Guitar | All About Blues Music

GEORGE THOROGOOD

George Thorogood is not a great innovator, but he knows how to rock and he knows how to boogie and the fans love it. George and his band The Destroyers helped to kick off the eighties Blues boom that gave us Stevie Ray Vaughan and Robert Cray, and his steady Blues-rock output over the decades…

MAGIC SAM

Magic Sam was a pioneering guitar virtuoso on the club scene on the West-side of Chicago in the late 50s, where a new generation of Blues guitarists like Freddie King, Otis Rush, Luther Allison and Buddy Guy were tearing up the rule book. Sharp-edged guitar phrasing, honking saxes and hysterical vocals were the hallmark of this…

ALBERT COLLINS

Albert Collins was at the forefront of the Blues revival of the mid-80s, along with fellow Texans Stevie Ray Vaughan and Johnny Copeland and with Robert Cray. Known as ‘The Ice-Man’ for his sparse, ringing guitar tone, he would often wander into the audience while playing. Albert took a while to get famous and left…

R L BURNSIDE

Like his friend and mentor, Mississippi Fred McDowell, RL Burnside was a farmer from the hill country of north-east Mississippi. He could play his rhythmic and often lyrical slide-guitar very much in the style of his long time neighbour Fred, and like him RL was a late entrant into the world of recording and touring,…

DUANE ALLMAN

Nashville born slide-guitar maestro Duane formed the Allman Brothers band, with his kid brother Gregg on keyboards and vocals, in 1969. They had played together in various Blues and soul bands, and Duane had been getting work as a session guitarist for Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett when they formed the band, which included Butch…

ANSON FUNDERBURGH

White Blues guitarists like Anson’s fellow Texans Johnny Winter and Stevie Ray Vaughan made the point that you don’t have to be Black to play the Blues, which was a moot point among music critics back in the day. Listening to classic Blues records and seeing Freddie King, Jimmy Reed and Albert Collins playing in…

JOHN HAMMOND Jr.

John Hammond Jr. has enjoyed a long career playing country Blues on his National Steel guitar and Blues harp, carrying a technique soaked in the Delta to stages all over the world. John is no country copyist, as his electric guitar work shows, but his dedication to acoustic Blues has done a lot to preserve…

SUSAN TEDESCHI

Susan Tedeschi was destined for a career in music. She was on the Broadway stage as a six-year-old and preferred Baptist churches to her Italian family’s Catholic kind, because the singing was more fun! Susan started her first band at 13 and when she was 18, she formed Smoking Section to perform original material before…

BONNIE RAITT

Bonnie Raitt embodies how far Blues music has come in a century. She is the opposite of a poor black man, yet her sensitive and soulful slide-playing speaks of bone-hard times and her warm, subtle approach to a vocal line shows the profound empathy that Blues music awakens in the human heart. In 1949, Bonnie…

DOUG SAHM

Little Douglas Wayne Sahm got started by playing steel guitar on a San Antonio radio station when he was just five years old. As a teenager Doug recorded for various small Texas labels and formed a gigging band called The Pharoahs, and in 1965, producer Huey Meaux encouraged him to form The Sir Douglas Quintet,…