Guitar | All About Blues Music

BLIND WILLIE McTELL

Willie McTell is rightly revered as one of the giants of early acoustic Blues. With his clear, light tenor voice and his stylish 12-string fingerpicking and slide guitar, he also wrote many classic Blues songs that have lingered into the modern era. Blind from birth, Willie was, by all accounts, a smart, generous, literate man…

JOHNNY ‘Big Moose’ WALKER

Shy, retiring characters don’t get called ‘Big Moose’, and loud barrelhouse pianist Johnny Walker got his tag from wearing his hair long and shaggy, but also for his wild personality. He was hugely popular with his fellow musicians for his energy and humour, and onstage he sometimes performed wearing a gorilla mask. When on tour…

ROBERT ‘JR’ LOCKWOOD

Robert Jr. Lockwood learned guitar from Robert Sr.- the Senior in this case being the legendary Robert Johnson. Around 1930, Johnson became romantically involved with Esther Lockwood after her divorce, when her son was about 15. The lad had been learning music on the family pump-organ, but his mother’s new boyfriend encouraged him to play…

JIMMY REED

The secret of Jimmy Reed’s music was that this simple, bare-bones, laid-back style of Blues was just so easy to listen to. Jimmy’s laconic but rock-steady shuffle sound out-sold every other Blues artist from 1955 to 1961, scoring a dozen entries into the Billboard Hot 100 pop charts and selling many millions of records. His…

CHRIS SPEDDING

Guitarist Chris Spedding is not weighed down by fame, but if you consider his work over the last 50 years, he has made a subtle contribution to many aspects of modern musical history. He has played with old Bluesmen; up-and-coming Punks; massively popular kids’ comedy bands; he toured with Rock icons; appeared in big musical…

LONNIE JOHNSON

Guitar maestro Lonnie Johnson didn’t thrash his axe like a Delta field-hand or finger delicate chord patterns like a Piedmont rag-picker, but the early guitar stylists like Robert Johnson, T-Bone Walker and the Three Kings, BB, Freddie and Albert would all recognise the trail that Lonnie blazed. His single-string style was precise and thoughtful, giving…

KENNY WAYNE SHEPHERD

When a seven-year-old kid gets to meet someone like Stevie Ray Vaughan, there’s a good chance he’ll pick up a guitar and try to play some Blues-Rock. Kenny Wayne Shepherd took up the challenge with both hands and made a big name for himself as a young Master of the Stratocaster. Displaying plenty of guitar…

LES PAUL

Les Paul invented the first effective solid bodied electric guitar. The Gibson Corporation rejected ‘The Log’, an electric guitar Les put together after hours in the Epiphone factory where Les worked in 1940, but when Leo Fender put out his ‘Esquire’ ten years later, they called him back! Les designed the guitar that carries his…

JOSH WHITE

Josh White had a long career as a Bluesy folk singer on the New York scene during the 50s and 60s, but his roots were in the South-East where the local music was Piedmont Blues. Josh mastered this style of elaborate finger-picking at an early age and his instrumental talent stood him in good stead…

MISSISSIPPI JOHN HURT

When the Folk/Blues revival of the early 60’s brought old Blues players out of obscurity and put them on the world stage, nobody’s obscurity was deeper than Mississippi John Hurt’s. He had a superb fingerpicking style and a vast repertiore of songs, but John turned down the chance to join a travelling show when he…