Johnny Winter
March 16th, 2008
Texas guitar legend Johnny Winter became a seeming overnight star in 1968 with the release of his first album on Columbia records. Winter was and remains an incendiary guitar player and a gruff, authoritative vocalist. An exceptionally fluid and dynamic soloist on both standard and slide guitar, his records in the 70's tended towards rock excess, but by the end of that decade he had returned to a much more pure blues approach which continues today. Along the way Winter was instrumental in helping the career resurgence of Muddy Waters, producing and playing on a number of acclaimed records. Winter was an important influence on a whole generation of musicians, including Chris Whitley and Stevie Ray Vaughn - Tom Heyman
Albert Collins
The late Albert Collins was an important and influential blues artist with an unmistakable sound. Playing a Fender Telecaster with his fingers through a hundred-watt amplifier, Collins produced a lead guitar sound that was brittle, biting, and funkily syncopated. His cool tone, and a number of early instrumentals he cut with titles like "Frosty" and "Sno-Cone," earned him the title "The Iceman." In the early 1960s Collins led big horn bands, but played with smaller bands and bounced from label to label after that. He signed with Chicago's Alligator records in the '70s, became a star attraction on the international blues circuit, and was a bona fide blues superstar by the time of his death in 1993. He was an important influence on a whole generation of guitarists, from Billy Gibbons to Stevie Ray Vaughn and Robert Cray. - Tom Heyman
