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.
