyed listening to guitarists who do that well — players like Peter Green.”

Even after decades at the top of the guitar world, during which heÆs performed some of the most-loved guitar solos, Gilmour has remained surprisingly self-critical. Speaking to Guitar World in 1998, he admitted that “about once a year, I have sort of an attack of a guilty conscience about my abilities, so I'll sit and run through a couple of scales.”

That lingering insecurity may help explain his admiration for Clapton's position. Gilmour can appreciate the freedom that comes with being able to draw from a vast blues repertoire, even if pursuing that path would have meant abandoning the qualities that made him unique in the first place.

As Gilmour himself once observed, he can try to sound like Jeff Beck, Clapton or Hendrix, “but it never works.” He only ever sounds like David Gilmour.

When the Rolling Stones decamped to the south of France in 1971 to record what would become Exile on Main St., they created one of rock’s most celebrated albums. But while the record has since attained near-mythic status, Mick Jagger has never been quite as enamored with it as the critics and fans who helped turn it into a classic.

By June 10, 1972, Exile on Main St. had reached No. 1 in the U.K. and topped charts around the world. Over the decades, it came to be regarded as one of the Stones’ defining statements. Yet Jagger has long viewed the album through a different lens—one colored by memories of disorder, unfinished work and a recording process he felt largely fell on his shoulders.

“Exile is not one of my favorite albums, although I think the record does have a particular feeling,” Jagger said in 2003 (via Far Out).

“I’m not too sure how great the songs are,” he continued. “It has some of the worst mixes I’ve ever heard. I’d love to remix the record, not just because of the vocals, but because generally I think it sounds lousy. At the time, [producer] Jimmy Miller was not functioning properly. I had to finish the whole record myself, because otherwise there were just these drunks and junkies.

“Of course I’m ultimately responsible for it, but it’s really not good, and there’s no concerted effort or intention.”

Those are striking comments about an album now widely considered a masterpiece. Yet they also reflect the reality of the sessions that produced it.

The Stones had begun work on some of the material at London’s Olympic Studios during the Sticky Fingers era before relocating, as tax exiles, to Villa Nellcôte on the French Riviera. There, they converted the villa’s basement into a makeshift recording space and worked in conditions that were anything but conventional.

For Jagger, who was preparing to become a father and frequently traveled to Paris to be with his wife, Bianca, the lack of structure proved frustrating. The villa became a revolving door of musicians, friends, dealers and celebrity visitors.

“There were a lot of people who came to visit that I don’t remember,” guitarist Mick Taylor later told Classic Rock. “I don’t remember John Lennon and Yoko coming, but apparently they did.”

Keith Richards, meanwhile, was battling a serious heroin addiction. According to the band’s lore, he was often absent from sessions taking place in Nellcôte’s basement studio. The chaos that Jagger viewed as an obstacle was, for Richards, simply part of the environment.

“We didn’t start off intending to make a double album,” Richards recalled in According to the Rolling Stones. “We just went down to the south of France to make an album, and by the time we’d finished, we said, ‘We want to put it all out.’”

“The Stones had reached a point where we no longer had to do what we were told to do,” he added. “I was no longer interested in hitting Number One in the charts every time.”

Richards would later tell Guitar World that Exile represented a conscious move away from the pursuit of singles. “It was made for what it was,” he said. “It was an album.”

That difference in outlook lies at the heart of the band’s conflicting memories of the record. Richards remembers freedom. Jagger remembers trying to impose order on a situation that often seemed determined to resist it.

“I think Keith was pretty out of it for some of that period, which shouldn’t have helped, but maybe it did,” Charlie Watts once observed. “Maybe that was where the creative energies came from.”

The sessions were plagued by practical problems as well. The summer heat played havoc with instrument tuning, recording schedules were inconsistent and songs often took far longer to complete than anyone anticipated. When Richards failed to pay the dealers providing him with heroin, they sent their henchmen to the house to steal several of the electric guitars used on the sessions, including Taylor’s 1959 Gibson Les Paul, which is said to be at the heart of a dispute with the New York City Met.

What emerged from the sessions was less a carefully executed plan than a collection of performances assembled amid confusion and constant interruption.

Richards embraced that unpredictability. Jagger struggled with it.

“Mick needs to know what he’s going to do tomorrow,” Richards said in the 2010 documentary Stones in Exile. “Me, I’m just happy to wake up and see who’s hanging around. Mick’s rock, I’m roll.”

That tension between discipline and spontaneity has always fueled the Stones. On Exile on Main St., it was amplified by circumstance, producing an album that still divides its creators even as it unites listeners.

For all of Jagger’s reservations, Richards has remained unequivocal in his assessment.

“For a year or two, it was considered a bomb,” he said in 2002. “This was an era where the music industry was full of these pristine sounds. We were going the other way. Yes, it is one of the [Stones’] best.”

More than 50 years later, Exile on Main St. remains a testament to the strange chemistry that powered the Rolling Stones at their peak: one songwriter trying to impose order, the other embracing disorder, and a classic album emerging somewhere between the two.

Stevie Ray Vaughan’s first encounter with Jimi Hendrix didn’t come from some carefully curated record collection or a mentor’s recommendation. It came out of a trash bin.

As Vaughan recalled to Guitar Player in 1989, his brother Jimmie returned from a gig in Dallas one night with a discarded Hendrix album he’d found behind a club.

“The first time | ever heard Jimi’s name was when my brother brought home a record of his. | guess it was around '67, and Jimmie had found it in a trash bin. He recognized it because he'd seen a short paragraph about Jimi Hendrix in a magazine, and he knew he was supposed to be something really happening.”

“He put it on the record player, and what could you do but say ‘Yeah!’” Stevie laughed. “It really knocked my socks off.”

At the time, Vaughan was still a teenager — barely 15 — and like so many of his generation, he learned guitar the hard way: by listening repeatedly until the music gave up its secrets. Hendrix’s records became a private master class in his room.

“I remember getting my little stereo — an Airline with the cardboard satellite speakers — and I would mic that up with a Shure PA that I had in my bedroom.

“For some of my first gigs, I’d rent four separate reverbs, and I’d have all this set up in my room. Of course, the parents were at work. I would go in there and floorboard it—dress up as cool as I could and try to learn his stuff.”

No instruction — just repetition, obsession, and a willingness to chase every nuance of the music on his electric guitar.

But Hendrix wasn’t just another technical hurdle. For Vaughan, he was proof that the blues could be something larger.

By the time SRV was famous and speaking publicly about Hendrix, he was pushing back against the idea that his music was untouchable. In his view, Hendrix wasn’t an outsider to the blues tradition — he was one of its most radical extensions.

“Some people don’t see that Jimi Hendrix was a blues player,” he said. “I hear it in the way he approaches things. Even though he wasn’t ashamed at all of doing some things differently, I still hear the roots of the old style.”

That perspective carried directly into SRV’s playing. Hendrix material wasn’t something he kept at arm’s length; it was part of his live arsenal. And he never treated that decision as controversial.

“For some reason, there seems to be a thing about it being sacrilegious to play Jimi Hendrix’s music. I think he would call bullshit on that,” he said from a London limo in 1988. “I may be wrong, but it seems he would want his music to be out there, just as accessible as anyone else’s.

“Hendrix was not scared to take [his] influences and incorporate them into his music,” he added. “Now, some people look at that as ripping people off. If it’s added to, and it comes out as yourself… it’s still got a new bite to it.”

Which is exactly what SRV did throughout his career. He honored Hendrix while cutting his own path as he stunned both David Bowie and Eric Johnson, and left Jeff Beck to compare him to his old friend Jimi.

Fittingly, Hendrix never left Stevie’s setlist. Vaughan’s final live performance closed with “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” a full-circle moment that underscored how deeply the connection ran.

When Steve Cropper heard the mixes of his final album, he knew exactly what he thought of it.

“I finished the mixes about a week and a half before Steve passed, and we brought a CD to him at the medical facility,” songwriter and producer Jon Tiven recalls. “He called me the night before he passed to tell me how much he loved it. He was playing it for everyone who came to visit him, telling them it was the best record he’d ever made.”

That album — Watching the Tide — will arrive later this year, serving as a poignant final statement from one of the most influential guitarists in soul and rock history.

The record was largely completed before Cropper’s death in December, with 10 of its 11 tracks finished beforehand. Recorded at Nashville’s RCA Studio C, the album again pairs him with Tiven and is being released under the banner Steve Cropper & the Midnight Hour.

Like its predecessor Friendlytown, the project brings in a notable roster of collaborators. Eric Clapton appears on the lead single “Ticket First,” released May 7, while Ronnie Wood contributes to “Until Now.” Other guests include Billy Gibbons and Brian May, with May joining Cropper on the aptly titled “My Angels Are Calling.”

“Making music was Steve’s greatest joy,” Tiven says. “Steve was so encouraged by Friendlytown. He was adamant he wanted to do another record.”

Cropper’s career stretched back more than six decades. As the guitarist for Booker T. & the M.G.’s — the house band for Stax Records — he helped define the sound of southern soul and co-wrote classics including “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay,” “Knock on Wood,” and “In the Midnight Hour.”

Beyond his work at Stax, Cropper built a formidable résumé as a session player and producer, working with artists such as Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Jeff Beck, Ringo Starr and Rod Stewart. He also appeared onscreen as a member of the Blues Brothers Band.

Along the way he earned multiple Grammys, including one for “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay” and another with Booker T. & the M.G.’s for the 1995 track “Cruisin’.”

Despite that legacy, Cropper kept his advice to young guitarists simple. In one of his final major interviews, with Total Guitar in 2024, he said, “Do not get into this business for money. Do it for fun — and if you’re good, somewhere along the way someone will pay you.”

He described his own approach to the instrument as practical. “I use it as a tool,” he said of the electric guitar. “I couldn't afford to hire another guitarist on a lot of Stax records, so I learned to play rhythm and lead at the same time so when I was soloing the rhythm wouldn't drop out.”

Watching the Tide is scheduled for release Aug. 28 via Provogue Records / Artone Label Group.

When people talk about the White Stripes, they usually start with Jack White — the riff architect behind “Seven Nation Army” and the band’s combustible creative force.

But White insists the real magic of the duo came from the quiet figure behind the drums. To him, Meg White wasn’t just his bandmate. She was the band’s “miracle” — a one-in-a-billion presence he has likened to legends such as Jimi Hendrix and Hank Williams.

The White Stripes were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year, a long-anticipated recognition for a band that reshaped garage rock at the turn of the millennium. Minimal gear, primitive attack, strict red-and-white aesthetics — none of it should have worked at arena scale. Yet it did. And White argues it worked because of Meg.

“People need to realize how shy Meg is,” he told Mojo as the band’s sophomore album, De Stijl, marked its 30th anniversary. “For her to sit down behind the drum kit is insane. But then to get onstage and sing into a microphone? Are you kidding me? It was unbelievable—a miracle, a blessing from above.”

White, who grew up in Detroit absorbing a volatile mix of Blind Willie McTell, Led Zeppelin, The Stooges and Loretta Lynn, has never lacked for confidence in his own ambition. But he credits De Stijl as the moment he realized the band could stretch beyond its raw beginnings.

“I still think De Stijl is one of the most important things I’ve ever done,” he said. “We could have easily just remade the first White Stripes record, but we didn’t feel we had anything to prove to anybody else. It became more about proving to myself that I could do all these things and not just be this one-chord wonder.

“If the band had broken up after the first album, I’d have gone back to work, maybe formed a different band, and never climbed past that stage of songwriting and artistry,” he continued. “De Stijl proved I could take this to other places. But it’s unbelievable that Meg came with me.”

The pair met in high school in 1990 and married six years later. Only after that did Meg begin learning drums on Jack’s kit. Their stripped-down two-piece attack—and the decision to publicly present themselves as siblings, even after divorcing shortly after their self-titled debut — added to the mystique. The contrast between them was immediate: he was loquacious and confrontational; she was reserved, almost stoic.

That dynamic defined the band’s chemistry. When the group dissolved in 2011 amid Meg’s struggles with anxiety, White remained in the spotlight through a steady run of solo records and side projects. Meg retreated almost entirely from public life.

Back in 2014, he defended her quiet nature in an interview with Rolling Stone.

“She’s one of those people who won’t high-five me when I get the touchdown,” he said. “Almost every single moment of the White Stripes was like that. We’d be working in the studio and something amazing would happen. I’m like, ‘Damn, we just broke into a new world right there!’ And Meg’s sitting in silence.”

He recalled something Ringo Starr once said about Elvis Presley—that the Beatles at least had each other to process the madness of fame, while Elvis was alone.

“I was like, ‘Shit — try being in a two-piece where the other person doesn’t talk,’” White added.

But silence, in Meg White’s case, was never absence. It was economy. Her drumming—elemental, unadorned, stubbornly resistant to flash—became the negative space that made Jack White’s guitar sound enormous. The tension between restraint and eruption was the band’s engine.

“People should write books about Meg White,” he told Mojo. “To me, she’s like Hank Williams or Jimi Hendrix. They are one in a billion. One in a billion.”

White has remained prolific in the years since the band’s split, revisiting his playing style after a serious car accident and launching a series of idiosyncratic gear projects, including signature instruments with Fender and experimental hybrid designs tied to the lineage of Eddie Van Halen’s favored luthier.

Yet for all the forward motion, he remains clear-eyed about the past. The mythology of the White Stripes often centers on the frontman and the riff. But according to Jack White himself, the band’s foundation — the improbable, volatile spark that made it all work — was the shy drummer who never chased the spotlight.

The miracle, he says, was Meg.

August 27, 1990, was a devastating day for the blues. In the early hours following an all-star jam at Alpine Valley Resort in East Troy, Wisconsin, a helicopter carrying Stevie Ray Vaughan crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all onboard.

In the confusion that followed, early reports misidentified victims, triggering a wave of grief for musicians and loved ones who believed what they were hearing.

For Richard Marx, the tragedy quickly became personal. As recently recalled on his podcast Stories to Tell, he awoke to the news like everyone else, stunned by the loss of Vaughan, a generational blues talent who was just 35 years old.

“We all wake up to this tragic news that Stevie Ray Vaughan has been killed in a helicopter crash. But the initial reports were, ‘Stevie Ray Vaughan and members of Eric Clapton's band have perished in a helicopter crash.’”

Roughly an hour later, the situation took a devastating turn.

“My manager calls me and says, ‘Richard, I'm so sorry. Nathan's dead.’ I get emotional just thinking about it even now all these years later. I collapsed. I was sobbing, I was inconsolable.”

The “Nathan” in question was Nathan East, his close friend and collaborator of Marx’s, and the bass guitarist in Eric Clapton’s touring band.

Then, after hours of mourning, came another call, one that would reverse the emotional whiplash in an instant.

“Hours later, I get a call saying, ‘No, no, no, no. He's okay. It was these other people.’”

More than three decades on, the memory remains vivid. Sitting opposite East, Marx still recalls the surreal weight of those intervening hours — not just the shock of the news, but the very real experience of loss that came with it.

“It was hours of me mourning you,” Marx tells East. “Like, I experienced losing you.”

“It’s such a bizarre thing to be told that someone very dear to you has been killed, and then to have the relief, hours later, that they're fine. That was really an extraordinary thing for me.”

Marx and East recall that they spoke later that night, roughly 24 hours after the accident, while the episode was still fresh in both their minds.

“I remember towards the end of our conversation, you were talking, and I wasn’t saying much,” Marx continues. “And you said to me, ‘Ricardo, I’m not dead.’ And I went, ‘But you were to me. I was told you were.’”

For East, the day was no less harrowing, despite the fact that he had survived.

“It was the darkest day of my life,” he says.

“People were showing up at my folks’ house saying, ‘We heard about what happened.’”

He adds that Clapton’s manager had diverted all calls intended for the band’s crew to his own hotel room. When East’s parents tried to reach their son, the rerouted calls only deepened their fear that the worst had already occurred.

The misinformation spread quickly and widely. Pat Metheny, hearing the news while in Brazil, left a somber message on East’s answering machine, lamenting that they would never have the chance to work together.

Then came the most chilling detail: East was supposed to be on that helicopter.

The very night of the accident, he had struck up a conversation with another pilot, who invited him to fly on a Twin Cessna instead. East accepted, as did Clapton keyboardist Greg Phillinganes, another musician who had originally been slated for the helicopter. Their last-minute decision made all the difference.

“Lots of things go through my head as I reflect on that day,” East says. “One is, ‘I guess I'm still meant to be here.’”

From Gary Moore’s violin-like swells on "Parisienne Walkways" to Steve Morse’s wah pedal–mimicking technique, the electric guitar has long proven an ideal platform for players looking to synthesize new sounds.

Now blues guitar star Samantha Fish has revealed the hack that turns her Gibson SG into a lap steel. Interestingly, it came about as she looked for ways to curb one of her bad guitar-playing habits.

“If I’m being honest, I fiddle with the [tone] knobs a lot,” she tells Guitarist magazine. Although she’s just trying to get the best sound possible, “if I’m fiddling too much, it’s not helping the show,” she admits. “I try to rely on pickups, volume switches and then pedals, [because they] are easier to hit with your foot while you're trying to play guitar.”

That mindset led her to invest in an Ernie Ball VP JR volume pedal so her hands could focus on playing rather than manipulating the guitar itself. Then she realized its usefulness could stretch well beyond what it says on the box.

“I got into the volume pedal first [before the pedalboard], and I kinda cheat volume swells,” she says. “I’ve always liked pedal steel, so on softer songs I’ll use it a lot.”

She then demos the pedal, and the slow arcs of the expression treadle imitate the glide of a pedal steel surprisingly well.

“I’ll do that in solos,” she adds, “and I see a lot of guitar players do that with their volume control. But it's kind of far away from me on most guitars. So I haven't found a comfortable way to do that and pull it off effortlessly, so that's a good way to cheat it… I’m a cheater.”

“The volume pedal is my main go-to,” she once said during a rig rundown with Premier Guitar. “I use that the most in a show, for slide guitar and solos.”

There’s also a faux pedal-steel trick that doesn’t require any extra gear.

Elsewhere, Fish — widely regarded as a generational torch carrier for electric blues — has named the five players she says are keeping the genre alive.

The guitarist is currently supporting her latest album, Paper Doll, and recently sat down with Guitar Player magazine to reflect on opening for the Rolling Stones and to recall the “comedy of errors” gig in “crazy weather” she’s still desperate to forget.

Stevie Ray Vaughan may now be remembered as one of the greatest blues guitarists since Eric Clapton and Howlin’ Wolf, but in his early years as a recording artist the electric guitar-slinger struggled to build an audience.

He got a little help from singer Huey Lewis.

In 1985, Huey Lewis and the News were one of the biggest acts in pop thanks to their third album, Sports, a number-one hit that spawned huge singles like “Heart and Soul,” “I Want a New Drug” and “If This Is It.” Lewis was an SRV fan and eager to bring the guitarist along for the band’s tour. He even went to battle with his management to get him on the bill, such was his belief in the Texan’s talents.

By this point, the guitarist’s stock was rising, most notably thanks to David Bowie’s shrewd recruitment of him for his 1983 album, Let’s Dance, alongside Nile Rodgers. But he was yet to become a megastar.

“Stevie Ray’s manager at the time asked for more money than they were worth,” Lewis writes in a reflective social media post. “My agent said, ‘This is ridiculous. We can't pay them this kind of money. They're not worth anything. We're just helping them by putting them on the tour. They should be paying us.’

“I said, ‘Forget about it. Just pay him. Trust me. You'll be glad you did.’”

It was a strong show of support for a guitarist who had already befriended Eric Johnson, and Lewis got his wish. In hindsight, though, Lewis may not have been glad he did. The tour began at the Zoo Amphitheatre in Oklahoma City, but despite SRV’s best efforts, the crowd offered very little in response.

“They were killing it. Then the song ended, and there was a moment of dead silence,” Lewis expands. “Then the audience started chanting, ‘Huey, Huey, Huey, Huey.’”

As Louder Sound reports, a review of the night from the local newspaper The Oklahoman claimed the crowd was “more concerned with the long lines at the beer taps.” Lewis couldn’t believe what he was seeing, and so he tried to offer some kindly words to soften the blow of a wounding opening night.

“Look, fellas, you're tremendous,” he had said. “Here's the thing: The audience is invested in us. They know our music. They play the record on the way to the venue. No matter how good you are, they're bound to think that we're going to be much, much better.

“There's no way you're going to score here. What's going to happen is, when they go home tonight, they're going to say, ‘Hey, you know what? That first band was pretty good.’”

Of course, the next few years would be kind to Stevie Ray Vaughan. It’s unlikely that Double Trouble’s tour with the News was the sole factor, but Lewis doubled down on his support by inviting the guitarist to end their set with them each night, when they’d play “Bad Is Bad” together.

“We were inseparable for the whole tour,” his post concludes.

It was also a memorable tour for News guitarist Chris Hayes, who reveled in the chance to share a tour bus with such a talented player.

“Stevie Ray Vaughan was great,” he told Vertex Effects last year (via Guitar World). “Every night, it was like a guitar lesson for me.”

Then there was one particularly heavy night on the bus.

“He kicks all the other guys in the band off the bus, and it's just me and Stevie on the bus, with a bottle of Crown Royal, and we just wrapped it down,” he said. “Of course, he could handle it. I think I was sick as a dog in the morning because it's not the safest thing to drink.”

Elsewhere, Carlos Santana has bizarrely claimed that Stevie Ray Vaughan once begged him to play his #007 Dumble amp from beyond the grave. Jeff Beck, meanwhile, compared the guitarist to Jimi Hendrix for one specific reason.

His brother, Jimmie Vaughan, has also used his brother’s virtuosity to dismiss the long-standing belief that there is a big difference between rosewood and maple fretboards.

Joe Bonamassa has little patience for the idea that B.B. King wasn’t a guitar virtuoso, and he’s making that clear at every opportunity.

The contemporary blues heavyweight is currently promoting Blues Summit 100, his new all-star tribute album to the architect of modern electric blues. One track pairs Bonamassa with Eric Clapton, and the choice was deliberate. In Bonamassa’s view, the song required not just technical skill but historical weight — and few carry more than Clapton when it comes to King’s legacy.

The project has also reignited a familiar debate guitar virtuosity. Bonamassa recently bristled at a journalist’s claim that King didn’t qualify — a puzzling assertion, given that the blues giant’s influence stretches from Clapton and Jimi Hendrix to more recent guitarists like Lenny Kravitz and even Grace Bowers.

That irritation surfaced again in a new interview with Classic Rock .

“When people say, ‘Oh, B.B. King doesn’t play much on guitar,’ I just can’t believe it,” Bonamassa said. “He’s one of the only guitarists you can identify with one note. And if you really listen, there’s a lot of jazz in his playing — Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian, and of course T-Bone Walker.”

Bonamassa’s defense of King pushes back against a flashier, post-’70s notion of virtuosity. Wolfgang Van Halen once joked that his father “kind of ruined” the ’80s by raising the technical bar so high. After Van Halen’s success, speed became the currency of credibility, and the decade filled up with Eddie Van Halen acolytes attempting to set new speed records on the electric guitar.

King operated in a different universe. His brilliance lay in restraint: the placement of a single note, the curve of a phrase, and his unmistakable vibrato. For Bonamassa — who once took Leslie West’s advice to heart and learned to say more by playing less — that economy is exactly what defines true mastery.

“By the ’60s, his phrasing was completely his own,” Bonamassa said. “But the real thing was his time.— where he put the notes. He was never in a hurry. And every solo he played told a story.”

Bonamassa has recently pushed back against caricatures of his own playing, too, rejecting the notion that he’s confined to slow tempos. In a Guitar World column, he pointed out that he can unleash “blazing licks” when required. The difference, he suggests, is knowing when not to.

And that lesson, he says, came straight from King.

“Everything I do — and everything everybody does — tips its hat to B.B.,” Bonamassa said. “I opened for him hundreds of times. Our band would come out and be cooking for 20 minutes. Then he’d walk out with an ES-355, hit one vibrato, and instantly, you knew it was him.”

Bonamassa has since admitted that adopting King’s fondness for punishing stage volume proved costly, after he suffered hearing loss during a show late last year. Even so, the influence remains indelible.

As Paul Rodgers recently put it, reflecting on his friendship with Bonamassa, his guitar playing flows like “blinding liquid” — a modern expression of the guitar language B.B. King helped to create.

At 50, White knows what it takes to impact the musical landscape. From penning one of the most iconic rock songs of the past 30 years to seeing his stripped-back gear ethos echoed by prog titan Alex Lifeson, his influence on modern guitar culture is undeniable.

Yet he remains acutely aware of the trailblazers who came before him — and the groundbreaking work they laid down, providing the foundations on which multiple generations have built.

During a new interview with Dan Rather for AXS TV, White named the Stooges’ self-titled debut album as the greatest rock record ever made. It’s a record he discovered after dumpster diving in Detroit, a unique pastime for the then school boy, but it’s what he says afterwards that really stands out.

“It’s hard when you get into rock and roll because there’s the Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the Gene Vincent songs that are so important,” he explains. “People don’t realize how important they are and how they just changed the world.

“They changed the world in a kind of flashy way, but also in an underground way where they’re being played in people’s bedrooms and in garages, and there are all these bands that learn from them and pass that on to their kids.”

And as Rather interjects, the rise of Little Richard, who once had Jimi Hendrix in his band, and company also helped soothe race relations in America.

“It’s so interesting historically, because all that music was generated and invented in the American South, which makes sense,” White replies. “There’s so much more tension here in the earlier part of the century, that it really makes sense that all this music could come out of that scenario.

“Because art doesn’t come from comfortable places; art always comes from pain and from struggle. So it makes sense, but what’s even greater is that the rest of the world likes that music, too.”

Indeed, the British blues explosion, which brought the likes of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck to the fore wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the Black artists who came before them. And there are countless examples beyond it.

That prompts Rather to ask him what rock and roll, at its very core, is all about. It’s here that White distinguishes key differences between a guitarist who plays the blues and one who cranks an electric guitar to play rock.

“Attitude,” he replies. “Where the blues feels like it’s about the truth, rock and roll for me is about attitude, whether that’s destruction, rebellion or any of those kinds of words.

“When I see a rock and roll band, I don’t want to see them be comfortable onstage. I don’t want to see them be kind to their instruments. I want them to be completely wild and uncontrollable, and I want to witness that, almost like children’s temper tantrums. And that’s what the early days of rock and roll were.

“Every 10 years, the wildness comes out of rock and roll,” White continues. “It gets tapered down. After Little Richard and Elvis, it was instrumental surf bands and the Patti Pages. A lot of the Nashville sound got into more orchestral music from the dirtier sound of renegade country artists. Then we get tired of the polite version and we want it to be wild again.”

Speaking of wild things, last year, Jack White tapped up Eddie Van Halen’s go-to luthier for a crazy guitar design that combines electric guitar and bass strings.

That followed the release of a suite of signature Fender gear that blends “innovation with history,” with the Triplecaster in particular earning admirers such as Kirk Hammett and Brad Paisley.

Eric Clapton’s departure from the Yardbirds was a touchstone moment in the history of electric guitar. It opened the door for future members Jeff Beck and, later, Jimmy Page, both of whom brought a more energetic and sonically innovative sound and style of playing to the group. And it was Clapton’s follow-up stint with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers that brought him acclaim and set in motion his move to form Cream, rock's definitive virtuoso power trio.

But while it’s often said Clapton left the Yardbirds out of a desire to play in a bluesier style, a former bandmate reveals there was another catalyst.

“That is partly the reason,” former Yardbirds drummer Jim McCarty told Forbes in 2019. “But he also had a bit of aggravation with the bass player, Paul Samwell-Smith.

“The two saw life differently. Eric aligned himself with the lower class, the working class, at that time. Paul wanted to be much more upper-crust, even though he was from the working class as well.

“His parents adopted the last name Samwell-Smith — they put their two names together so his mother would not have to be Mrs. Smith. From that, Paul wanted to be upper-class. I think that was the basis of their differences.”

Clapton's roots were indeed working class. He was raised in Ripley, Surrey, by his grandmother and her second husband, whom he believed were his parents. HIs discovery around the age of nine that his “sister,” Patricia, was actually his biological mother left him feeling unwanted and abandoned.

“Eric was coming from a difficult upbringing, because he wasn’t really brought up by his parents,” McCarty told Guitar Player. “He was brought up by his grandmother, who he thought was his mother. We met her, and she was a lovely woman, very chatty and very friendly. But that gave him a challenged outlook on things, and I think he took the blues up as his personal crusade.”

McCarty also compared and contrasted the Yardbirds’ three most famous guitarists for Forbes, noting, “Eric was a great purist. If he ever stayed with you, he’d be up early in the morning, playing before he even had breakfast. He was very dedicated and also very much into clothes.

“Jeff was completely different from Eric,” he continues. “He couldn’t care less what he wore. He’d just wear dirty old jeans that he could lie under his car with. His playing had much more variety to it. He liked jazz, rockabilly, and old-time electronic music. He loved Les Paul, double-tracked stuff. He would play much wider than Eric, who stuck to B.B. King and Buddy Guy.

“Jimmy was different again. He was the ultimate professional because he used to play in studios in London on other people’s records. He did what people asked him to do, very exact and businesslike. He was a session man.”

Beck and Page worked together fleetingly after Beck left the Yardbirds, while Page went on to form Led Zeppelin from the ashes of the Yardbirds.

Clapton, meanwhile, features on Joe Bonamassa’s new B.B. King tribute album after a singer demanded his presence on a cover of his most challenging track.

Eric Gales wasn’t the first in his family to play the blues. As the celebrated southpaw reveals in a new interview, he’s just the latest in a line of guitarists whose history includes jam sessions with some of the genre’s greatest players.

Now 51, Gales has come a long way since breaking onto the scene as an electric guitar–playing child prodigy. He’s just launched his first signature guitar with Kiesel, having ended a long-standing relationship with Magneto Guitars. And he’s now sat down with Rick Beato for a deep dive into his family’s history with the blues.

“I’m the youngest of five brothers,” he begins. “All of my brothers, my aunts, uncles, mom, dad, my grandfather on my mom's side [played guitar] well before I even thought about.”

In particular, it’s his grandfather’s story that stands out. He was honing his talents at a time when traditional African-American churches derided the blues as the devil’s music.

“He was an evangelist in the church, and if you know about the old gospel world, they definitely did not believe in blending the two worlds,” Gales explains. “You were either in, or you were out.

“So my grandfather played guitar, but nothing on record.”

Perhaps, but the man’s jamming buddies cut plenty of sides, and became famous doing it.

“He would go over to wherever the spot was — a juke joint, backroom, barn, or whatever — and he and Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf would play together,” Gales continues. “So this was part of my lineage way before I came.”

Although his grandfather kept his religious and secular worlds separated, Gales’ uncle did not.

“I’ve got an uncle that was one of the baddest in the world, man,” he says, passion amplifying his voice. “But he just chose to play in church. He was left-handed and played upside-down in the Baptist church, believe it or not.

”If he had chosen to come on the whirly ride, I don't think that B.B. King would be as well known as he was, because my uncle was that kind of guy.”

Gales’ family was defined by a strong network of mentorship. He learned the ropes from his brother Manuel, a.k.a. Little Jimmy King, who was 10 years older and had some big-name fans.

“Music was flourishing in the family, leading up to my brothers,” Gales says. “Little Jimmy King — he took ‘Jimi’ from Jimi Hendrix and ‘King’ from Albert King — had his own record deal, and at a certain point, he went out with Albert King on the road. He was a certifiably badass guitar player.”

His story, however, was cut tragically short. King died of a heart attack in 2001, a year to the day after the passing of their mother. Consequently, Gales’ latest album, A Tribute To LJK, is exactly what its title says it is.

“He was all about power. He took that from Albert King,” Gales told Guitar World of his brother last year. “There was a rigor and intensity to what Albert chose to play. Every push and bend meant something and had some pain or emotion behind it. That’s something I learned from both of them.

“People knew about Little Jimmy King. He was a touring machine who did it the hard way through grind. If he wasn’t on the road, he was at B.B. King’s Blues Club on Beale Street every single weekend playing in the house band.

“I saw him struggle,” he adds. “It gave me a glimpse of the real grind it takes to make a name for yourself to beat the pavement like that. He’d be in places that were far from pristine, but every night he’d play his heart out. That stuck with me.”

And like his brother before him, Gales learned to mix the best aspects of the players he loved to create something unique in his own playing. He once shared his secrets for developing your own style with Guitar Player.

Now a grandfather himself, Gales is carving the family name into the annals of blues-rock history at long last.

When Jimi Hendrix traveled across the Atlantic to Britain, he made a monumental impact on London‘s blues-rock scene. But while native stars like Jeff Beck have famously explained how Hendrix “swept us all aside and put us in a bin,” Hendrix's tradition-shattering antics made it possible for guitarists to play and perform in ways they previously hadn't dared to.

“He was extreme with everything, and he pushed it,” Beck says in an interview clip posted to YouTube. “He made it possible for everybody to see what could be done with an electric guitar.

“I was doing similar things, but not in such an ostentatious way. I used to use a tape echo [a Klemt Echolette S NG51]. I never paid for it — I think I fell behind on my payments — but it was part of my act. I used to make a sample of a phrase, and then play it over and over, and play harmonies over it. Then I’d just put the guitar on top of the amp and let it do its own thing.”

Hendrix was said to be a great admirer of Beck, and was certainly well aware of his talents, particularly his work on the Yardbirds track “Shapes of Things.” And as Beck noted, when the dust settled, the world was a better place for a maverick like him.

“Hendrix came along and made it much more theatrical,” he explains. “He had bigger amps, and he made it possible for me to move in within those parameters with big amps and start getting a bit dangerous with it.”

In fact, Beck struggled to find his place in the scene for many years after Hendrix died. His time in the Yardbirds yielded success, but his early attempts at a solo career were hit and miss.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that he found his footing with 1975‘s Blow by Blow, a melting pot of trad blues and jazz fusion on which Beatles producer George Martin challenged him every step of the way. It was there that the real Jeff Beck emerged. It’s no wonder, then, that his famed Oxblood Les Paul, his weapon of choice during this era, smashed records when it went to auction last year.

Sadly, Beck‘s 2023 death left behind a pair of mysteries. There's the question of his prospective collaborative album with Mark Knopfler, as well as the now-missing PRS guitar Paul Reed Smith says Beck was head over heels about. .

Meanwhile, Mick Rogers claims he owns the last recorded work of Beck’s lifetime, but says there’s no issue stopping it from being released.

In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked the late Duane Allman as the second greatest guitarist of all time, bested only by Jimi Hendrix. Decades earlier, Hendrix's music had inspired the guitarist to go in a new direction, and it would define the rest of his tragically short-lived career.

The story comes from folk guitarist Jeff Hanna, who first discovered Allman’s talents when he and his brother Gregg were plying their trade as Allman Joys. For a while, Hanna — a cofounder of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band — lived with the brothers during a brief stay in Nashville, and later that year, when the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s first album was released, Allman began a journey that would take him down a new musical path.

“Duane was the first electric guitar guy I ever knew because I was an acoustic folky guy,” Hanna says in conversation with Otis Gibbs. “He played a Telecaster with a Strat neck at the time, and it had a fuzz box, I think it was a Fuzz Face, inside the guitar. He could sit in a room and play, not plugged in, and it was spellbinding. He was that good.”

However, he says the band didn't amplify his guitar playing in the right light, which is perhaps why the freedom of Hendrix's power trio arrested him as it did.

After a while of living together, he says that Duane Allman grew tired of their communal living situation and sourced his own apartment with Dirt Band drummer, Jimmy Fadden. Hanna was a frequent visitor.

“We were sitting in Duane’s apartment,” he recounts. “Are You Experienced had just come out, and we're all just going deep in marijuana. And I think we were there for, like, two days just getting stoned to listen to this record.

“After about the fourth or fifth playing of this album, Duane's got this little stinky amp and a Strat, and I'm going, ‘Well, that's not Jimi playing.’ It was Duane playing that stuff back at us, and we're all just going, ‘Damn.’”

It was a moment that exemplified just how special the guitarist’s talents were. And just like how seeing Buddy Guy’s trio play in London inspired Eric Clapton to leave the Bluesbreakers and form Cream, Are You Experienced inspired Allman to form his own trio.

“He said, ‘Guess what I'm doing? I'm going to leave. I'm going to get a trio together!’ And he's just killing it, man. That was pretty ballsy to be playing the record, first off, and then saying ‘I can do that’ [laughs]. He loved Hendrix.”

However, unlike Clapton on the other side of the Atlantic, Allman’s trio dreams never quite materialized. In 2007, Dickey Betts told Guitar World that the trio — which included future Allman Brothers Band members Berry Oakley on bass, and Jai Johanny "Jaimoe" Johanson on drums — even secured a record deal with Atlantic, with early recordings captured at Muscle Shoals.

“Their group was supposed to be a power trio, like the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream,” he explains. “But Duane had to sing, and Jaimoe doesn’t play drums in that style at all.

“Berry brought back some demos of the stuff they were doing, and even though it was good, they weren’t going to be able to stand up next to Hendrix and guys like that.”

Allman instead found his calling in the much more expansive instrumentation of the Allman Brothers Band, carving his name into southern and blues rock folklore in the process.

Indeed, Betts once said he hated having to tackle Duane Allman’s slide parts, but knew he had to persevere if his band, continuing after he died in 1971, was going to honor him in the right way.

Later, his connection to Clapton became far more literal as he starred on Derek and the Dominos' only album, forming a remarkable partnership with Slowhand that embodied the blues tradition.

And elsewhere, Derek Trucks, who would become part of the Allman Brothers Band lineage years later, has named the slide player who was just as influential as Duane in making him a better slide guitar player.

Few 21st century guitarists live and breathe the blues quite like Joe Bonamassa, but he says a rockabilly icon played a crucial role in shaping him into a more rounded musician.

By his own admission, Bonamassa’s musical worldview was singular when he first stepped out onto stages at 11 years of age. He was the blues to the bone. But when Danny Gatton took him under his wing, his world changed for the better, setting the pre-teen Bonamassa on the path he still treads today.

“I met him at the Silver Lake, New York Blues Festival. I was asked to play half a set with the first band, and I was just about to turn 12,” he tells Circle Country. “I was playing with the Cold Shot Blues Band, and I noticed a guy wearing a John Deere hat and some overalls watching me play. just thought it was somebody who worked at the sound company.”

It was Gatton, and he was impressed by what he saw and heard. After the show, he approached the young guitarist.

“He said, ‘Hey, kid, where'd you learn how to play?’ I said, ‘Well, my dad taught me.’ And he goes, ‘You want to see a cool Telecaster?’” Bonamassa recalls. “I was a guitar geek from birth, and he pulls out this ‘53 Tele. I had never seen anything like that.”

It was the start of a heartwarming friendship that showed Bonamassa musical worlds outside the gravitational pull of the blues. It started that day when young Joe watched Gatton’s set at Silver Lake.

“He starts playing, and my mind is blown from the first notes,” he recalls. “I've never heard anyone play American styles that seamlessly, and with real intent. Like, he learned everything. You're hearing Les Paul, and you're hearing Hank Garland. It was really a life-changing moment.

“And he mentored me,” he continues. “I just knew him as ‘Danny with the cool guitar’ who would call the house, and we would do these shows. We would play Johnny D’s in Boston, or the Cat Club in New York, and we would go out on the weekends or in the summer.

“He really set me off on a musical path that makes me the artist who I am today because I love all types of music, not just the blues. At the time I met him, I was just into the blues. That was it. And then after I met Danny, I was like, ‘Oh…’”

Gatton, known for his use of a Gibson ES-295 — alongside his beloved Teles, of course — was often regarded as one of the world's best under-the-radar players. He could even solo with a beer bottle and a towel. The teachings of the Humbler, as he was known, proved invaluable to Bonamassa — as did the rather cutting words of Leslie West when the pair met in the studio while Joe was in his early 20s.

Elsewhere, Bonamassa has revealed the unlikely circumstance that saw Eric Clapton play on his new B.B. King tribute album and hit back at a journalist who claimed that King wasn’t a virtuoso.

When Steve Morse left Deep Purple in 2022, he had logged more time with the group than any other guitar player.

But perhaps familiarity really does breed contempt: Morse says several members of the band were more than happy to see the back of him.

The Dixie Dregs founder enjoyed side quests with Kansas and Lynyrd Skynyrd before he joined Purple in 1994, just as Ritchie Blackmore’s second spell in the band came to an end. After eight studio albums with the British hard rockers, he departed when his wife fell ill with aggressive Stage 4 cancer.

As Morse recently revealed, his time in Deep Purple was marked by frustration over his tendency toward virtuoso fusion playing, which took the group a step away from the blues-meets-classical roots they formed with Blackmore. He's said that 95 percent of the ideas he presented to the group were dismissed.

Morse now tells Guitar Interactive Magazine he believes his band mates were glad to see him go and that he can't imagine performing with them again even for a one-off event.

“I think if the band felt differently, I would feel differently,” he says. “But I think that there's a couple of guys in the band that were really glad for me to be gone, because they were sort of heading back to their roots and wanted just to be a rock band, and ‘don't give me any of that fancy crap.’

“When you look at me as a writer, I definitely give you that fancy crap,” he says, laughing. “I can't help it.

Deep Purple seems to have found what they want in Morse's replacement, Irishman Simon McBride, who is another blues-centric player, and a fine one at that.

“So I think the band's happier the way they are,” Morse adds, “and it would be kind of a step back for them to wanna do something like that. They're happier and better off, and I think it’s the same here.”

Vocalist Ian Gillan said as much last summer.

“Simon is a fantastic contributor to the band,” he told Made in Metal last summer (via Blabbermouth). “It's one of the best things that could have happened.”

“He's changed things quite a lot,” he said in another interview two years prior. “He's a catalyst; we feel very relaxed with Simon's style of playing. It's very compatible with the way we started. It's very straightforward; the platforms are simple, and the virtuosity is on top.”

Reading between the lines, it's easy to see why Morse hints at there being more disharmony during his reign than the fact that he stuck around for 28 years lets on. The comments on McBride’s playing, and of its simplicity, also feel like a veiled dig at Morse’s inability to do likewise.

Talking of his successor, Blackmore called Morse a “fantastic” guitarist, but suggested he played more from the head than the heart, which he felt was to his detriment.

Morse is back on familiar ground with his namesake trio. He’s got a new album out in Triangulation and is back on the road to celebrate it. This, despite his ongoing struggles with arthritis, which means he has to change up his playing style daily. It’s also rendered one of his more virtuoso songs unplayable.

It's well known that Buddy Guy had a huge impact on the direction of Eric Clapton’s career. What's less frequently noted is how much Clapton and his fellow British blues guitarists breathed new life into Guy's career, helping him reach a younger white audience.

Before traveling across the pond, Guy struggled to make a name for himself in America. Radio stations, if they did pick up his music, would get him confused with other Black artists.

In England, however, he found himself at the heart of the British blues explosion, and the scene’s most influential players were falling over him.

“When I went to England in 1965 with this Strat, all the super British guitar players, like Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, they all looked at me and said, ‘Man, I didn’t know that kind of guitar could play the blues,”’ he told Guitar World. “Then they all went out and bought Strats.”

They also loved the tone that emanated from his Fender Bassman amp (which would later be accidentally left behind on a runway).

During a new career-spanning chat with Rolling Stone, Guy reflected on those evocative formative years. He tells how upon seeing “a white face” in the crowd at one of his shows, he assumed the man was with the police.

“It was Eric Clapton,” Guy recalls with a laugh.

And although Guy was embraced by the British blues community, he didn’t understand every facet of its culture.

“I saw the [Rolling] Stones coming with the high heels on, almost looked like a woman,” he says. “I’m saying, ‘What is this?’ I got to San Francisco, and I said, ‘Man, look at this.’ I didn’t know what a hippie was. I saw men with long hair. But they were going crazy [for my music].”

His career did a full 180 degrees. But it was a long road to get there. Growing up on a farm in Lettsworth, Louisiana, with no electricity, Guy didn't know about the blues until he heard a fieldhand playing John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillen" on a guitar. That same fieldhand became his guitar teacher, and his first guitar — a gift from his father — only had two strings.

Guy found work as a session musician, notably playing on Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor," and his rhythm chops found him in great demand. “They would call my house because they couldn’t get this guitar player down to play the rhythm they wanted,” Guy remembers.

Fast-forward to 2025, and he’s refusing to retire until the genre he’s so tirelessly pushed for one hell of a lifetime gets the recognition it deserves.

“I’m the last old man still walking and playing the blues,” he tells Rolling Stone. “That’s what we talked about with Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf before they died. They said, ‘Buddy, please keep the blues alive.’ And I’m tryin’.”

His role in the Ryan Coogler-directed, genre-blurring film Sinners has helped introduce the blues to a new generation of players, but he isn’t resting on his laurels yet.

“My grandkids know about it,” he concludes. “But what about your grandkids? What worries me most, the young person don’t hear it anymore because they don’t play it no more.”

Meanwhile, Samantha Fish has named the next-gen guitarists keeping the blues alive, and Grace Bowers has reflected on her fast-rising star in the face of sexism from the industry.

For blues fans, Joe Bonamassa’s all-star tribute to the late, great B.B. King is one of the year’s most anticipated releases. But Bonamassa says his guitar hero — the one and only Eric Clapton — only came onboard after another guest artist insisted on his presence.

And as Bonamassa says, Clapton was one of the few guitarists he felt was capable of taking on the King's biggest hit.

Bonamassa has spearheaded the creation of B.B. King’s Blues Summit 100, with Buddy Guy, Susan Tedeschi, George Benson, Slash, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, Gary Clarke Jr., and Warren Haynes all involved. It's a stunning cast list, and one fit for a king.

“Not many musicians represent the genre in which they succeed in quite like B.B. King,” Bonamassa says in a promo video for the album, which was announced on what would have been his 100th birthday. “No one else was doing a tribute record to him, [so this album] was a labor of love.”

A slew of singles have dropped so far, bringing together the old guard and those carrying the torch of the blues for a new generation. He tackles “Sweet Little Angel” with Buddy Guy, “Heartbreaker” with Trombone Shorty and Eric Gales, and “Don't You Want a Man Like Me” with Larkin Poe.

But the most exciting collaboration on the record won't be unleashed until the album's release on February 6. And it has an interesting backstory.

“We approached Chaka Khan about singing on the album, and she said, ‘I'll only sing on it if somebody like Eric Clapton plays the guitar,’” he recalls to Q104.3 New York. “I said, I think I can help you. Hold my beer.’”

Bonamassa has consistently cited Slowhand as his hero and had the “insane” honor of sharing a stage with him at the Royal Albert Hall. While he most likely had him on his wish list before his conversation with the “Ain't Nobody” singer, her request sealed the deal. He had to ask.

“We were lucky enough to get Eric to play the duet,” JoBo says.

For that matter, he believes the task of playing "The Thrill Is Gone" was one only a guitarist of great stature could execute.

“It's so iconic that anyone who dares to do it will be compared to B.B. and the original version, which is untouchable.

“You either need to have icons themselves do it, or you need to find an unsuspecting young artist that wants to do it, and you make them the sacrificial lamb. I don't want to do that! So we were very lucky that this all played out.”

It's unfathomable to think that the weight of JoBo's reputation didn't make the gig any more enticing for Clapton, and in doing so, it's a serious vote of confidence for the hard-working bluesman.

“He's my hero and the reason I play the way I play,” he writes on his website. “[He was] just one of those guys who plugs the guitar straight into an amp and it sounds like him.”

Suffice to say, them playing Clapton's take of Bobby Bland's “Further Up the Road” together in 2009 was a dream come true for the guitarist.

“I always apologize to Eric like, ‘Dude, you have no idea how much I've ripped from you,’” he joked with Rick Beato last year.

And in his Guitar World column discussing his Gibson years, before he turned to the Fender Strat, he wrote, “The hallmarks of Eric’s playing from this era are his exquisite finger vibrato and how perfectly in-tune his string bends are. The playing is fiery; the lines are emotionally powerful, and the melodic ideas and phrasing are perfect.”

That makes him the ideal man to cover “The Thrill Is Gone” and survive to tell the tale.

In related news, he recently challenged a journalist's definition of virtuoso when he didn't put B.B. King in that bracket. He has been forced to rethink his love of loud tube amps, having been diagnosed with hearing trauma after a show in Austin.

Few guitarists represent the future of blues guitar quite like Christone “Kingfish” Ingram. Recognizing this, Fender has teamed up with the Mississippi-born guitarist, championed by Eric Gales, Buddy Guy and Slash, for a revamp of his 2022 signature Telecaster Deluxe.

In an interview for a promo video, however, Kingfish confessed that he didn’t always like Fender’s second-most famous electric guitar. He says it was Prince, chief among a litany of six-string greats, whose music convinced him to revisit the instrument with a fresh mindset.

“My first Telecaster was a red Squier Affinity Tele,” Kingfish explains after a tour of Fender’s Corona, California, factory, where his new Daphne Blue axe has been crafted. (The model was previously made with a shimmering purple Mississippi Night finish.) “At first I didn’t get the whole Telecaster movement, because I felt like they were too twangy.”

The Tele Deluxe, however, delivered a solution to what he feels is the guitar’s biggest tonal problem: its pickups.

The Fender Telecaster — first produced as the Broadcaster in 1950 — went through several iterations leading up to the development of the Telecaster Deluxe in 1972. Rather than a pair of single-coils, the Deluxe model featured two of Fender’s Wide Range humbuckers, giving it a warmer, thicker and more rounded tone than its standard sibling. (The Tele Thinline, first introduced in 1968, was likewise revised in 1972 with a pair of Wide Range pickups.)

While that tonal change spoke to Kingfish more than any other Tele, he needed another guitarist to convince him to make the leap. He found what he needed in his own record collection.

They include “some of my favorite Telecaster players out there, like Freddie Stone, from Sly & the Family Stone, Prince, Keith Richards, Albert Collins, and of course all of the country players as well, like Danny Gatton and Roy Buchanan,” Kingfish says.

Of all those players, he says Prince was the most influential. Listening to him play, Kingfish says, “I found out how funky these things can get.”

(It should be noted that while Prince played a modified Tele in his early years, he was best known for playing a Hohner Mad Cat Tele-style model, as seen in his celebrated live performance of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." The Mad Cat featured a flamed maple top on an ash body with a walnut strip in the middle, as well as a distinctive-looking leopard-print pickguard.)

Ultimately, it was the sound of those twin Wide Range humbuckers that drew Kingfish not to the Telecaster, but to the Tele Deluxe.

“Coming from traditional blues, I'd always been into players that had a big sound,” he adds. “Then I started to expand my ear and got into guys like Gary Moore, who has that classic overdriven humbucker sound.

“I always wanted that kind of tone — something where I can hit the pedal and everything can be boomy, and I can scale back and be pretty. The pickups do just that. Between that and two Fender Twins, the sound guy is always telling me to turn down!”

Having a signature Telecaster also meant Kingfish could go further and specify his own custom-voiced pickup. “I wanted a sound that could really punch and hit heavy,” he explains. “But being that I come from church, I wanted a guitar that doesn't scream. I can dial back the volume if I want to.”

Speaking to Guitar Player last year to dish out his top tips for guitarists, Kingfish discussed his love of aggressive melodic soloing, the need for his live shows to tell a cohesive story, and the key lessons taken from his time jamming with Buddy Guy.

And in related news, Samantha Fish is the latest blues star to name-drop Kingfish's talents as one of the torchbearers of modern blues.

Buddy Guy has some 70 years of experience as a blues guitarist and has played his electric guitar on stages all over the world . From the two-string diddley bow he made as boy growing up in Louisiana to his first proper guitar — gifted to him by a stranger — to his rise in Chicago, where he was mentored by greats like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King and Guitar Slim, Guy rose to become a signature blues artist in his own right.

Guy fortified his innate guitar talent with a wealth of knowledge and skills he gained over his formative years. He then passed it on to players like Eric Clapton, who saw Guy onstage in England in the mid 1960s and was moved to form his own blues trio, Cream. And while Guy announced his retirement from the road with his 2023 Damn Right Farewell Tour in 2023, his influence lives on in a new breed of guitarists. That includes players like Gary Clark Jr., John Mayer and Johnny Lang, who learned to play blues authentically by watching — and learning — from the master, who honed his craft with a Fender Stratocaster in his hands.

As for Guy, his blues expertise came the hard way. He's a self-taught player, with no formal training—except for a couple of lessons with a high school music teacher who, to Guy's chagrin, couldn't show him the things he really wanted to learn.

"I moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to go to high school," he recalled to Guitar Player in our January 1999 issue. "And they had a music teacher there, and I thought, 'My God, I've got what I've always wanted. I'm gonna let this guy teach me how to play the guitar.'

"I went in, and the teacher showed me some scales, and I said, 'I don't wanna play that; I wanna play like this' — I had a Muddy Waters record and a John Lee Hooker record at the time. He looked at me and said, 'I can't teach you that.'

“So I said, 'Well, then I can't take a music class!'

“I was so excited by the way Muddy played the slide, how B.B. King squeezed the strings, and how Lightnin' Hopkins and T-Bone Walker played their things. I said, 'If they don't teach this in school, I've got to find it myself.'

"Nowadays," Guy continued, "young people have advantages that I didn't have. It wasn't until 20 or 30 years ago that you even saw blues written in music notation—they claimed they couldn't write it.”

One tremendous benefit that Guy did have — after moving to Chicago in 1957 — was seeing Chicago blues legends such as Muddy Waters, Wayne Bennett, Matt Murphy, and Earl Hooker when they were at the height of their powers.

But no matter what a musician's cultural advantages — or disadvantages — might be, Guy maintains that anyone with enough heart can play the blues.

"If you love the blues, you can play it. Every interview I've ever had, I get asked 'Can a white man play the blues?' I hate that question! It's a human being, man. If I had eight fingers on my left hand, then! would say, 'No, a white man probably can't play like me.'

“But these guys, man—the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, this young Jonny Lang, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck, to name a few — there's some things they do that I wish I had known.

"Look at athletes — boxers, football players, baseball players—they come in all sizes and all colors, and all those guys are great. Music is the same way. There's no advantage or disadvantage. If you want to learn this thing, man, and you love it the way I love it, you can do it."

When it comes to virtuoso players, the power trio can be one of the most effective formats to let each member shine. From the envelope-pushing exploits of Cream — a band Clapton was inspired to form after seeing Buddy Guy’s trio play — to Motörhead, Rush and ZZ Top, the guitar-bass-and-drums lineup has proved to be a potent recipe for success.

Robin Trower is no stranger to successful power trios. He led his own Robin Trower Band trio in the 1970s and worked with bass guitarist Jack Bruce in that format for a pair of albums in the 1980s. He's continued to work in power trios and believes there's one thing every band of this format requires to make it work.

“The thing is, with just the three of you, you've got to make up for the instrument that's missing,” the former Procol Harum guitarist tells Rick Beato in a new interview. “So it needs to be a little bit more intense from everybody.

“I think that's what gives it its power — its potency. Plus, from my point of view, it's a great challenge to fill that space, especially when you go from backing the vocals to the lead. You really have to fill that space then.”

It helps that his guitar-playing style — Trower cites B.B. King, Albert King and Jimi Hendrix as his influences — is so rich in sustain and ferocity, even as he reaches the age of 80.

Procol Harum, who blended psychedelic rock and proto-prog tropes with baroque, blues and soul flavors, found their strength in numbers. During Trower's initial spell in the group, he was one of five or six members. But when he formed the eponymous Robin Trower Band in 1973, three was the magic number.

In the '80s, Trower linked up with former Cream bass player Jack Bruce and two former Robin Trower Band drummers, Reg Isidore and Bill Lordan, to form two new lineups. It's safe to say that he's learned where the balance between success and failure lies.

One of the key things here, he says, is “coming in prepared” for studio sessions. In trios, there’s nowhere to hide.

For Eric Clapton, who famously performed in Cream, widely considered the greatest rock power trio, there was a sense of danger and freedom that called to him, and ultimately prompted him to leave John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers.

When recalling his decision in 2005, he explained, “What it said to me was 'this was possible.’ If you were a good enough guitar player, you could do it as a trio. It seemed to be so free, you could go anywhere.”

Drawing inspiration from Clapton's short-lived supergroup, Leslie West would later tap up Cream producer Felix Pappalardi and drummer Corky Laing for a threesome of his own. But, as Trower says, it required him to up his game.

“I had to work a lot harder with the trio,” he confessed.

More recently, Andy McKee, Calum Graham and Trevor Gordon Hall have formed a rather different-looking trio, with the guitarist's fingerstyle chemistry at its heart.

Meanwhile, Trower has revealed which prog-rock icon turned him onto the majesty of the Fender Stratocaster, having started his Procol days armed with a Gretsch solidbody electric guitar. He later pivoted to the Gibson SG before he found his forever axe in the Strat.

At 80, he's proving as creatively restless as ever, despite health issues scuppering his 2024 US tour plans. It's no wonder Beato calls him “one of the most distinctive guitarists in rock history.”

Music's landscape changed dramatically in the late 1960s, as the electric guitar became a greater force of expression in rock. That was due as much to developments in amplification and effects as it was to the players who dominated the scene, like Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix.

Prior to then, rock and roll belonged to guitarists like Keith Richards and George Harrison, each of whom had one foot in the styles preceding the British rock boom and the other in a more expressive, blues-inspired way of playing. Harrison, in particular, eventually became enamored of the slower, single-note style of lead guitar that emerged in the playing of the Band's Robbie Robertson and his pal Clapton.

But he wanted nothing to do with the heavier rock that followed. As far as he was concerned, Clapton took electric guitar to a new and more forceful place with his rock trio Cream.

Where it went after that was simply all too much.

“As far as listening to it, I’d rather hear someone like Little Richard or Larry Williams,” he once recalled (via Rolling Stone). “I never liked all that stuff in the late '60s after Cream had broken up — all those Les Paul guitars screaming and distorting.”

Clapton had been at the heart of the British blues explosion following his departure from the Yardbirds in 1965, when he joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. But when he left to form his own loud and lively power trio, inspired after seeing Buddy Guy play in London, he took the blues to new, rather more aggressive places.

Although Cream was a blues-rock band with strong elements of jazz mixed in, the group's fusion proved instrumental in paving the way for the hard rock and heavy metal scenes that followed. Even Clapton came to understand as much in the years after.

“I think we were one of the early heavy metal bands without knowing it,” Clapton has previously said. “After we disbanded, Led Zeppelin filled the void.”

While hard rock would give us plenty of fine virtuoso players, Harrison preferred the more expressive side of guitar work that preceded them.

“I like subtlety, like Ry Cooder and Eric Clapton,” he said. “Eric is fantastic. He could blow all those people off the stage if he wanted to, but he’s more subtle than that.

“And personally I’d rather hear three notes hit really sweet than to hear a whole lot of notes from some guitar player whose ears are so blown out he can’t hear the difference between a flat and a sharp.”

Harrison’s high praise for Clapton came just a few years after the two men reportedly performed a guitar duel over their mutual love for Pattie Boyd, Harrison's wife at the time. Clapton had become infatuated with her in 1970, leading to his anguished love letter to her, the song "Layla," from Derek and the Dominos' Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs. (although that tune is now shrouded in plagiarism claims).

Intriguingly, in his Rolling Stone interview, Harrison failed to mention the guitarist he felt was responsible for the “greatest guitar solo of all time.”

Buddy Guy was a hero to the electric guitar players of the British blues boom. When he first showed up in England with his trio in the mid 1960s, he thrilled all of them with his revolutionary, high-energy style, using amp overdrive, feedback and a dynamic, approach that blended raw emotion with powerful technique.

But as the blues guitar legend says today, those same guitarists took what he did and went too far with it.

In fact, he even had to warn JImi Hendrix to watch his ears when he entered clubs where the British blues players plied their trade. And as he notes, Jimi was no slouch when it came to playing loud.

“You’ll laugh, but I thought he used to play too loud,” Guy says of Hendrix in the December 2025 issue of Guitar World magazine. “When I first came up, Muddy Waters and those guys had two little speakers at each corner of the blues club, and it was a clean sound.”

But he said even Hendrix was no match for the British blues guitarists of the time. “When the British guys started playing, they had stacks of Marshalls! After I got to know Jimi, I’d go see him and [warn him], ‘Before you go in there, you ain’t gonna hear nothing.’ That type of sound just took over.

“That clean sound went away because, with the amplifiers, it was a dogfight. And then all the special effects came in, and Jimi, I think he was one of the greatest that ever took advantage of the special effects, because a lot of people used them after him.”

Though Hendrix’s take on the blues was a world away from the cleaner, more controlled blues playing that Guy was accustomed to, they had a lot in common. Hendrix idolized Guy and went to see him perform in 1967.

“I got invited to play in New York City. I was putting on the ‘Buddy Guy show,’ with my guitar behind my back and throwing it around,” he told Guitar Player of their first meeting. “And somebody said to me, ‘Look out, man, that’s Jimi Hendrix over there!’ – ’cause those were Jimi’s moves.

“But I said, ‘So what? Who the hell is that?’

“Eventually, Jimi came over to me and introduced himself. He said, ‘I just canceled a gig, ’cause I wanted to see you.’ And that’s how we became friends.”

Still, there was a degree of separation to their receptive takes on the blues.

“I was into Arthur Crudup, T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, and all the old blues guys,” Guy told GP on a separate occasion. “I wasn’t into all the special effects. I liked what Hendrix was doing when I heard it. But I decided to let him have that. I figured my time would come.”

Eric Clapton was another player rapt by Guy’s talents. He says seeing his power trio play in London inspired him to leave the Bluesbreakers and start Cream.

In related news, Guy has discussed the one thing every guitarist needs to play the blues and has reflected on his slightly unusual relationship with his son.

“He didn’t know who I was until he could turn 21 and get into the blues clubs,” Guy has revealed. “He said, ‘Dad, I didn’t know you could play like that!’”

For a guitarist who’s made his mark in the world of prog rock, David Gilmour is remarkably rooted in the blues. An old-school progger like Steve Howe shows fluency in a range of styles — from rockabilly to classical to jazz and bluegrass — while a more modern prog player like Tim Henson combines elements of progressive metal, jazz, trap, and K-pop.

But Gilmour has somehow managed to navigate Pink Floyd’s catalog with little more than bluesy phrasing on electric guitar, and with elements of folk when he ventures into acoustic guitar territory.

“My style is my style, and it was created out of an amalgamation of the folk and blues I started with,” he told Guitar Player in 2003, “as well as my early years in Pink Floyd when I was attempting to be a psychedelic-type guitar player.

“That being said, I think I always come back to certain elements of blues phraseology. The blues run pretty deep in my playing.”

It’s a rich musical vein that nurtures some of his most iconic solos, including those in Pink Floyd tracks like "Money" and "Comfortably Numb."

As he told Guitar World in 1988, he started out on electric guitar copying the lines of late 1960s guitarists like Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.

“When I was young, I actually sat down and learned many of the classic blues solos by Eric and Hendrix as well as studying old Howlin' Wolf records,” he said.

That apparently served him well when Gilmour joined B.B. King for a New Year's Eve performance on Later... With Jools Holland in 1997.

In 1968, around the time that he was studying Clapton and Hendrix, Gilmour joined Pink Floyd as support for guitarist Syd Barrett before taking over once Barrett’s mental decline made him unreliable. Given his role at the time, Gilmour attempted a more, as he said above, “psychedelic” style.

“When I joined Pink Floyd I was trying to play some of Syd Barrett's parts, yet adapt them to my own style and taste. The framework I was working in was already set, and it included a style of guitar playing that was already a part of it. It took a while for me to allow myself to stray from what I thought I should be doing.”

And while specific references to Gilmour’s blues influences don’t appear verbatim in his playing, he says they are within the well from which he draws to create his own signature style.

“It's like, you've got a series of things that you can put together in different combinations but there aren't that many moves you can make,” he explained. “Instead, I try to approach things, given my limitations and strengths, from a more melodic standpoint and just work on it until it sounds... nice.

"I don't really have any plan in hand that helps me to deal with this. I try not to be too tied down by rules and regulations. So the blues influence may come out at times but I like to think I come at it from a different angle."

Part of that “different angle” is simply down to Gilmour’s inability to play fast. As he revealed to The Telegraph, “I just have not got very good coordination between left and right hand. My fingers are very slow. I couldn’t do what all these other guitar players could do, so I had to do something different.”

He elaborated on this with Rick Beato last year, when he explained his early attempts to play in the faster style of guitarists like Ritchie Blackmore and Jimmy Page, “There were years when I was younger where I thought I could get that if I practiced enough,” he said. ” But it just wasn’t ever really going to happen. I’ve got no control over the music I make.”

Music journalist and Guitar Player contributor Steven Rosen has detailed a lesser-known side of Eddie Van Halen, and it’s an aspect that Eric Clapton once fell afoul of.

On stages and in music videos, the late guitarist was a perpetually animated, larger-than-life character.

But Rosen — who wrote the book Tonechaser about his 26-year friendship with Van Halen — says that behind his performances, he was “a pretty complex person,” and someone you didn’t want to cross.

“He was like this onion; you peel back layers, and there'd be another layer,” he says while guesting on Igor Paspalj's YouTube channel.

“The longer I hung out with him, I realized there were more facets to his personality. Music was first and foremost. There was never a single moment when I was with him that he truly did not have the guitar in his hand.

“He'd come over to my pad. I was a guitar player — not a very good one, but I had always had a couple of guitars.

“So the first thing he'd do was light a cigarette, and he'd go over and pick up a guitar and start noodling. Every single time.”

Eddie's relationship with the guitar bordered on obsessive, even if Sammy Hagar says it had been replaced by a love of cello in his later years.

“Whenever I went over to his place in Coldwater Canyon and he was out in the studio, he was playing, he was changing strings. It was always about the guitar,” Rosen echoes. “There were two major modes with Edward: my friend Edward, and Edward in musician mode.

“When he was in the musician mode and he needed to work, he needed to be by himself. It was almost an unspoken thing. I mean, I could sense it. He'd be playing, and you look over, and I just knew it. ‘Hey man, I'll see you later.’

“For Edward, respect was a huge thing. And if you disrespected him, he held on to that for a very long time.”

For evidence of that side of EVH, just ask Eric Clapton.

Eddie’s love for Clapton’s guitar playing, particularly during his era with Cream, was revealed in Ed’s first-ever interview, with Jas Obrecht for Guitar Player magazine, in 1978. As Eddie's fame grew, it was inevitable he and Clapton would meet. When they did, in the early 1980s, they formed a friendship built of mutual respect.

But it began to unravel in 1986. While speaking to Musician magazine, Clapton criticized Eddie's guitar work on “Blues Breaker,” a 13-minute blues jam between him and Brian May that appeared on May's 1983 Star Fleet Project mini-album and was dedicated to him.

“They can't play,” Clapton said. “They took turns to play solos... and there was no dynamics, no build up, no sensitivity. I was very disappointed.”

Clapton’s decision to bare his feelings in an interview wasn't just poor judgment — it obscured the larger point he was trying to make: that playing blues is difficult, even for him.

The guitarists' relationship spiraled from there. Speaking to Dweezil Zappa for an interview in Guitar Player's March 1995 issue, Ed compared Clapton's contemporary guitar solos to “pissing up a rope.”

Once a grudge was established, it took a lot for Eddie to get down from his perch, which is likely why he was insistent on his son replacing Michael Anthony in the final iteration of Van Halen.

Before he even put out a single album, Joe Bonamassa received a key piece of soloing advice from blues-rock legend Leslie West.

But by his own admission, it took 30 years for him to put the tip into action. Now that he has, he says it’s elevated his live performances.

The guitarist recalls that he met West when the former Mountain guitarist made a guest appearance on a cover of Kenny Neal's "If Heartaches Were Nickels" on his 2000 debut studio album, A New Day Yesterday.

“He came to the studio in Ithaca, New York, when I was a kid working with [producer] Tom Dowd on what would be my first solo album,” Bonamassa says, setting the scene with Premier Guitar. “This was pre-production, and he guested on a track.

“And he, in that voice, goes: ‘You know, Joe, you’d be my favorite guitar player if you’d just divide by two.’ I’m like, ‘You mean half as many notes?’ He goes, ‘Right. Keep doing what you’re doing and divide by two.’”

It turns out he only half listened. He did indeed carry on what he was doing, but he wasn’t quite as eager to minimize his note count. Recently, though, he’s realized that West was onto something.

“I’ve noticed a change in my playing,” he extends. “Especially when I’m touring and we’re playing big venues over here, I’ve been using ‘divide by two.’ Every once in a while, you break through a frontier you didn’t even know you were gonna break through or didn’t even know existed.”

It's a nugget of wisdom he's also passed onto Jared James Nichols, albeit in a slightly more blunt manner. West was in a wheelchair at the time, around a year before his death, and Nichols was due to support his show at B.B. King's in New York.

“Leslie wheeled over and strapped on his guitar. We started jamming — it was really cool,” he recalls. “Finally, he stopped playing and looked at me, and serious as can be he said, ‘Slow the fuck down!’ He meant it.”

Another recent breakthrough, he says, has come from a renewed focus on the acoustic guitar. He tells Premier Guitar that, “for years, I would just say I’m an electric guitar player.” That, too, is starting to change.

It started when he bought a “museum-grade” 1941 Martin 000-45, which has since been reissued in what Bonamassa calls “the honor of a lifetime.” That sent him down a slippery slope.

“Right after that, I got a 1942 000-18 from my friend Jim Hauer in Dayton, Ohio, at Hauer Music. And once I had the neck set and it came back, I was like, ‘You know what? I get it now. I get the acoustic,” he continues. “I’ve played a bunch of herringbones and stuff, but I was so focused on electric that acoustics would all sound the same to me.

“And I’ve found that my accuracy on the electric has improved by embracing the acoustic. Especially in the studio, if I’m producing a record and I’m playing on it, my chordal accuracy is a lot better.”

His interview precedes the release of his 17th solo album, “Breakthrough” (July 18), which may or may not showcase his newfound note-dividing abilities, but it will certainly be different from its kin in other ways. And it’s put his songwriting under the microscope.

“I approached this album from the point of view that the world does not need another Joe Bonamassa record,” he professes. “That’s why we ended up with 20 songs, 10 of which we were like, ‘Yeah, I’ve heard that before.’ We tried to concentrate on things that I haven’t done before, but when you have 50 albums out, including the live stuff, before you even get to the side projects, it’s hard.

“I’m trying not to repeat myself, but not abandon ship,” he adds. “The only thing I’ve abandoned is the notion that anything I’ll do will be pop music. I’m a niche guy. I’m not looking to get invited to the Met Gala.

“You’ve got to come in with some sort of idea. A title is great because you can write something about that. A riff is like, ‘Okay, then what are we going to say?’ Then you’ve just got to have a conversation. You try to find a broader concept and try to make it something that’s personal to you that will also be personal to your audience.”

Elsewhere, Bonamassa has explained the unlikely story of his "Royal Albert" Les Paul that was locked under a staircase for 50 years and cost him $190,0000, and has praised the versatility of Stratocasters, likening them to Swiss army knives.

He's also offered players his best guitar-buying advice and rebuffed claims that picking the right amp for a gig has cost a fortune.

Feedback was once a problem to be avoided like the plague — that is until a few inventive guitarists began to use it effectively in their stage shows and even in their recordings.

Some, like Pete Townshend, discovered how to harness its power by searching for new guitar techniques.

“I'm afraid I was an arty little sod and I was actually experimenting,” he told Guitar Player when asked if his early innovations were the result of genius or dumb luck. “It shows that radical experimentation really is worth pursuing, because even though it might feel stupid and pretentious if you do discover something new, it's your property and you're identified with it forever.”

For others, feedback was a happy accident. That includes the Beatles, who chanced upon feedback in the studio when Paul McCartney's bass note caused John Lennon's Gibson J-160e electric-acoustic guitar to vibrate and generate feedback through the amplifier it was connected to. The result became the introduction to their hit 1964 single "I Feel Fine."

And then there's blues legend Buddy Guy, who learned about feedback while playing electric blues in Chicago in the 1950s.

“In Chicago then, we didn't have stages,” the 88-year-old tells NPR. “We'd always go in a corner and play. They had jukeboxes during their breaks, and they would play tunes. And that's how I learnt, by listening to other people, greats — Muddy Waters, [Howlin’] Wolf and so on.”

It was during this period that the guitarist's lightbulb moment came.

While on a break, Guy left his Fender Strat still plugged into an amp that was still turned on. As he says, there was no stage, so his electric guitar was exposed to the venue’s audience.

“A lady passed by, and her dress tail hit the G string, and it just stayed there with distortion for about 20 minutes,” he recalls. “We were just in the corner playing. And she got up from her table to probably go get a drink or use the bathroom or something like that. And I said, ‘Wow, I forgot to cut my guitar off.’

“It was right in tune with the particular tune that was playing on the jukebox. I'll never forget that. I went up, and it worked with me, and I've been doing it ever since.”

In that moment, his mindset switched, and feedback became a tool in the arsenal; something to embrace and utilize, particularly when it came to guitar solos. He’s expressive with it, taming it like a lion under his command.

“After I found out it would stay and distort that long, I just went up one day and played and stood right there where it was, and it worked,” he concludes.

Jimi Hendrix, in particular, would take great inspiration from Guy’s use of feedback as did many others, including Jeff Beck, Robert Fripp, and My Bloody Valentine, have followed in their wake.

Derek Trucks is one such player to have learned a great deal from Guy, and he says playing with him in blues clubs before he hit his teens proved a vast education.

“What I remember about Buddy Guy is that when he wanted to, he would bring the band down to a whisper," Trucks recalled last year. “I could hear the amps humming.

“I remember that discipline and that use of dynamics just being a huge thing that went off in my head. It’s powerful when you can bring things down to that level, but still hold the intensity. Then, when you take the lid off of it, it’s a big trip that you've taken.”

Guy has also been dishing out his best blues guitar tips to Guitar Player and revealed the one question he's sick of being asked by interviewers, delivering feedback of a very different kind.

Ryan Coogler's new high-budget move Sinners puts 1930s blues and horror on a wild collision course, and its soundtrack, which features Buddy Guy, Christone "Kingfish" Ingram and Alice In Chains' Jerry Cantrell, has been masterminded to be as historically accurate as possible.

Set in the Mississippi Delta in 1932, the film stars Michael B. Jordan who plays twin brothers who, upon returning to their hometown, cross paths with a supernatural evil. The score plays a pivotal role in its storytelling and treats the history of the genre with the utmost respect.

Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson (The Mandalorian, Tenet, Oppenheimer) was sent Robert Johnson and Tommy Johnson recordings for references and ultimately wound up recording much of the soundtrack on three 1932 Dobro Cyclops resonator guitars, which Jordan's protagonist also plays onscreen. Getting hold of those nearly 100-year-old instruments, however, proved exhaustive.

“I was able to find three of them in the world,” he tells Classic FM. “One in London, one in Nashville, and one in L.A. Playing it with a slide, you use the guitar almost like a voice. It creates this beautiful note and gives you a lot of variety on how you can play.”

Göransson also worked closely with blues producer Lawrence "Boo" Mitchell, whose Royal Studios in Tennesssee became the base of operations. Mitchell introduced the Swede to a cluster of the other musicians who would stamp their mark on the soundtrack, including Guy and Ingram, to help bring what, for Göransson is a project that means a huge deal.

“My dad is a guitar teacher, so when I was about six or seven years old he started giving me lessons. Then when I was eight or nine I heard [Metallica’s] 'Enter Sandman' for the first time and that's when I got really passionate about music,” he explains.

“It was kind of my own thing. My dad was into the blues and I was into heavy metal, [even though] at that age I didn't even understand that like all music, even heavy metal, comes from the blues.

“It's something that I think came out in this score, and it's a very personal score,” the Swedish composer continues. “It starts mostly acoustically. I wrote almost the entire score on [the 1932 Dobro], and then, as the story develops, it transitions into heavy metal, orchestra, strings and big drums. So the guitar tones transitioned from acoustic to electric.”

One key scene in the film — minor spoiler alert — which took several months to film showcases the then-and-now of the blues. It shows how the stylings of Robert Johnson and company originated in Africa and morphed, over time, into funk, and far beyond. It’s a scene, he says, that unfolds “in a surreal kind of dreamy state,” and provides a powerful history lesson for those unaware of how much of a cornerstone the blues was for genres that followed it.

Like Göransson, Coogler had found himself drawing lines between his musical loves and those of the generation before him, which inspired him to write the film. Across its 138-minute playtime, it explores the appropriation of Black music and culture via colonialism.

Alice in Chains were, strangely, a key driver in his wanting to explore that theme.

“I started listening to it, bro, and I was like, ‘This shit is like what my uncle used to play’: the blues,” he told The Breakfast Club [via Metal Hammer]. “I’m listening to the guitar riffs and what they’re talking about and the passion they’re singing with, and I’m like, ‘That’s odd.’ I dug into the research, man, and that’s exactly what it is: it’s just blues music sung by white people.”

As a result, Cantrell features on “In Moonlight” alongside Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich. His contribution saw him taking a portion of the score and “writing a song out of it” with the haunting track a collaborative effort.

Speaking of his involvement in the film, Buddy Guy — who features on "Travelin'" and plays Sammie Moore — has said he used the opportunity to fulfill the wishes of Muddy Waters and B.B. King that he helps “keep the blues alive”.

Sinners was made with a lavish budget of around $90 million, meaning the Dobros were likely a drop in the ocean of the film’s expenditure. The movie has already amassed nearly $300 million at the box office.

What if Jethro Tull never turned prog?

That question got its answer in 2002 when the original blues quartet lineup regrouped for the career-spanning Living With the Past film.

For the first time in more than 30 years, longtime frontman Ian Anderson reunited with guitarist Mick Abrahams, bass guitar player Glenn Cornick and drummer Clive Bunker to perform a brief set of standard blues tunes. The results showed a very different group from the progressive-rock outfit we've come to know and love through albums like Aqualung, Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play.

It was a sight many fans through they'd never see. After all, Anderson and Abrahams couldn't see eye to eye on Jethro Tull's musical style. Their first album, 1968's This Was, was, as Anderson described it, "sort of progressive blues with a bit of jazz." He saw no future in it.

Abrahams, on the other hand, was a hardcore blues guitarist and a key figure in shaping the band's early, blues-heavy focus. But after This Was, he declared himself "fed up with all the nonsense" and left to create his hardcore blues group, Blodwyn Pig.

"The blues were certainly there in the case of Mick Abrahams,” Anderson told Guitar Player, reflecting on the guitarist's short stint in the band. "That was his background. He was very much blues and rock and roll — and very much American music,

He astutely adds, “If someone’s doing something that I feel is really not working or not right for the record, then I will hopefully politely convey that to them before they expend too much energy going down that approach.”

It's no wonder Abrahams departed with little love left between him and the band. As Anderson’s recent GP chat proves, he was an iron-fisted bandleader from the get-go and was in no mood to simply echo music already floating through radio airwaves.

“I don’t think I would want to have a guitar player whose sole interest and influence was Black, American folk music,” he says matter-of-factly. “You might call it the blues, but to me, it’s cultural misappropriation.

Abrahams’ departure paved the way for Martin Barre's arrival, with a brief cameo from Tony Iommi, who featured with the band at the Rolling Stones' Rock & Roll Circus along the way.

But as Anderson and Barre began to sow the seeds of what would prove a fruitful and innovative songwriting partnership — via some ‘seat of his pants’ first shows alongside Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck — the rest of the founding members would soon peel away.

Cornick blamed musical differences for his parting, and Bunker a relentless touring schedule. By 1971, Anderson was the sole founding member left.

So,when he got the old band back together for what he called a reunion of the “little old blues band Jethro Tull,” he was left in a reflective mood.

“When we first started playing, there would be three, five, six people in the audience,” he says to the camera, a glass in his hand. “We would play shows and people just look at us, go uh [shrugs], and ignore us.

“We would pack up and go home back to our parents in some cases, or my chilly bedsitter in Luton in my case. It was actually damn depressing. You thought ‘Is this it? Is this being a professional musician?’ It was tough.”

To reiterate the bleakness of the band’s humble early days — and perhaps to prove that there is a sense of humor rattling around beneath his tough-boss exterior — he ensured their reunion felt like it did all those decades earlier.

“A few unlucky audience members,” he writes, “have been co-opted to attend and look suitably bored — just like the bad old days when we first played together as an unknown new group.”

The Jethro Tull people know today, and the one that just released its 24th studio album, is a world away from the band that bored British pubs of the late ‘60s. But without those trials and tribulations, they may never have gone down in prog rock folklore — or any folklore for that matter.

Cory Wong has divided opinion among his Instagram followers after revealing his strict criteria for what he says makes someone an “advanced guitarist.”

Wong says it's vital for guitarists to be intrinsically acquainted with their fretboard and know the location of different notes across every string.

“Gentle call out to the folks that consider themselves advanced guitarists,” he says in the video posted to his Instagram. “If you can't do this exercise, I would not consider you an advanced guitarist.

“Why?” he adds. “Because you should know where all the notes are on a guitar.”

To that end, he lays out a challenge for his followers, asking, “Can you play me a C on every string?” before repeating the exercise with G and Bb at an impressively quick pace. (The latter exercise reveals his guitar isn't completely in tune, which is pretty a low bar to clear.)

The concept is simple, and it’s easy to understand why Wong places so much importance on players being able to hit a certain note on the fly without having to stop and think about it. It demonstrates that players are at one with their instrument, be it an acoustic or an electric guitar.

Wong doesn't include technique as a barometer of a player’s expertise. Regardless, he says his criterion is “a hill I’m willing to die on.”

As you might expect, several comments from his followers show that not everyone is on board with him.

One naysayer pointed out that Stevie Ray Vaughan would likely fail Wong's test. The reader notes that the late bluesman — largely accepted as one of the world's greatest players — did not know the fretboard with such a level of detail. He adds fuel to the fire by saying “a nice vibrato” is far more important.

Wong retorted with his “guarantee” that SRV would pass with flying colors, adding, “I think it’s important to know the roads you’re driving on”.

However, Wong's challenger has a point. As Stevie Ray told Guitar Player in his 1984 cover story he wasn't schooled in theory. For him, feel came first.

When asked about theory vocabulary, Stevie replied, “I don’t know any of that stuff. I just look for things that sound right.”

He said that when playing on David Bowie’s iconic “Let’s Dance” record, he used his ear — not his brain — as his guide.

“Most of the time, I'd listen to a couple of run-throughs while he was doing his vocals, to get an idea of where the song was going," Stevie said. "Then I'd just figure out in my head where this Albert King lick or that Albert King lick would fit.”

Other commenters point out that even the best players have composed songs using complex chords without knowing their names — yet another rally against Wong's "theory first" argument.

Guitar teacher John Huldt, meanwhile, adds that, of all the world's musicians, “only guitar players pride themselves on not knowing how music works,” believing that to be at their detriment. It implies a rhetoric that all violinists, for example, would not struggle with this challenge because of the culture of mastering the instrument.

Another user provided some useful hints for players wanting to level up, with tips for finding octaves and the "one string down, five frets up" trick for finding duplicate notes.

Perhaps most damning, some have accused Wong of gatekeeping.

Says one user, “You are better than this."

Wong is best known for his incredible right-hand technique and water-tight funk rhythms, but he’s also a thoughtful improviser. His understanding of where notes can be found on a fretboard at any given moment plays a key part here. That’s why he has brazenly laid down the gauntlet to the online guitar community. For better or for worse.

Indeed, unlocking the fretboard can help players achieve a newfound freedom on the instrument, making it far easier to find their voice and avoid duff notes when jamming. Whether this is the only requirement for a player to rise through the ranks or not is a discussion that will likely rage on for far longer.

Molly Miller has become a force over the past several years, not least for the vibrant lead lines and rhythmic grooves that have graced her work with the Molly Miller Trio and her performances with Jason Mraz.

In this lesson, Molly unlocks elements of her guitar style by sharing six of her favorite licks derived from the modes of the major scale and the melodic minor. Her guitar tone is simplicity itself: Molly plugs her Gibson ES-335 straight into a clean amp, using the neck and middle pickups and a touch of reverb. For a similar sound, dial in a clean tone and select your neck or middle pickup (or both if you have a Strat-style guitar). For a more traditional jazz guitar sound, try rolling off the guitar's tone control.

In this video Molly brings her phrases to life using techniques such as hybrid picking, finger slides, hammer-ons and pull-offs. She also combines single-note melodies with chords, a style of self-accompaniment that works particularly well in a stripped-down band where the guitar is the main harmony instrument. Playing lead lines on a clean-toned electric guitar can feel exposing, but it's a good way to measure consistency and musicality.

To keep you on your toes, all the licks are in different keys and a couple are in different time signatures (3/4 and 4/4). All of the examples are performed without a click but are strongly rhythmic (having consistent inner timing is vital for all musicians). Once you’ve learned and mastered these six examples, challenge yourself to play them in different keys so they're versatile for your own music making. The only lick that is key specific is example six, which uses the open second string (B), but you can change this to suit your own musical scenario.

Ex. 1: E Mixolydian (E7) Lick

Here Molly outlines the E7 chord sound by linking the chord tones (E-G#-B-D) with chromatic notes. The interplay between the minor 3rd (G) and major 3rd (G#) is a classic blues trick which Molly uses several times. Click on the video below to watch her play example 1.

Ex. 2: D Lydian Dominant (D7#11) Lick

The D Lydian Dominant scale (D-E-F#-G#-A-B-C) is the fourth mode of A melodic minor (A-B-C-D-E-F#-G#) and works well over a D7 chord. It's similar to the popular D Mixolydian (mode 5 from the G major scale), but the augmented 4th (G# note) is what makes it different. To outline the sound of the D Lydian Dominant, Molly groups together the minor 7th (C), root (D), major 3rd (F#) and augmented 4th (G#) to create a moveable whole-tone pattern. The lick is finished off with three-note chords that evoke the mode's unique sound. Without going into too much detail with chord-naming conventions, an augmented 4th (#4) is the same as an augmented 11th (#11), hence the chord being D7#11 and not D7#4. Click on the video below to watch her play example 2.

Ex. 3: G Lydian (Gmaj7#11) Lick

For this major 7–based lick, Molly uses hybrid picking (pick and fingers together), which makes playing it easier. To help you articulate the notes well, the picking directions are positioned under the tab (i.e. down pick, a = third finger, m = second finger). Notice that for the majority of this, the sound could easily be considered as G major (G Ionian), but the final chord is where spice is added, as the C# note clearly outlines the sound of G Lydian (G-A-B-C#-D-E-F#). Click on the video below to watch her play example 3.

Ex. 4: E Dorian (Em6) Lick

This uses the E Dorian mode (E-F#-G-A-B-C#-D) to create a flowing jazz-style line. The key color of the minor-oriented Dorian mode is the major 6th interval. Here, it's the C# note that flavors E Dorian. Notice the way Molly targets the C# in both the lines and the three-note chords, adding brightness to the minor sound. Click on the video below to watch her play example 4.

Ex. 5: G Dorian (Gm6) Lick

Molly heads into funky territory here by using G Dorian (G-A-Bb-C-D-E-F) and a 16th note–based rhythmic feel that shines with numerous syncopations. The Db/C# notes are assertive "blue" notes (i.e. the diminished 5th), which add further attitude to the phrasing. Click on the video below to watch her play example 5.

Ex. 6: B Ionian (B major) Lick

This final example is ear catching due to the amount of sweet-sounding 6th intervals, which evokes B Ionian (B-C#-D#-E-F#-G#-A#), also known as B major. Hybrid picking will greatly help you play so many string jumps at this speed. Use a down pick on the fourth string's low notes and the second finger (m) to pluck the open second string. These picking suggestions are shown under the tab. With three-note groupings played against a 16th-note rhythm, the syncopated patterns are sure to catch everyone's attention. Click on the video below to watch her play example 6.

Think you’ve heard the most jaw-dropping hardcore blues solos of all time? We don’t think you have until you’ve heard every solo on this list of what we consider the 50 greatest badass blues guitar solos of all time.

Let’s face it: Thousands up thousands of great blues solos have been played on the electric guitar, so you can imagine how daunting it was for us to narrow our selection down to just 50. For starters, we siphoned off more than a dozen artists and solos that have already been so widely celebrated that they hardly need additional mention. After all, who isn't already hip to Clapton's extraordinary solo on "Crossroads" or Jimi's on "Red House"?

We also excluded a few legendary players who were renowned for their acoustic guitar solos, but did little of note once they switched to electric, such as Tampa Red, along with several well-known guitarists that played fantastic electric blues, but didn't really take solos, like John Lee Hooker. And early on we decided not to include seminal acoustic blues players like Robert Johnson, Son House and Blind Willie Johnson, both because their numbers are too great, and because in most cases they played unaccompanied, and therefore didn't "solo" in the same sense as the artists on our list.

After fighting over which guitarists should be included, GP editors Matt Blackett, Art Thompson and Barry Cleveland enlisted additional aid from four blues-savvy contributors — Teja Gerken, Jimmy Leslie, Adam Levy and Michael Ross — and each member of the team was tasked with choosing the particular solo they wanted to spotlight. Whether you hail us as brilliant or bash us as bums, we at least hope that you'll dig reading this as much as we did writing it.

"Ohio" — Dan Auerbach (Black Keys)

Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach is never flashy, but he's naturally poignant, and the fuzz freak is largely responsible for the past decade's dirty blues resurgence. Auerbach eschews prominent guitar breaks, and almost never strays past the pentatonic box. "I'm not much of a solo guy," he told GP in his February 2012 feature. But I do love 'rips." Auerbach really rips near the end of the single "Ohio," which was released independently from 2010's Brothers. The Akron native's vibrato quivers like the shivers of a cold Midwestern winter. Auerbach eventually engages a wah, induces feedback, and then climbs up the fretboard with flurries of tremolo picking until he reaches a dramatic climax. —J.L.

"Deep Feeling" — Chuck Berry

Even though he recorded for Chess records, home of Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf, Charles Berry is not known as a blues guitarist but rather as one of the inventors of rock and roll. Nevertheless, this instrumental, released as the B-side to "School Day (Ring! Ring! Goes the Bell)," is a straight 12-bar blues. Well, maybe not completely straight, as Chuck throws in a V chord where you don't expect it, and, oh yeah, he performed it on an unusual pedal-steel guitar — thought to be a Gibson Electraharp. The country- style string bends might have been played by anyone, but the wolf-whistle slides are pure Berry. —M.R.

"Stormy Monday" — Dickey Betts (The Allman Brothers Band)

Half of one of the greatest guitar teams of all time, Richard Betts' job description involved going toe-to-toe with the genius of Duane Allman night after night. At Fillmore East, on an evening recorded for posterity, he had the unenviable task of following Duane's incendiary solo on the blues chestnut "Stormy Monday." After Duane comes Greg Allman's jazz waltz organ solo. As the band breaks it down from there, Betts begins his sliding, squeezing and screaming licks that build into a masterpiece of soul, lyricism, intonation and tone that give away nothing to his legendary partner. —M.R.

"Red Dog Speaks" — Elvin Bishop

How about some greasy slide playing over a slow blues in E? That's exactly what Elvin Bishop dishes up on "Red Dog Speaks" (from the album of the same title) and as a bonus, he describes his ax (Red Dog) in the song's lyrics. Want to hear a 1959 Gibson ES-345 Stereo really wail? Wait for Bishop to say, "Speak, Red Dog," and hang tight, as he unleashes a soulful solo that combines fretted notes and fluid slide playing in a relaxed, in-the-pocket manner that puts style and class ahead of showboating. —T.G.

"Albert's Shuffle" — Mike Bloomfield (Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper & Stephen Stills)

When Michael Bloomfield appeared on the scene with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in 1964 no one had ever heard guitar playing quite like that, nor did any previous blues album have a printed exhortation to "play this record loud." Indeed, Bloomfield's excitable, ahead-of-the-beat soloing had more to do with rock energy than blues mystery. It wasn't until 1968's Super Session, featuring Bloomfield with Al Kooper and Steven Stills, that Bloomfield settled into this pocket of more traditional blues playing, while retaining the desperate energy that set him apart from the traditionalists, and gave him his distinctive voice in the first place. —M.R.

"Blues Deluxe" — Joe Bonamassa

Bonamassa began his professional career when many lads are being Bar Mitzvahed. His early blues work was that of an impressionist: his solo on "Long Distance Blues" from 2003's Blues Deluxe is Joe doing Eric Clapton. In the decade since, Bonamassa has melded his influences and made them his own, honing a style of diamond precision playing and to-die-for tone. This slow blues from Jeff Beck's first solo record (itself a cover of B.B. King's "Gambler Blues") starts off with three minutes and 50 seconds of soloing that take you from B.B., through Clapton and Eric Johnson, all inflected with a heavy dose of Bonamassa. — M.R.

"Cry" — Doyle Bramhall II

If ever there was a guy to get a handle on the SRV attitude and fire without copping Stevie's licks, it's Doyle Bramhall II. On this slow 12/8 number, Bramhall gets all kinds of righteous Strat tones, including spooky tremolo, clanging semi cleans and a positively massive exploding-amp lead tone. He does a killer, thematic break mid-tune but saves his best stuff for the end of the song. For the outro solo, he coaxes awesome, howling feedback before leaning into his powerful bends that are jam-packed with emotion. His note choices and phrasing as fresh as always, due in part to playing lefty-strung righty, but Bramhall's super-deep pocket might be his greatest asset. —M.B.

"Okle Dokie Stomp" — Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown

You can hear echoes of the big-band era in Brown's recordings from the 1940s and early '50s. It's in the instrumentation— with an ensemble of horns, upright bass, and a drummer driving spang-a-lang on his ride cymbal. Rock-and-roll was about to happen, but hadn't quite. Music from this in-between period is sometimes called "jump blues," and Brown's instrumental "Okie Dolde Stomp" is a first-rate example. T- Bone Walker's influence is apparent here, particularly in a lick that Brown repeats: an up-bent 4 on the third string followed immediately by a 5 on the second string. Still, Gate had his own thing, and it's a whole lot of fun to listen to. —A.L.

"John's Blues" — Roy Buchanan

In 1971 PBS aired a documentary: Introducing Roy Buchanan a.k.a. The World's Greatest Unknown Guitarist, and the world's perception of what a Fender Telecaster could do was forever changed. Buchanan wrenched human cries and animal squeals out of this dead simple guitar design. His style of blues melded James Burton's chicken pickin' with Albert King's expressive bends, definitively illustrating the deep connection between country and blues. It is all here in "John's Blues" from his first record. This is the guitar tone and technique that inspired Danny Gatton, Gary Moore and Jim Campilongo, as well as causing Jeff Beck to dedicate "Cause We've Ended As Lovers" to Buchanan. — M.R.

"When My Train Pulls In" — Gary Clark Jr.

The second flight on the second track from buzz bluesman Gary Clark Jr.'s diverse major-label debut, Blak and Blu, is a gnarly fuzz/ wah solo that kicks off hissing. "We recorded that track first and cut it live in one take," the Epiphone Casino enthusiast revealed in his January 2013 GP cover feature. "I had my Fender Vibro-King, and stomped on all of my pedals for that solo." It peaks when Clark launches into a Chuck Berry–like lick at the 12th fret, and then starts incorporating the G at the 15th fret and the F# at the 14th fret on the high E string. "I'd been experimenting in that range," Clark revealed. "I played that lick over and over to build momentum. We were eager to prove ourselves, and there was an overwhelming sense of 'Let's go for it!’ “ — J.L.

"Feelin' Bad Blues" — Ry Cooder

In interviews over the years, slide guru Cooder has shared some juicy details about his hot-rodded guitars and unusual rigs. It's tempting to tag a particular pickup, compressor or amp when trying to pinpoint the source of his mystical sound, but let's face it — it's a touch thing. That's most apparent in his nakedest recordings, like this laid-back guitar-and-dolceola duet from the Crossroads soundtrack. Cooder has always shunned picks, and this cut shows just how adept he is with his bare hand. Working in open-D tuning, Cooder blurs the line between rhythm and lead. You may be inspired to take up a bottleneck and start practicing — or quit altogether. —A.L.

"Chicken in the Kitchen" — Robert Cray

Though he owes much of his success to a fairly slick, mainstream crossover sound, Robert Cray can play no-holds-barred blues with the best of them. Recorded live, "Chicken in the Kitchen" (on Cookin' in Mobile) not only features some of the most beautiful, sparkly, out-of-phase Strat tone you'll ever hear, it also has not one but two great solos. Number two, especially, is full of incredibly cohesive lines with blindsiding surprises, occasionally getting close enough to the edge that you start worrying whether Cray will make it out alive. —T.G.

"Shake 'Em on Down" — Luther Dickinson (North Mississippi Allstars)

The North Mississippi Allstars lived up to their name when they brought tribal elders R.L. Burnside, Jim Dickinson, and the whole neighborhood to Bonnaroo in 2004, where they documented history in progress. Luther Dickinson pays homage to the past while dragging classic Hill Country blues kicking and screaming into the present via groovy Gibsons, mighty Marshalls, and occasional echo and other effects. He does it to death with a Les Paul in open D on Fred McDowell's "Shake 'Em on Down," which kicks off Hill Country Revue as wickedly as it did the Allstars' debut CD, and, in turn, their career. When Dickinson lays a slide to the treble strings while thumbpicking the bass strings and incorporating optimal open ones, he brings the honeysuckle sweet and the dirty primitive together in glorious harmony. —A.L.

"Blues After Hours" — Hollywood Fats

Fats is one of the more obscure players on our list, but if you've got an appetite for the blues then you really need to put some Fats in your diet. His style was somehow brash and classy all at once. Most frequently seen wielding an ES-335, he was an itinerant sideman who did stints with the Blasters, Muddy Waters and Canned Heat. For raw blues power, though, it's hard to beat his playing with his own Hollywood Fats Band. On the sultry "Blues After Hours" (from Deep on America / Larger Than Life, Vol. 2), he delivers a textbook example of how to build a solo from a humble beginning to a searing climax, and then how to wind it back down for the subsequent vocal verse. —A.L.

"Prison of Love" — Robben Ford

The word "uptown" is sometimes used to describe blues with more jazz-inspired harmonies — chords beyond the common I, IV, and V. Ford can take the blues farther uptown than just about anybody, as this minor-key shuffle from his 1992 record Robben Ford & the Blue Line illustrates so colorfully. He stays in familiar pentatonic territory for the first four bars, and then shades his phrases with canny chromaticism in the next four. He plays even more ear-tweaking lines in the next few measures before taking the express train back downtown for a gritty finish. —A.L.

"The Change in Me" — Eric Gales

Based on a riff that borrows heavily from ZZ Top's "La Grange," Eric Gales' "The Change in Me" is a hard-driving rocker of a tune, and Gales plays highly melodic fills to provide a dynamic counterpoint to the crunchy theme. Demonstrated by several YouTube clips of the song, Gales varies the actual solo considerably from one night to the next, often employing a modern-sounding, delay-drenched high-gain tone and a great ability to allow the solo to alternately breathe and burn. —T.G.

"Bullfrog Blues" — Rory Gallagher

It's no easy task to choose a favorite Rory Gallagher blues solo, but his slide work on "Bullfrog Blues" is a serious contender. Leaving his trademark Strat behind (several YouTube videos show him playing a Gretsch Corvette), Gallagher gets to work in open-A tuning, with a capo on the second fret. The solo itself uses licks in the I, IV and V chord positions at the fifth, seventh and 12th frets, and it isn't unlike Gallagher's acoustic bottleneck work, though a ferocious amount of gain yields one of the meanest electric slide tones that you'll ever encounter. —T.G.

"Please Send Me Someone to Love" — Amos Garrett

In 1974, Amos Garrett's solo on Maria Muldaur's "Midnight at the Oasis" was all over the AM airwaves. It gobsmacked guitarists worldwide with its triple-string bends and unusual phrasing — but the previous year Garrett had already blown minds with his spectacular solo on this Percy Mayfield classic. The Canadian guitarist navigates the changes more like Benny Carter than Albert King. His trademark double-stop bends and large-interval, two-string pull-offs, facilitated by his huge hands, are nothing short of astonishing. The two choruses here are perfectly constructed, and were, in fact, composed. To improvise something this flawless would be superhuman. — M.R.

"Blues Newburg" — Danny Gatton

Danny Gatton had such a great grasp of country, jazz, rockabilly and blues that it's tough to pin down when he was at his bluesiest, but this tour de force is as good a place as any to start. It's got only about one percent of what the guy was capable of, and that means excellent bends on the high and low strings, amazing single-note and chord melody, wicked vibrato, faux pedal-steel licks, blazing runs, breakneck chromatic passages, volume swells, and lots, lots more — all played with impeccable time. Boy, do we miss this guy! —M.B.

"Sure Got Cold After the Rain Fell" — Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top)

Billy G. is one of the finest blues players around, but ZZ Top's boogie-oriented repertoire tends to overshadow a tune like this slow-burn gem from the 1972 album, Rio Grande Mud. The song isn't in the classic 12-bar mold, but Gibbons decorates the 12/8 groove as if it were. Deploying a moderately distorted tone for the licks he plays over a clean arpeggiated rhythm figure, Gibbons shows his usual mastery of note choice and placement, building his solo to create maximum emotion during the song's extended outro. — A.T.

"The Blue" — David Gilmour

You could say David Gilmour has never played anything that wasn't the blues — after all, Pink Floyd was named for blues musicians Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. Gilmour's tone and vibrato have always been touchstones of the modern electric blues sound. Though he played a number of awesome solos with Pink Floyd, "The Blue," from his own 2006 record, Islands, deserves mention for several reasons. Reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac's "Albatross," the solo quickly pushes the envelope with evocative whammy pedal work, which continues throughout, seamlessly woven into classic Gilmour licks delivered with the gorgeous tone and pocket that make him a guitar legend. —M.R.

"Lonesome Dave" — David Grissom

Already astounding when he made the classic Live at Liberty Lunch with Joe Ely in 1990, Grissom has refined his style through the years in stints with Storyville (featuring the SRV rhythm section) and the Dixie Chicks. It is all there in "Lonesome Dave," from his first solo record: the Danny Gatton organ pedal point, the pedal-steel licks (Grissom taught himself to do B-Bender licks without a B-Bender), and the ZZ Top grind. Imagine Bluesbreakers Clapton and Billy Gibbons meet Brent Mason and Albert Lee and you get the idea. Throughout, Grissom's innate taste and musicality let him be jaw dropping without being flashy. —M.R.

"How Blue Can You Get" — Jeff Healey

Healey's blindness and unconventional playing style never hindered his ability to turn in amazing guitar performances, one of many being "How Blue Can You Get" from his posthumous 2008 release, Mess of Blues. Healey burns white hot here, pulling off wickedly fast lines and dramatic bends that defy the physical realities of holding a guitar flat on his lap. And if that's not enough, visit YouTube to also see what a gifted jazz trumpeter Healey was. What an incredible musician! —A.T.

"Blue Guitar" — Earl Hooker

Earl Zebedee Hooker, first cousin to John Lee, recorded this instrumental on May 3, 1961, and It was released the following year. A short time later, Muddy Waters overdubbed vocals onto the track, renamed it "You Shook Me," and released it under his own name. Now a blues staple — covered famously by Page and Beck among many others — Hooker played his immortal slide licks in standard tuning, which was novel for a Chicago blues guitarist at the time. He went on to experiment with echo, wah and other effects, attracting the attention of Jimi Hendrix for one, but this early recording, sans Muddy, showcases one of the most original stylists of all time. —B.C.

"It Hurts Me Too" — Elmore James

No doubt, "Dust My Broom" is slide guitarist James' signature song, but there's so much more mojo to be found in his cover of Tampa Red's "It Hurts Me Too,” if only for his sound. (You can bet your best bottleneck that Ry Cooder has listened to this recording more than a few times.) James takes full advantage of this throaty tone, letting his notes speak in vocal-like phrases. Whatever there is to say in open-D tuning, James says it here, with astounding character and confidence. Blues doesn't get much bluer than this. —A.L.

"Texas" — Eric Johnson

This session for Johnson's 2010 sonically superior release Up Close features guests Jimmie Vaughan and Steve Miller (vocals), who dropped by his studio and inspired him to rise to the occasion. The famously fickle and laborious Strat cat played a '59 Les Paul Standard dubbed "Buddy" through a Fuzz Face and a 100-watt Marshall on the solo—a first-take monster in the moment. Brandishing a sizzling tone and feeding off of Miller's vocal setup, Johnson's searing first solo soars to the heavens. Perfectly timed major thirds sound surprisingly blue, and EJ incorporates just enough diminished and chromatic runs to add spice without pushing too far beyond the boundaries of the blues. —J.L.

"Playing Around" — Lonnie Johnson

Alonzo "Lonnie" Johnson is best known to guitarists for his groundbreaking acoustic six- and 12-string work in the late '20s, including his celebrated duets with jazz guitarist Eddie Lang in 1929, and his 1927 recording "6/88 Glide," featuring what is now widely considered to be the first flatpicked single-note guitar solo. But Johnson's career continued for decades after that, and in 1947 he began playing electric. You'll find great electric solos scattered throughout his subsequent tunes, but the brief but rocking romp on 1949's "Playing Around" notably foreshadows moves that early rockers such as Eddie Cochran, Cliff Gallup and Scotty Moore will explore a few years later. —B.C.

"Born into This" — Wilson T. King

"I was listening to Eddie Hazel on 'Super Stupid' and Jimi's Band of Gypsys when I recorded this," Wilson T. King says, "and I wanted a future blues style of real whiplash out of the bends and tones." Well, he got it, while wielding a '69 Strat with DiMarzio Fast Track pickups played through an early '80s Marshall 2104 2x12 combo cranked way up, and using only his fingers. King is known for pushing the blues envelope in new directions, and this particularly passionate example of that predilection would, no doubt, elicit a big grin from Jimi. —B.C.

"Chief's Blues" — Greg Koch

Although he's known for his monstrous chops, Greg Koch displays tasty restraint for most of this slow blues, and the results are simply delicious. Much as the native people did with the mighty buffalo, Koch uses every part of the scale on these amazing seven minutes, blending major, minor and chromatic lines brilliantly over the changes and milking several notes out of every bend. It's hard to pick the coolest part, but a strong contender would have to be his jarring, pre-bent, triple-stop descending groans. This solo has it all: space, dynamics, humor, sensitivity and bombast, with damn near every lick being of the "must steal" variety. Yes sir! —M.B.

"Wind In Denver" — Sonny Landreth

Louisiana's singular slideman delivers a pinnacle performance on this track that only appears officially on his landmark live recording released in 2005, Grant Street. He tells GP that he achieved the gargantuan stereo tone playing a '66 Strat in open D minor tuning (D, A, D, F, A, D, low to high) through a Matchless HD30 with a 2x12 onstage and a 100-watt Dumble Overdrive Special pushing a 2x12 located offstage in a former freezer storeroom for maximum ambiance. "I was going for that wonderful 'Voodoo Child' vibe that still gets me every time I hear it," Landreth says. Sonny probably has the most evolved technique in slide blues history, and on "Wind in Denver" he delivers a host of hallmarks such fretting notes behind the slide and coaxing heavenly harmonics with a level of unbridled moxy that makes the solo truly monumental. —J.L.

"A Quitter Never Wins" — Jonny Lang

The baddest blues showcase on then teen sensation Jonny Lang's 1997 major-label debut, Lie to Me, is still his showstopper on 2010's Live at the Ryman. In his July 2010 feature he told GP that Albert Collins inspired him to become a Tele player, and Tab Benoit inspired him further. "When I heard his tone I freaked out — the Thinline Tele with humbuckers became the staple for me after that," he said. GP relayed that Lang eventually placed a P90 pickup between the two humbuckers, and he features the classic single-coil during the fiery intro and first solo on Tinsley Ellis' tune at the Ryman. He cuts into the second solo with sheer reckless abandon. —J.L.

"I'm Going Home" — Alvin Lee (Ten Years After)

It's hard to think of Alvin Lee without taking note of his solo in Ten Years After's "I'm Going Home." The band first recorded the song on its 1968 release Undead, and it upped the fast shuffle's octane level during its performance at the Woodstock festival. Playing his iconic "Big Red" 1959 Gibson ES-335, Lee takes the unusual step to start his solo accompanied only by drums for a full 24 bars, playing without the comfort of harmonic guidance from the band. He then proceeds to play one of the most blistering and fluid, Chuck Berry–influenced solos you'll ever come across. —T.G.

"Out of My Mind" — John Mayer

Regardless of whether or not you're into John Mayer's songwriting or vocal style, it's hard to argue with the fact that the guy has chops. Sure, he may not be the most original player to come along, but whether on acoustic, electric, lead or rhythm guitar, he is clearly in command. Eschewing the slick production found on much of his work, Mayer takes a decidedly more raw approach on the live recording of "Out of My Mind" (on Try!), giving his ES-335 a pentatonic workout with great vibrato, slightly overdriven, fat tone, and an excellent climax before resuming his vocal duties. —T.G.

"Still Got the Blues" — Gary Moore

Moore emerged from early British fusion and then spent his career alternating between turning out hard rock and blues records. It would be easy to go with any of his incendiary solos on a straight blues tune, or one of his letter-perfect recreations of Peter Green on Blues for Greeny, but "Still Got the Blues" is pure Moore. Okay, this cycle of fifths progression is not "the blues" per se, but its sharp-five-to-five resolution is blues approved. More importantly, the yearning in the gorgeous melody that Moore milks on the final solo, before tearing the roof of the sucker, is what the blues is all about. —M.R.

"Steroids" — Oz Noy

Oz Noy can get so far outside so quickly that it's easy to think that what he plays is not blues. Despite the funk and fusion elements that he throws in here, the fact is he's playing wild, vibey, blues-on-acid on this tune. We could all add a heaping helping of freshness to our 12-bar playing if we adopted one iota of Noy's phrasing, note choices, or fearlessness that are so abundant on this song. —M.B.

"Three Time Loser" — Bonnie Raitt

While blues and contemporary pop are not always an easy coupling, Raitt has been interlacing the two for decades now with consistently cool results. This track from her 1977 album, Sweet Forgiveness, is a high-water mark. The chord progression here has nothing to do with the customary 12-bar form, but Raitt's supernatural slide work infuses the song with deep blues feeling. Nobody else can make a quarter-tone glissando sound so expansive, and her overdriven Strat tone burns the way whiskey does going down your gullet. Listen close to hear her widen her vibrato and pluck harmonics in the final ride out. Pure swagger. —AL

"Greasy Kid Stuff" — Kid Ramos

Known for his explosive lead work on a Tele or Strat, and the ballsy sound he gets from a Vox AC30 with a stand-alone reverb, Kid Ramos has played with the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Roomful of Blues, James Hannan, and the Mannish Boys. He has also recorded several solo albums, including 2001's Greasy Kid Stuff, where he makes the instrumental title track jump with his fierce attack and fat tone. Check out YouTube to see Ramos tearing it up in a variety of situations, including on a baritone Tele with Los Fabulocos on "Burnin' the Chicken." —AT

"It's My Own Fault" — Otis Rush

Rush takes three solos on this track from the 1967 album Chicago/The Blues/Today!, Vol. 2. His first, in the song's intro, is amazing from the get-go, not because it's a display of guitar fireworks, but precisely because it's not. Phrase by phrase, Rush uses his Epiphone Riviera to masterfully tell a story here. After a couple of vocal verses, he ventures higher up the neck, ramping the thrill factor. His final break is just four stop-time measures to set up the saxophonist's solo, with a staggering impact-to-bar ratio. Rush was a southpaw who played his righty-strung guitar upside down, with the high E on top. This gives his bends an unusual sound because he's pushing the strings where most guitarists would pull, and vice versa. —A.L.

"Blues for Salvador" — Carlos Santana

Santana may not be though of as a blues player per se, and "Blues for Salvador," the title track of his 1987 solo album isn't a standard blues form. But by playing nearly six continuous minutes of intensely bluesy melodic work Santana laid down a masterpiece that helped him win a Grammy in 1989 for "Best Rock Instrumental Performance." Robben Ford later covered the song, and Santana has played it in concert with Buddy Guy, the Wayne Shorter Group and Mexican guitar star Javier Batiz. —A.T.

"Blue on Black" — Kenny Wayne Shepherd

When Louisiana native Kenny Wayne Shepherd broke big while still a teenager in the mid '90s, he was heralded as the next Stevie Ray Vaughan. Of course, nobody is ever the next SRV, but Shepherd's highly rhythmic Southern Strat histrionics clearly owe a debt to Austin's patron guitar player. And like SRV, KWS has a knack for turning stock blues licks into memorable, melodic moments via clever phrasing. You know a player — especially a bluesman — believes he's made a statement when he sticks close to the recorded version of a solo onstage night after night, year after year. "Blue on Black" is case in point. It's hook-laden licks get under your skin and stick in your brain whether it's the original version on 1997's Trouble or 2010's Live! In Chicago. —J.L.

"Three Hundred Pounds of Joy” — Hubert Sumlin

Released as a single on the Chicago-based Chess label in 1963 — with Howlin' Wolf leading the session — this is Sumlin's nonpareil. He plays teasing fills at the top of each verse, with an assured attack and shuddering vibrato, finally launching into his solo midway through the song. He begins with an unusual high-E string bend from the minor 3 up to the 4, falls a few steps back down the minor-pentatonic scale, then repeats the phrase twice more with slight variations. It's a spunky start, and he never relents. In a genre where clichés are an easy pitfall, this is one of the most unique solos ever rendered on a popular recording. —A.L.

"Wild About You Baby" — Hound Dog Taylor

Famously called “the Ramones of the blues" by The Village Voice, Hound Dog Taylor and his band the House Rockers played a ferociously raw kind of boogie blues. Based on the familiar "Dust My Broom" slide riff, "Wild About You Baby" (from Hound Dog Taylor and the House Rockers) is all about a game of call-and-response between the vocals and the guitar. When the time comes for Taylor to solo, he doesn't stray far from the main riff, and his note choices are perfect examples of a solo taking the place of a vocal line. —T.G.

"Slow Blues" — Mick Taylor

Released on Mick Taylor's self-titled post–Rolling Stones solo album, "Slow Blues" is a study in how to avoid mere noodling while essentially blowing for the entire duration of an instrumental track. The fact that "Slow Blues" uses a very cool, modified 12-bar progression with a distinctive bass line and chorused-sounding 13th chords taking the place of an actual melody certainly helps in keeping the tune engaging, but Taylor's throaty, reverb-drenched tone and dynamic playing keep the tune moving forward in a way that is not to be taken for granted in such an extended solo exploration. —T.G.

"Jesus Is Everywhere" — Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Tharpe may not have considered herself a blues artist, favoring gospel songs as she did throughout her career. But when you listen to her live 1964 recording of "Jesus Is Everywhere" — from The Authorized Sister Rosetta Tharpe Collection —the gap between sacred and secular doesn't seem so wide. Armed with a thumbpick, and backed by a bassist and drummer who sound like two thirds of the best rockabilly trio you've ever heard, Tharpe digs in hard on her early '60s SG-style Les Paul Custom. The first half of her solo is relatively straightforward, but when she starts swerving and swooping you'll wonder which way is up. Glory, glory! —A.L.

"Whisky Train" — Robin Tower (Procol Harum)

Like Hendrix, to whom he is overly, if not unfairly, compared, Robin Trower's blues roots run deep. Fifty years into his solo career, he still makes records worth listening to, these days filled with more classic blues tunes than ever. Still, the best example of his rooted playing might be "Whisky Train," a tune he wrote for Procol Harum's fourth album. The song could be considered one long cowbell-driven guitar solo, with Trower riding one of the great guitar riffs over and over, occasionally answering brief Gary Booker vocal sections with short modern blues excursions that preview his style as a solo artist. —M.R.

"I Know" — Derek Trucks (The Derek Trucks Band)

"Nearly everything I do on guitar has a foundation in blues music," says freak of nature Derek Trucks who primarily plays a Gibson SG tuned to open E with a large Dunlop Pyrex slide through a cranked Fender Super Reverb to conjure his signature, liquid fire tone. The way Trucks furthers Duane Allman's electric bottleneck style via Eastern-influenced microtones is mesmerizing. The Derek Trucks Band's 2010 release, Roadsongs, is a supreme document. His "Key to the Highway" solo reaches the highest zenith, but "I Know" is extraordinarily interesting as it progresses from droning raga into a swinging R&B feelgood number with one of the most musical, uplifting major-2 blues solos ever recorded. —J.L.

"Miracles & Demons (Part 2)" — Eddie Turner

A master at creating spooky atmospherics — such as those infusing several Otis Taylor records — Turner is also a funky and hard-rocking psychedelic bluesman in the Hendrix tradition, as evidenced on this track. Rooted in a repeating 6/8 figure played on dual resonators, with Turner's haunting vocals and wicked, wah-inflected, heavily echoed solo intertwining throughout, the tune showcases his ability to simultaneously wail and conjure uncanny sonics via Custom Shop Strats, a '59 tweed Deluxe, a Budda Twinmaster, a Roland RE-301 tape echo and other magical implements. —B.C.

"Tuff Enuff” — Jimmie Vaughan (The Fabulous Thunderbirds)

The other Vaughan is as cool as the other side of the pillow, especially compared to his fire-spitting brother. They both favor Strats, but the similarities pretty much end there. Jimmie rarely plays fast or dirty, and is never flash. He mostly sticks to stabbing single notes within a traditional framework, giving them plenty of space to breathe. Jimmie Vaughan reminds us that less notes can certainly mean more, and the solo on the title track from the Fabulous Thunderbirds' 1986 album, Tuff Enuff, is a shining example. Vaughan doesn't usually do effects, but in this instance shimmering reverb and delay add remarkable depth to his sparse phrasing. It's hard to find better evidence of a pure blues solo building a perfect bridge to a crossover hit. —J.L.

"Call It Stormy Monday" — T-Bone Walker

Chances are, you're not old enough to remember the impact this song made when it was originally released in 1947. (By way of perspective, Clapton was only two years old then, and the first Stratocaster was still seven years off.) So you may listen now and find yourself thinking, What's the big whoop? I've heard other guitarists play that stuff. The big whoop is: Walker invented that stuff. Without his influence, there might've been no B.B. King, no Chuck Berry, and no Gatemouth Brown. Go back to the source and listen, taking note of Walker's rhythmic sophistication. Sure, there are eighth-notes and sixteenths and some triplets. But such subdivisions were never more elastic than in Walker's hands. — A.L.

"Ball and Biscuit" — Jack White (The White Stripes)

Jack White kicked the blues straight in the nuts on "Ball and Biscuit" utilizing a bizarre, ferocious sound the likes of which had never before been heard in the history of America's senior guitar genre. No "real" bluesman would have imagined such blasphemy as a Detroit garage punk playing a plastic guitar (a 1964 Montgomery Ward Airline) with a fuzz-drenched, Whammy-infected tone on a blues romp. White made it his signature tone, and his signature guitar album, Elephant, landed him his first Guitar Player cover story on the June 2003 issue. The bombastic trio of solos throughout White's sideways statement "Ball and Biscuit" play like a blues from hell trilogy. — J.L.

Billy Gibbons was 20 years old when he formed ZZ Top, and the power trio has defined his life ever since. With the dawn of the ‘70s just over the horizon, Gibbons had shaped his band around two of his biggest influences ± Cream and Jimi Hendrix — in 1969, and his legacy might not still be being talked about today if it weren’t for the way they inspired the bright-eyed guitarist.

“Make no mistake, ZZ Top didn’t just happen upon becoming a trio because it was easier; it’s a lot more challenging,” he tells Classic Rock of the band’s origins. “Hendrix and Cream were at the top of the chart as far as ZZ Top’s book was concerned, and it was through those early influential days of attempting to emulate those sounds and styles that brought us together.”

The band’s foundations were laid while he was still strutting his stuff in his pre-ZZ outfit, Moving Sidewalks. Before the British blues explosion had properly ignited, Gibbons was turned on by the psychedelic sounds of Roky Erikson’s 13th Floor Elevators, molding a very similar sound. Their less-than-subtle nod of a single, "99th Floor," paved the way for a change-making touring opportunity.

“That release led to additional airplay and touring opportunities, including teaming up with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, who became our friends and mentors,” he told Guitar Player last year. “As I remember it, I played a Fender Jazzmaster through a Vox Super Beatle, and a Hohner harp through a Fender Bassman.”

Seeing Hendrix up close sparked something in Gibbons. It’s an experience he relives with CR.

“We toured with him in 1968. It was a real mind-bender and eye-opener, to say the least,” he remembers. “As most now know, Jimi Hendrix, either consciously or subconsciously, made a decision to invent things to do with a Fender Stratocaster that it had not necessarily been intended for. He did it very well, too.

“I was 18 at the time,” he details, “and somehow the organizers saw fit to book us in the hotel room across the hall to his room. That was convenient to ask him the obvious question: ‘How do you do that?’

“I remember that this was a long time before hotels had stereos in their rooms, and each day there would be the delivery of a rather heavy and cumbersome hi-fi console player that was the size of a small Buick. It was dutifully installed for Hendrix to be able to listen to his favorite discs.

“The one I really remember him playing the ass off,” Gibbons goes on, “was the first Jeff Beck Group album, Truth. Hendrix was mad about it, totally OTT [over the top] about Jeff’s playing.”

There’s a strange bittersweet irony in Hendrix’s Beck obsession. In search of a more receptive audience, he soon traveled to the UK and proceeded to blow everyone who laid eyes and ears on him away. So much so that Beck, a man who the guitarist was humbly obsessed with, considered quitting the business entirely.

“Oddly enough, Hendrix was all too willing and ready to include blues licks in his arsenal of guitar offerings, which had fallen out of favor in the States with most black entertainers,” Gibbons adds. “I got to play onstage with him at the time, but it was what went on behind the scenes that really captured the magic of the moment.”

And so, by the time the Moving Sidewalks disbanded a year later, Cream were at the height of their powers, and Hendrix was making serious waves on the other side of the Atlantic. Gibbons was keen to channel some of that energy into his new endeavor, with the things he learned from his hangs, on and of the stage, with Hendrix stuffed tightly into his back pocket.

Eric Clapton’s ZZ Top legacy can be seen slung around Gibbons’ shoulder every time he steps on stage; his ‘59 ‘Pearly Gates’ Les Paul. Seeing Clapton’s Sunburst Gibson Les Paul on the back cover of his Bluesbreakers record prompted him to track down the out-of-production guitar and own one for himself.

He too had taken a leaf out of Clapton’s book and decided to grow his fingernails, and that left its mark on his beloved electric guitar.

“What I hadn’t counted on was that the fingernail of the little finger started digging into the pickguard, leaving scratches,” he says.

Today, the Reverend is still going strong and says new music from ZZ Top – the first since bassist Dusty Hill’s passing – and his solo project, the BFGs is on the way. Without Hendrix and Cream’s influence, Gibbons may have never hopped off the psychedelic rock train and be the man that is so celebrated today.

Austin-born guitarist Eric Johnson has reflected on his hometown’s knack for spawning next-level guitarists and how the city, with its “little artistic pockets,” helped shape them.

Certain places have come to be intimately associated with specific styles of music, from the Mississippi blues to the Seattle grunge explosion of the ‘90s. Austin, meanwhile, is often celebrated as the world’s live musical capital, as well as for its ties with the blues. And Johnson has always been in awe of its most famous export, the late Stevie Ray Vaughan.

During a sit-down interview featured in the latest issue of Guitarist, the '"Cliffs of Dover" composer offers a taste of what the Austin scene was like when he cut his teeth there. He’s also revealed the one skill SRV boasted that Johnson feels deserves as many accolades as his abilities on electric guitar.

“When I look back now, I realize there are certain little artistic pockets that are known for certain things, like new art,” he says. “Austin had its own thing; its own artistic pocket. A lot of the players there had that blues influence. No matter what kind of music they did; whether it’s country or country rock or blues or jazz, there’s an element of blues in what they do.”

Perhaps there’s something special in the water supply. It would go some way to explaining SRV’s revolutionary talents.

“Stevie was fantastic,” Johnson continues, paying his respects. “I got to do some touring with him and hang with him a little bit. He was a wonderful guy and obviously a tremendous talent. Just the way he could give it up and go out there and get out of the way of himself and channel this great, beautiful force and be a really, really fine singer in front of all the powerful music that he did.

“I really admire that, probably just as much as his guitar playing,” Johnson continues. “I think he was a great singer and he wrote really good songs. He had the whole package. I learned a lot from that — trying to put emotion into what you do. He certainly was a master at that.”

SRV's legacy was cut all too short when he died aged just 35. His brother, Jimmie Vaughan has spoken to Guitar Player about the impact his death had on him.

“I’m still in denial about it. It was terrible. I had to deal with losing my little brother,” he said only last year. “The thing is that he died on the same day that our father died, four years earlier. Imagine how that felt when I was calling up my mother to tell her. I guess she thought I was calling up to tell her I was thinking about her on that anniversary. And I have to tell her that Stevie got killed?

“It’s a life-changing experience... I didn’t know what to do or say about it when it happened. I almost didn’t even want to play anymore. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.”

While SRV enjoyed a sizable reputation, he once went on record to lament that Johnson's stature wasn't bigger. “If Seven Worlds had come out at the time it was ready, instead of being held back, he would have been as big as Jeff Beck,” Vaughan said.

The record was released in 1998 but had been recorded two decades earlier, in the wake of his old band the Electromagnets splitting up.

Meanwhile, footage of Stevie jamming with Albert Collins and Jimmie Vaughan in 1989 has recently resurfaced, after being feared lost for 20 years.

Our search For the big beat led us to John Lee Hooker's house in Redwood City, California. At 72, Mr. Hooker can proudly look back on a career that began in Clarksdale, Mississippi, during the 1930s. Unlike his contemporaries Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, Hook didn't play roll-and-tumble Delta jukes, choosing instead to launch his career in Memphis, singing gospel and blues. He moved to Detroit after World War II to work by day in an auto plant and make the rounds of Black Bottom clubs by night.

Nineteen-forty-eight's "Boogie Chillen'," his first R&B hit, inaugurated the most prolific recording career in postwar blues history. (It's estimated that between 1949 and '53 alone, Hooker cut some 70 singles on 24 different labels, using a dozen different names to avoid contractual problems.) Other big R&B hits followed: "Crawlin' King Snake" in '49, "I'm in the Mood" in '51 and "Dimples" in '56.

Hooker made his first foray into Europe in '62 and returned to find that "Boom Boom" had become his first crossover hit. Covers by the Animals and other British Invasion bands helped him win white audiences at home. Since then, Mr. Hooker has moved to California, recorded armloads of albums, and associated with some of the most respected names in rock and blues.

As it was in the beginning, so it is today: The very heartbeat of John Lee Hooker's music remains his unique songwriting, powerful voice and down-home, propulsive guitar. Like Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins, and very few others, he remains a musical law unto himself, still specializing in the sparse blues and infectious boogies that first rocked the globe more than 40 years ago. As Miles Davis expressed it after a 1990 session, "John Lee, you the funkiest man alive. You sound like you buried up to your neck in mud!"

Mr. Hooker received us graciously, sat us on his couch and tuned his electric guitar to open A. He quickly launched into an instrumental version of "Boogie Chillen'," each foot tapping to a different beat.

Watching you play "Boogie Chillen’” close up, it seems like what you're doing is very simple, and yet it's very difficult for others to get it right.

For me, it's simple, but.... [laughs]

That was one of the first songs you recorded.

Uh-huh.

Did you write it when you were a young man in Mississippi?

[nods]

How are you counting time with your feet?

[laughs] I couldn't tell you. It just boogie. Just go on with it. I don't need drums.

You often played that way in Detroit, using your feet instead of a rhythm section.

Yeah. That first come from my stepfather, Will Moore, from whom I learnt to play when I was 13. John Hammond do it too.

Do you usually keep your guitars tuned to a chord?

Not really. But I use open tuning. "Boogie Chillen'," that's in open A. For "Boom Boom," I got to rekey [retune] it. [Rich Kirch, John's backup guitarist, details: "John plays almost everything in open E, except to boogie, when he usually tunes three strings up so he's in open A.]

What do you look for in a tone?

I look for a deep, gutty feelin'. I don't use picks, so I can get that deep gut feelin'. People ask, "How you get that?" It's just there. There's a lot of people try to play real fast chords — do do do do da — that's not the blues. It's synthetic. It ain't the hard, solid blues. It's a lot of speed and everything. It's got no feeling to it. You sit down and play some [whispers] funky, funky guitar. Take your time! Don't rush it. Just let it come flowin' through you. I can play guitar so funky until it bring teardrops to your eyes. It got that funky funky tone. I'm just me.

While most musicians stick to 12-bar blues, you seldom follow that format.

That's for the birds. People just feel — that's the way the blues supposed to be played. The way you feel those notes or scales. Shut your eyes, and then you'll know what you're doing. I know what notes to hit. I know what notes not to hit.

I can do a 12-bar perfect— perfect. Oh, yeah. If I did then, I wouldn't be known for John Lee Hooker. See, I'm known for not doing it. When I'm just playing to myself I do it: 8, 12, 4, 16, 24. But ordinarily I don't do it, because it would take away a lot of my feelin'.

You cannot learn this in a book. You feel it here [points to heart and head], not by what you got writing on a piece of paper. Throw that paper away! When I walk into a studio, I don't need all that stuff. I can go into a studio and in two hours' time I can record five or six songs. Sometimes it take some people three or four weeks to record one or two songs!

Sometimes it takes a band years to make one album.

[laughs] Yeah! It do! I can make 10 albums in a year, and they come out perfect too.

Can you make up songs on the spot?

Yeah. They're on the spot. I get that good feelin'. But one thing I don't like — what really bugs me — is anybody tellin' me how to play. What to do and how to do. Don't do that.

Has that been a problem on your recent Chameleon and Charisma albums, since so many of the songs feature guest bands? When you recorded with Santana, for instance, you were working in a pretty straight format.

Heavy duty. We get together on it. They know how I do it. With "The Healer" we did two takes—it come out perfect. "Stripped Me Naked." [laughs]

What were you thinking when you wrote that?

Well, I got stripped naked once. She took the house, the Cadillac. And the money in the bank—she took that too.

Did Carlos come to you with the music for that song?

He come to the house, and we set around. Like, he talked and we go with things. Just me and him. I go to his house, we lay the foundation, and then he pass it on to the guys. And it come out perfect every time. "Stripped Me Naked," that took just about two takes.

Have your recent albums had a big impact on your career?

Very, very big impact, because it was all-stars. But this one I got comin' out now, I'm not gonna have all-star everyone — just me and my band and some local people. Carlos will probably be on it. We already got a thing called "Chill Out" on the shelf, so we'll probably use that.

I'm in the studio now workin', gettin' some pretty good stuff. A lot of the stuff I did a long, long time ago, which is new to the kids now. Some of my classic stuff, but the kids never heard it, so I'm doing it over. I always did want to do it that way. Now that I got a chance, I'm gonna do a lot of it all over, like "Sugar Mama," "Boom Boom," "Dimples."

Those songs turned a generation of kids on to your music during the 1960s.

That "Boom Boom," that "Dimples" — turned a whole generation. It went to Europe and told Europe, and then come back here and turned the whole universe on. Then different artists took to doing that song, "Boom Boom" — Bruce Springsteen, all them. Big Joe Turner, he was do" Dimples."

Is it a compliment when people by to play like you?

Yeah, it is. Because I know I'm doing something to be loved. If he didn't like it, he wouldn't try to do it! So it's very complimentary to me.

Some guys feel very protective . . .

Not me. I love people that do my stuff. Robert Plant, he did "Dimples." He sing it all the time. He's one of my favorite people. Nice guy. Every time he come over, he try to look me up. He flew me out to New York once to meet him. Paid for my hotel and everything. Had a lady with him called Big Maggie Bell, from Scotland. Met her.

But my hero is Bonnie. Me and her just like this [holds two fingers together] I guess you know that. We real close. I've known Bonnie Raitt over the years, and I'm a guest on her tour in L.A.

A lot of your old material has recently come out on CD.

Yeah, you know they comin' out now because we're doin' big things. They just throwin' out everything now—boom. Rhino Records did one.

That has many great tracks, but it's missing "Mad Man Blues."

Yeah. Ohhh, I love the "Mad Man Blues." [Claps time and sings "I love the Mad Man Blues" and "I'm gonna kill somebody" to the original melody.]

Do you play blues when you're alone?

Yeah, around the house I do. Yeah. Sit down in my room and just go with things I want to do, some of that old stuff that I'm trying to revive again and bring back.

Do you work on your own guitars?

No. The little light stuff I do, like adjusting the bridges and raising the saddles. You get beyond that, no.

Why do you play semi-hollowbody guitars?

Well, I like 'em. You got to do that now because the generations come and go, and the young generation, they like to dance and they want it loud. But you still can make it funky loud.

You could play a Fender

I could, but I don't want to. I'm plainspoken, and I don't want that. This is what I like. You don't got to bring me around the bridge. This is what I like — boom. I like the tone. I always did like Gibson. Even the old style, I did.

Why do you have a guitar with B.B. King's name on it?

I saw it, and I went and bought it. He's a old buddy of mine. I said [to the salesman], "Give me that one." He give me a price — he said, "It's a lot of money" I said, "I don't care! Just give it to me." He said, "Who are you?" I said, "I'm John Lee." He said, "Oooh," and he come down on the price when he found out who I was. I was signing stuff in his store.

What's the greatest amplifier?

I know who got the greatest name — Fender. I got one sittin' right there [points to an old Concert]. I got another one back there, man, a Bedrock — boy, that thing is powerful! Whoo. It's not famous, but oh, it's powerful.

But Fender is a brand name, and it's the name that sells, and that's what people go for. How do you set the amp controls? Different songs, different settings. I don't like it real sharp. I like it kind of medium. Not too much bass, not too much sharp. I get different settings.

Do you like reverb?

Not really. On some of my new stuff I did. About two weeks ago, I got reverb on a couple of my really funky tunes, like "Sugar Mama." Carlos Santana says a man's tone is his face. He know. Albert Collins' tone, for instance, is spiky and sharp. It is. Oh, it's a thousand miles apart from mine. It's good, but it's his thing. You talkin' in a different world.

Do you like B.B.'s tone?

Whoo! Yeah! Are you kiddin’? Oh, yeah. My old buddy. And Albert King is funky. That old man is funky! He put that pipe in his mouth and rear his head back. He's a good man, and he gonna do things his way or no way! [laughs] He be workin' on his own bus right now.

You've used some of the same backup musicians for many years now.

Oh, yeah. My guitar player Rich is nice, nice. Whoo, he's a good guy! Boy, that guy loves me and I love him. I'm the one that brought him to California. He'd been in Chicago all his life. I been knowin' him about 12 years along. I got the guy a ticket, brought him out — he been with me ever since. I talk to him every day. He's a heck of a nice guy and good guitar player. Jim Gayette — oh, he is funky! He's a funky bass player, and funny too. He keep the band laughin' all night.

When you were starting out, would you play for a long time at night?

Before I become famous? When I was a kid? If my parents would let me I would. You hear about guys playing in Delta juke joints from nightfall until morning. No, I didn't do that. No. I would've, but I didn't. [laughs]

What was Hastings Street like when you first came to Detroit?

That was the best street in town. Everything you wanted was right there. Everything you didn't want was right there. It ain't no more now. It's a freeway now, called Chrysler Freeway. But that was a good street, a street known all over the world.

But I didn't just play on Hastings — I'd play any club on Russell, Chene, Jefferson. In them days, I was so into my music, but I had to work to survive. I was a janitor [in the Ford Rouge plant]. I pushed a broom.

What do you remember of your sessions at United Sound Studio in Detroit?

On West Grand Boulevard and Second? Still there. I would always use my amp, just plug into my old funky amps. It was Ampeg or a Silvertone.

Was your first electric guitar the Les Paul you're seen with in some of the early pictures?

Really, it was. Really good one. Before that I had some round-hole pickups [for amplifying an acoustic guitar]. No, T-Bone Walker give me my first electric guitar. Then I thought that was the best I ever seen. It was a Epiphone [archtop].

Did you use an acoustic for early sides like “Mad Man Blues"?

Yeah, that's acoustic. I had an old Stella with a pickup called DeArmond, and it fit across the round hole. You slide it in. I thought at that time it was a great, great sound.

Was Newport '63 your first big concert?

Never been so scared! My first big concert, yeah. Couldn't get my body to stop shaking!

You appeared with Muddy Waters there.

Yeah. I was good friends with Muddy.

Do you have any favorite memories of him?

Yeah, I do. I got so many I couldn't tell 'em all. He'd come to Detroit, he used to stay at my house. I had a big house in Detroit. Matter of fact, I own property there now. He never would stay in a hotel. Him and Jenny, his wife, would stay at my house. Little Walter would be with him. He was a sideman then, one of the greatest harmonica players ever lived. I think so. We would go on tour together sometimes, me and him and Little Walter,

Jimmy Rogers. Remember Jimmy Rogers? He had this old Oldsmobile, brand-new. And Little Walter was crazy, and he used to drive. Speedin' in it. He'd be boogeyinl And he'd be laughing 'cause I'd be nervous. Just a lot of good remembrances. Things I cannot ever forget. Muddy was a really good man. And he was just beginnin' to come into it really on, like I am now. Just beginnin' to climb up the ladder really high.

His last four albums were terrific.

They was. He was beginnin' to climb up to the top, and it's a hard climb. But, you know, you get there somehow. Some get there and some don't. I be one of the few giants at the top of the ladder. In my travelin' and living in God's world, I love people. My heart go out for people. I'm just a softie. I just give my heart to people, and how can I say no to the people that I know I should? I don't like hurting people.

We all like money, don't get me wrong, but it's not the greatest thing in the world, but we have to have it. Friendship, love, peace of mind, and health is the greatest thing in the world. You have to have money to survive, but — and a lot of us do — we can't let money get in the way of friendship and love and the people that put you where you at today. People put me where I'm at today. Weren't for those people, John Lee wouldn't be sittin' on top of the ladder. I'd be sitting down below.

And who put me there? The workin' people, the poor people go out and work five or six days a week, and come out to see me and go out and buy my albums, and stuff like that. Young kids. Old people. Them the people that got me there. Some stars seem to forget — well, they don't forget, but when you get to the high, they say you forget the people that blazed the path for them, the people that put them there. Wasn't no people, you wouldn't be there.

So them the people I love. I love to go in them little small clubs, funky bars, get up there singing. I walk into a lot of little clubs, and they surprised to see me in there. Say, "What're you doing in here?" And I say "I'm just like you. I'm here to have some fun and get down with you." I don't think about I'm a big star, or I got money. I don't think about that. I'm out there at a place I like, get down and have a beer with you. I don't look at me being a big star. I really don't. I really don't.

Did you ever see Elmore James?

Once. I was in Chicago. I went to the hotel where we sit there and talk. He was a nice man. A lot of people copied him too. Lot of people.

Out of the younger generation of the blues singers, who was my pride and joy? Stevie Ray. I know that kid — I used to go around Austin, Texas, before didn't anybody know about Stevie Ray and Jimmie [Vaughan]. Every time I go there, he sit in and play. We used to talk. He used to come to the dressing room, come to my hotel room. Those days he used to wear a cap. To me, he was one of the greatest young blues singers. He could do anybody, probably — Albert King, Jimi Hendrix — do anybody's thing.

George Benson. He played jazz. I sit down and watch him do that. He had his own style — he did, definitely — but he could play anything else anybody could play. He'd say, "I'm gonna play you now," and he play me. And if he can play me, he can play anybody!

Who's come closest to playing like you?

Let's see. Eddie Taylor is real close. He can do it. Buddy Guy pretty close. He can play "Boogie Chillen" real good. He plays it on every show. Buddy Guy is playin' so well, and I'm so happy for him. He gettin' a lot of recognition that he should have had a long time ago, like us all should have got. He's such a beautiful person.

Do you admire John Hammond's playing?

Whoo! Who don't? Me and him together over the years a lot too. Now, he can play like me! [laughs] Yeah, he can. He say, "I'm gonna play like you now, just like you," and then he goes to playin' it and starts laughin’. I say, "If you was outside and you walkin' up, you think it's me in here playin'." He's a really nice gentleman. He's another easygoing person too. He love people. He's a softie. He talk to me about it a lot. We sit down together [imitates Hammond's voice]: "John, you know, you love people. We let 'em get away with things we shouldn't, but we don't want to hurt them." That's the way he talk. I said, "They think John Lee don't know any better, but I do. I just love people." You help people. You take 'em in. It all come back to you.

Perhaps the measure of a truly great man is how he treats people day in and day out.

Right! The little things in life, the love. I always believe in "it comes back to you if you do something good." I was taught that, and I think it do too. You do good deeds, somewhere in life it's gonna come back. You can do wrong so long, you gonna get it in some kind of way. That's my belief.

So I'm happy with my life. I had a good life, and I had a rough life — I've had both. I don't try to live in the past. I can't bring back those little things. I can't change the rough things that come through, so I look for the future. You can't live in the past — a lot of people try to live in a memory I live for today and for people today. This is a different world. This world changes all the time.

Buddy Guy has some 70 years of experience as a blues guitarist and has played his electric guitar on stages all over the world . From the two-string diddley bow he made as boy growing up in Louisiana to his first proper guitar — gifted to him by a stranger — to his rise in Chicago, where he was mentored by greats like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King and Guitar Slim, Guy rose to become a signature blues artist in his own right.

Guy fortified his innate guitar talent with a wealth of knowledge and skills he gained over his formative years. He then passed it on to players like Eric Clapton, who saw Guy onstage in England in the mid 1960s and was moved to form his own blues trio, Cream. And while Guy announced his retirement from the road with his 2023 Damn Right Farewell Tour in 2023, his influence lives on in a new breed of guitarists. That includes players like Gary Clark Jr., John Mayer and Johnny Lang, who learned to play blues authentically by watching — and learning — from the master, who honed his craft with a Fender Stratocaster in his hands.

As for Guy, his blues expertise came the hard way. He's a self-taught player, with no formal training—except for a couple of lessons with a high school music teacher who, to Guy's chagrin, couldn't show him the things he really wanted to learn.

"I moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to go to high school," he recalled to Guitar Player in our January 1999 issue. "And they had a music teacher there, and I thought, 'My God, I've got what I've always wanted. I'm gonna let this guy teach me how to play the guitar.'

"I went in, and the teacher showed me some scales, and I said, 'I don't wanna play that; I wanna play like this' — I had a Muddy Waters record and a John Lee Hooker record at the time. He looked at me and said, 'I can't teach you that.'

“So I said, 'Well, then I can't take a music class!'

“I was so excited by the way Muddy played the slide, how B.B. King squeezed the strings, and how Lightnin' Hopkins and T-Bone Walker played their things. I said, 'If they don't teach this in school, I've got to find it myself.'

"Nowadays," Guy continued, "young people have advantages that I didn't have. It wasn't until 20 or 30 years ago that you even saw blues written in music notation—they claimed they couldn't write it.”

One tremendous benefit that Guy did have — after moving to Chicago in 1957 — was seeing Chicago blues legends such as Muddy Waters, Wayne Bennett, Matt Murphy, and Earl Hooker when they were at the height of their powers.

But no matter what a musician's cultural advantages — or disadvantages — might be, Guy maintains that anyone with enough heart can play the blues.

"If you love the blues, you can play it. Every interview I've ever had, I get asked 'Can a white man play the blues?' I hate that question! It's a human being, man. If I had eight fingers on my left hand, then! would say, 'No, a white man probably can't play like me.'

“But these guys, man—the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, this young Jonny Lang, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck, to name a few — there's some things they do that I wish I had known.

"Look at athletes — boxers, football players, baseball players—they come in all sizes and all colors, and all those guys are great. Music is the same way. There's no advantage or disadvantage. If you want to learn this thing, man, and you love it the way I love it, you can do it."

Gary Moore could soon be honored with a statue in Belfast, hot on the heels of fellow Irish blues guitar great Rory Gallagher receiving a statue in the Northern Irish capital.

Gallagher’s statue has caused a little controversy in the city in which he often played shows — particularly during the Irish Troubles — after one crucial detail appeared to have been overlooked. It’s hoped that Moore’s statue will avoid a similar fate.

Plans for Moore’s (presumably) bronze immortalization on the streets of his hometown have been shared by Belfast’s Green Party councilor, Brian Smyth as the city looks to show a greater recognition of its musical heritage.

“Belfast City Council agreed to my proposal to carry out a land check of sites in the Cathedral Quarter for a potential Gary Moore statue,” he said in an Instagram post. “As a proud son of our city and East Belfast, he blazed a trail and has left a lasting legacy for rock and blues fans across the world.”

Gallagher, born in Ballyshannon, but raised in Cork, passed in 1995, meaning the statue's unveiling came just shy of 30 years after the fact. Belfast-native Moore died in 2011 leaving a legacy of work behind him that transcended across rock, blues, and jazz fusion playing styles as a member of Skid Row, Thin Lizzy, and a solo artist.

Smyth, it seems, wants to make up for lost time by recognizing the city's most beloved musicians.

“Gary was one of the greatest ever guitarists and deserves to be honored in his home city,” his post goes on. “We have never been great at celebrating our people who have achieved great success. It’s time to change that in relation to Gary Moore and tell his story for future generations of aspiring musicians in Belfast.”

The councilor has been collaborating with the Wild Frontier Memorial Project, established in Moore's memory, to raise €80,000 (approx. $83,202) of private funding for the statue.

Speaking to The Irish News earlier this month while highlighting the need for the funding, he called Moore, “probably the greatest guitarist to come out of Belfast.”

Gary Moore famously came to own Peter Green's "Greeny" Les Paul – now under the care of Metallica's Kirk Hammett – and even played it on a kid's TV show on a Saturday morning to promote his Wild Frontier album in 1987 as his sensational musicianship blew his peers away time and time again.

The electric guitar also starred on the iconic slow blues song, Parisian Walkways, a song characterized by some incredible sustain from the guitarist. In a 2007 interview with GP, he reflected on how a young Randy Rhoads became enamored with the song after seeing him play it love. He would pull from the song for his epic outro solo on Mr Crowley.

By the latter part of his career, 'Greeny' took a back seat as he “tried to get a modern, less high-gain version of that natural sound that Eric Clapton had in the '60s.” The revelation came during a 2009 chat with GP which also revealed the extent of blues greats have impacted his sound.

Speaking after his passing, former Thin Lizzy guitarist Eric Bell said of Moore: “His playing was exceptional and beautiful. We won't see his like again.”

Cream were a revelation when they emerged on London's blues scene in 1966. Until the power trio's arrival, blues guitar had typically been slow, intentional and emotional. Unlike others before them, Cream — Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker — brought rock and roll fire, flair and ferocity to the genre — along with a fair helping of jazz-inspired jamming — and in doing so helped change the game.

Yet despite comprising three superlative musicians — including Clapton, who had forged a formidable reputation with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers — Bruce believes the group was, from its start, destined to pull itself apart.

His comments — from a 2012 interview with Guitarist conducted two years before his death — centered on the supergroup’s creative apex, 1967’s Disraeli Gears.

“I think Eric thought he was going to have this little blues trio and he would be sort of like Buddy Guy standing out the front," Bruce offered. "And then I thought, Great, I can be a composer and get some songs out there. And I think Ginger just wanted to conquer the world, basically, like Genghis Khan or somebody. We had different ideas.

“Meanwhile, the management was thinking, ‘Let’s milk this for all it’s worth because it ain’t going to last. So let’s get them out there and make them play every toilet in the US for as long as they’ll last before they go barmy or kill each other.’”

What management never imagined, according to Bruce, is that Cream would not only become an influential blues-rock crossover act but also cross the pond and catch fire in America.

“[They] thought it was going to be an all-star band that would fill the blues clubs, and maybe be a nice festival attraction,” Bruce said. “They never thought it would spread; they never thought it would get to America; they never thought we’d have hit songs. They had absolutely no bloody idea. And when you look at it, it’s a miracle that it happened.”

Bruce was certainly correct about Clapton's aims. Seeing Buddy Guy perform live at London's Marquee Club in 1965 inspired him to sever ties with the John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and launch his own group.

"What [Guy's performance] said to me was 'This was possible,’” Claton recalled of the change-making show decades later. “If you were a good enough guitar player, you could do it as a trio. It seemed to be so free, you could go anywhere. With Jack in my filing cabinet, I was thinking about that as a way of breaking free.”

But Clapton's Guy-inspired foundation would form just one facet of the group's musical direction. Bruce was eager to take the blues to new places.

“Eric was really into the blues and he knew a lot of stuff that I didn’t know," the bassist said. "So I was being a bit presumptuous by saying, 'I love the blues', but I’d want to take it a step further and use the language of the blues as a way to write music for us. I always thought I could really change the world through music.”

in fact, both Bruce and Baker had jazz backgrounds, unlike Clapton. The late Peter Brown, who co-wrote lyrics to Cream songs like "White Room" and "Sunshine of Your Love," believed that helped Clapton elevate his playing to new heights.

“They didn’t put Eric down,” he said of Bruce and Baker. “They didn’t say, 'You don’t know enough about chords, or, You don’t know enough about jazz to play with us.' What they did say was: 'You’re a terrific player with terrific feeling, and if you play with us then this thing will happen. The magic will come.'”

The magic came and went, with Cream disintegrating after four studio albums, leaving behind an untouchable legacy.

Reflecting on what they left behind, Bruce mused, “I think you always would like another go.

“You’re never quite happy about it,” he said. “There’s definitely things that could be changed and, obviously you only hear the mistakes. But once it’s finished, it’s finished.”

Despite being just 18 years old, Grace Bowers is a shining light for the future of blues guitar. She’s been championed by the likes of Devon Allman, Margo Price, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, and Susan Tedeschi since releasing her debut album, Wine on Venus, last year.

Bowers' rise has been nothing short of meteoric, with her talents and fame belying her youthfulness. Having regularly posted clips of her playing on social media in recent years, the comments sections of those videos soon played host to some reputable names.

“My guitar heroes would start commenting on my posts,” she tells Classic Rock. “I’ll never forget the day that Brian May commented on one of them. That was when I had to step back and be like, ‘Wow, that’s wild.’ It was kind of crazy how things all just built up so big before we [Grace Bowers & the Hodge Podge] put a single song out.”

Impressively, Bowers already has nine years of playing beneath her fingers and says a certain top-hatted guitarist was responsible for drawing her to the instrument.

“Slash is the reason I picked up a guitar when I was nine,” she says. “I somehow found the 'Welcome to the Jungle' music video by Guns N' Roses,” she told Marty Music. “You know, Slash in that, with his Les Paul and everything. He looked cool. I wanted to look cool like Slash, so I asked my mom for a guitar."

The pair crossed paths at a show in July last year, providing a full-circle moment for her.

Hearing B. B. King’s "Sweet Little Angel" on the radio shortly after sent her on a voyage of self-discovery via blue music’s rich history.

“That’s the song that made me realize I love this, that I want to do this forever,” she says.

Yet, despite being drawn to the blues, Bowers is veering away from one of its archetypal trademarks. Wine on Venus is brimming with happiness and smiling riffs, rather than the tales of woe and stinging licks that typically define the genre.

“I don’t hate sad songs,” she tells CR, “but I don’t think I’ll ever write a sad song. Being in the studio with all those people, there’s no reason to be sad about anything. I think what came out in the music was how much fun we all had recording.”

Even when the core of a song comes from a place of hardship or tragedy, she finds light in the darkness.

“The title track was written about my nana and before she passed,” she reveals. “Before she died she would tell everyone not to worry because she’ll be drinking wine on Venus because it’s the brightest star. I like that idea, it’s so out there.”

Bowers has gone on to share stages with Dolly Parton and Gary Clarke Jr., and rub shoulders with Billy Gibbons, and Orianthi, earning her a Gibson endorsement at the tender age of 14.

Her fast ascent through the ranks, coupled with her age, has seen her face her critics but she’s intent on winning them over one gig at a time.

“I get disrespected before I even play,” the guitarist told Guitar World last year. “People take one look at me, a young female, and immediately get a thought in their head of what I am, and they don’t take me as seriously as they should.”

Shinedown's Zach Myers, Michelle Malone, Driver Williams (Eric Church) Lynyrd Skynyrd's Damon Johnson, Trev Lukather, Steve Stevens, and Mother Mother's Ryan Guldemond were among the stars to hail her 2024's best new guitarist in Guitar World's end of year issue.

Sue Foley is renowned for her dynamic electric blues playing. Even so, the Texas blues woman took a stylistic detour on her latest album, One Guitar Woman, by covering a range of styles, including flamenco, classical and Tejano — all on a nylon-string acoustic guitar — while paying tribute to female guitarists like Memphis Minnie, Maybelle Carter and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

“That’s the great thing about guitar playing,” Foley says. “There’s always a new mountain to climb. I tend to be restless and adventurous in general, and that certainly extends to my guitar playing. I’ve spent a lot of my life playing the blues, and I’ll always return to it, but there’s other kinds of music I still want to learn.”

Such as? “Well, jazz, for sure,” she says. “I can’t play jazz — yet. Harmonically, I’m really challenged. I know if I were to really try to stretch myself, that’s where I would probably try to go.”

Foley recently heard she's received a Grammy nomination for “Best Traditional Blues Album” on behalf of One Guitar Woman. It's her first nomination, and one that is clearly well deserved. She was kind enough to take some time from her busy schedule to offer choice bits of advice for Guitar Player readers.

“There’s a lot of technical tips you can get out there, but to me a big part of guitar playing is mental,” she says. “It’s funny how a lot of players can talk themselves out of trying something new or breaking out of their boxes. Just remember: There’s no rights and no wrongs. Play fearlessly and it’ll all sort itself out.”

1. Ask Yourself Big Questions

“Learning the fundamentals of blues isn’t that difficult, really. Once you familiarize yourself with how the I, IV and V operate in the circle of fifths, you’re in a good place. To me, those are the primary colors you need in order to paint a picture. But what I find fascinating about the blues — and much of it is mysterious, in a way — is just how many ways there are to express yourself using only a few colors.

“Blues music asks you some big questions, like, Who am I? What do the blues mean to me? What do I really want to say? It almost dares you to expand your mind and express yourself through your playing. It wants you to go to a deeper place all the time. I find that fascinating. To me, it’s a challenge every time I play, like, How am I going to play this solo and these licks that have been regurgitated countless times for almost 100 years in a way that sounds fresh and alive? How am I going to make them sound like me?

“Asking yourself these types of questions is as important as any kind of technical practice you undertake. I guarantee you, whenever you listen to the greats, you
can bet they’ve asked themselves these questions. I know this sounds kind of spiritual, but when you get down to it, that’s really the essence of the blues. This is music born from a certain time and place, and whenever we play it, we’re paying homage to those spirits and keeping them alive.”

2. Tone Comes From Your Picking Hand

“Of course, you need decent equipment to get a good sound — a good-quality guitar and amp, decent strings that aren’t too old. But the real secret about tone is that it comes from your picking hand. Your fretting hand is doing one kind of work, but for the most part it’s flowing in the same kind of general moment. But your picking hand is where you control your tone. It’s surprising to me that so few people really talk about it.

“When I was coming up, I spent a lot of time watching people’s picking hands. I used to go see Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown a lot, and he had this amazing right-hand technique. He didn’t use a pick, and he did all these really interesting flourishes using all his fingers. It was like each finger was a paintbrush that he’d run across the strings. He could play fast and wild, but when I’d watch his right hand, it was like he put no effort into it. It was all graceful swing. That’s where his tone came from.

“In a different way, there was Albert Collins. He had another great right hand, and his tone could slice your head off. He used his fingers, too, and he played with very light strings. The way he dug his fingers into his strings and pulled the sound from them, it was like sparks flew.

“These kinds of players made an impression on me, and I decided to do away with a flatpick. I use a Golden Gate thumbpick, which I take on and off. Mostly I just play with my fingers so I can feel the flesh on the strings. What I like about that is how intimate it feels — there’s nothing that separates me from each string. I can pluck each string lightly, or I can dig in and get tough. I can run my fingers softly across the strings, or I can hit ’em hard. Playing this way, my tone comes straight from my picking hand, whether I’m going through an amp or not.”

3. If You Play Electric, Try an Acoustic

“It’s easy to let your pickups and amp do a lot of the work for you, but if you want to expand your playing — and if you want a dose of humility — pick up an acoustic from time to time. I started on an acoustic, so I’ve always felt comfortable playing one. The way I generate sound on it is vastly different than on an electric guitar. The sound basically comes from my stomach, which is pressed right against the instrument.

“It’s an unforgiving instrument, which freaks a lot of people out. This is especially true if you’re playing a nylon-string acoustic, which I’ve been doing a lot of lately. Don’t expect it to have the same behavior and response as your electric. It’s a whole different animal. So right away, adjust your expectations and approach. You’re going on a new adventure.

“I would also recommend people either use a thumbpick or an open hand when playing acoustic. There are so many things you can do using your whole hand, and you can experiment in so many ways. But be patient. You’re going to have to take baby steps. I remember my first flamenco guitar lesson: I had been playing for a couple of decades and I thought I was pretty good. I went for my first flamenco guitar lesson, which was open hand, no picks, on a nylon-string acoustic. Between the time signatures and the techniques, it was like I’d never played guitar before. Believe me, it was a good dose of humility.

“The more I played on a nylon-string acoustic, the more I fell in love with its sound and feel. I surrendered to the sound and didn’t fight it. And what was cool was when I found I could use a lot of the right-hand techniques I learned and apply them to my Telecaster playing. My fingers just flew across the strings.”

4. Embrace Your Suckiness

“We all hit a wall with our playing sometimes. I got in a rut myself with my blues playing. I’d been out on the road, and I could play different styles of electric blues, but then I started to think, What else is there? That’s when I started to get into learning flamenco and classical techniques. It was this mountain I wanted to climb, and the only way to do it was through baby steps.

“Whether you want to learn a different style of playing or not, the important thing is that you can’t give into your fear. If you’re trying something new or difficult, you can’t get freaked out if you suck at first. Keep going. In a way, you have to be honest and sort of embrace your suckiness. Say to yourself, Okay, I really suck at this, but I’m not going to stop. Each day you’ll be a little bit better, and one day you’ll be able to say, Hey, I don’t suck anymore.”

5. Speak Through Your Instrument

“Music is a conversation, and if you’re a guitar player, you’re speaking through your instrument. Think about it: If you’re having a conversation with somebody, are you just going to blather all over them and yell at them? That’s not a very effective way of communicating. Better to sit back and wait until it’s your turn to speak, and when you do, try to add something meaningful to the exchange.

“If you try to adopt this attitude, you’re going to find that you don’t have to say everything all at once to make a point. Jimmie Vaughan once told me, ‘Solos are
like little paragraphs in a story.’ That’s a lesson I took with me, and it’s guided me through the years. I don’t need to blather on in my solos. If I have something to say, I’ll say it. If I don’t, I won’t. If I perform a ballad that just requires me to play a melody, is that really so bad? I think not. That’s what I need to add to the conversation.”

At 18 years old, Grace Bowers has talents beyond her years and is seen by many as the torchbearer for the next generation of blues guitar players.

Devon Allman, Margo Price, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, and Susan Tedeschi have all name-checked the rising star, who has wowed audiences at the prestigious Newport Folk and Crossroads Festivals in recent years.

Yet, despite her success, she says many people in the music industry instantly have dismissed her.

“I get disrespected before I even play,” she tells Guitar World. “People take one look at me, a young female, and immediately get a thought in their head of what I am, and they don’t take me as seriously as they should.”

“For the most part, I feel equal,” she adds. “But there’s been a lot of times when I feel disrespected or lesser, which is not cool. At the same time, being young and a girl is an advantage. There’s a lot of other people who are in that position, so I view it as an advantage — and a disadvantage.”

Bowers also had to shake off accusations that she’s backed by wealthy parents having self-funded her debut record Wine on Venus (with the Hodge Podge band).

“I’m still paying off the record we made,” Bowers clears up. “People online are like, ‘Her parents paid for it,’ ‘She comes from a rich background’ or ‘Her family was in the music business.’ None of that’s true.”

“With every single show I play, I’m not seeing any of that money because it’s going toward the record. That’s how much I believed in it.”

Ultimately, though, she’s shrugged off the negativity aimed at her and let her music do the talking. Nancy Wilson of Heart has said she has “a significant” voice on the guitar, thanks in part to her ability to produce “melodically conversational shredding as opposed to just wanking off”.

Speaking of the positive effects of her rise to stardom before being old enough to order a drink to celebrate it, she said: “I see people my own age in the audience, and their minds are blown. I’m making this stuff sound new to them.”

Joe Bonamassa is set to perform three special shows in Rory Gallagher's hometown next summer to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the blues great's passing. For Bonamassa, saying yes to the offer of celebrating the life of his “working class hero” was easy, but dealing with the pressure the occasion has put on him is proving less so.

“Here's this guy with long hair, a flannel shirt and he looked like he just came out of an auto factory playing some of the most gutbucket blues and rock you've ever heard,” Bonamassa had said of his first introduction to Gallagher while playing two of his most adored electric guitars earlier this year.

The chance to honor his legacy in Cork, Ireland, across three shows at the start of July is an exciting prospect, put in motion by the Gallagher family. It’s a move too that, in the wake of the sale of Rory’s iconic Stratocaster and a large portion of his other gear, shows that the family isn’t bequeathing its responsibility for keeping Rory’s flame burning any time soon. Bonamassa, one of the most celebrated and important bluesmen on the scene today, is the perfect man for the task.

“The idea came from the Gallagher family — Dónal [Rory’s younger brother and manager] and Daniel [his nephew and archivist] — and a gentleman from Ireland named Peter Aiken [promoter] who wanted to do something to celebrate next year’s 30th anniversary of Rory’s passing,” Bonamassa recently told Classic Rock. “When they reached out I said, ‘You had me at hello.’

“Then I thought about it and went, Shit, what did I just sign up for?”

When announcing the shows, Bonamassa had called the doubleheader — which has since been upgraded to three shows — “the biggest honor and challenge of my musical life.” He echoed that sentiment once more when speaking to CR.

“They will be,” he says. But there are caveats. “We’ve put together a great band featuring [bass guitarist] Aongus Ralston, [keyboardist] Lachy Doley, and [drummer] Jeremy Stacey [whose credits include King Crimson and Sheryl Crow]. Before starting rehearsal I told Dónal, Daniel, and Peter: ‘I’m not Rory; I don’t want to be a tribute act that replicates all the little glitches and mistakes. I’m going to be myself.’ And they said that’s exactly what they want. Having heard that, I could relax. It’s proven very popular, and from two shows it became three.”

Bonamassa recognizes that Gallagher’s stature isn’t as big in the States as on home soil. Still, via his father’s introduction, he quickly became one of his heroes and is basing his performances on the live album that got him hooked.

“I never thought I would be 47 years old — 48 by the time the shows happen — and doing a set of Rory based on [the legendary double live album] Irish Tour ’74, and doing it in Cork,” he muses. “But here we are. Let’s boogie.

“It won’t be perfect but it’ll be the best I can. You just have to go in there with conviction and show the fans how much the music means. But that’s me, I’ll never back down from a challenge.”

Bonamassa was 18 when Gallagher passed in 1995 meaning he never got the chance to meet his idol. Asked, then, what he’d say to him given the chance, he replied: “I would ask how he got so deeply into the blues. You can hear his Celtic influences, and there was a swing that he put into everything, but Rory really was the sum of his parts.

“He soaked up everything and put it all out in his own way,” he extends, before relaying a revelation he had while preparing for the shows. “The further we got into rehearsals, I began to realize that I was more deeply influenced by Rory even than [Eric] Clapton. I went: ‘Oh shit!’”

He admits that post-shows, “there’s every chance of a couple of Rory songs being Easter-egged into my live set,” but underscored that the show won’t be repeated verbatim.

Bonamassa was vocal about Gallagher’s legendary Strat remaining in Ireland beyond its sale, with Irish politicians and even the daughter of the man who sold Rory the instrument, for £100 in 1963, among the other voices wanting the same.

The campaign proved successful as the guitar was donated to the National Museum of Ireland after selling for $1.16 million in October.

The success of that campaign extends the likelihood of Bonamassa playing the Strat once more, after borrowing it for a soul-rendering take of Sloe Gin at London's Royal Albert Hall over a decade ago.

Whether the iconic instrument makes an appearance or not, it will be a special occasion for Bonamassa and the thousands that pack into Cork's Marquee, which has previously hosted Elton John, Bob Dylan, and Meat Loaf.