T-Bone Walker
T-Bone Walker took the electric guitar out of the rhythm section and made it a lead voice as flashy as the singer's — splits, behind-the-head solos, and a smooth, stinging tone that turned him into blues' first true guitar hero. Every electric blues guitarist working the next fifty years, knowingly or not, is standing on his amplifier.
As a kid, Walker literally led the blind Jefferson around Dallas's Deep Ellum district to his gigs, and Jefferson taught him guitar basics in return — about as direct a mentorship as the blues ever produced.
listen forHear Jefferson's ringing, syncopated country-blues picking on Matchbox Blues, then Walker's own first recording, the raw acoustic Trinity River Blues — you're hearing the student still close to the source, before the electricity and the showmanship arrived.
Walker caught Lonnie Johnson's shows whenever the guitar innovator passed through Dallas, and Johnson's clean, single-string melodic lead lines — more jazz than country blues — became the model for Walker's own smoother, more modern attack.
listen forListen to Johnson picking out single-note melody lines on Mr. Johnson's Blues, then Walker's fluid, horn-like phrasing on Call It Stormy Monday — that's the lineage from country-blues strumming to a true guitar solo.
Blackwell's crisp, jazzy single-string runs alongside pianist Leroy Carr helped define an early template for lead-guitar-plus-piano blues that Walker absorbed and eventually amplified, quite literally, into the electric era.
listen forPlay Blackwell's clean, biting lines on Kokomo Blues, then Walker's 1942 breakthrough Mean Old World — the phrasing DNA is the same, just plugged in and given a horn section to lean against.