THE BIRTH OF ELECTRIC BLUES

T-Bone Walker may have been the first true hero of modern electric blues, but he stood upon the shoulders of jazz and blues giants, as we explore in the following pages

-  Denny llett

Let’s begin with a simple fact: T-Bone Walker wrote the dictionary on electric blues guitar practically single-handedly.

The licks and techniques he invented - or, at the very least, popularised - are still heard in almost every amplified blues guitar solo, whether said soloist knows it or not. Listen to Jimi, Eric, SRV, BB or Bonamassa for more than a few seconds and you will hear something T-Bone played way back in the 1940s.

This revolutionary electric guitarist was the one that took the instrument, which was still in its infancy, to a place it had never been and would never return to. It was a place previously dominated only by horn soloists - at the front of the band wailing over the rhythm section and the brass riffs. Along with jazz genius Charlie Christian, T-Bone scared the hell out of the trumpet and saxophone stars. Their time was almost over, and within a decade they were the ones backing the guitar solos.

T-Bone Walker was the cutting edge of a coming-of-age for the guitar, the effects of which are still being felt today.

By the time of Walker's peak in the late 1940s and early 50s, most blues guitarists were plugging it in and turning it up. So what made T-Bone Walker special? After all, hadn't performers of equal stature such as Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker both 'gone electric' by then? Yes, but T-Bone's guitar was new - brand-new.

Waters and Hooker were, arguably, still speaking the same Delta-based language that had made them famous, and this time round they were merely louder. T-Bone's guitar playing was as modern as the electric guitar itself. And it was as if he needed the electric guitar and the electric guitar needed him. They were made for each other. At times, his guitar borrows more from the language of a saxophone than it does a guitar. His concept and phrasing drew from jazz in a way that the work of other blues musicians didn't.