Albert Collins
(1932-1993)
“A lot of people ask me what’s the difference between
Chicago blues and Texas blues. We didn’t have harp players
and slide guitar players out of Texas, so most of the blues
guitars had a horn section. ...The bigger the band is,
the better they like it in Texas.”
Albert Collins, interviewed by Jas Obrecht, Guitar Player, July 1993
To illustrate Collins’ point, this video opens with a blazing
example of ‘the master of the Telecaster’ in the company of
the full fleet of his Icebreakers performing on Austin City Lim-
its in 1991. Collins had been a presence on the Texas blues
scene since the early 1950s, but it was only after moving to
Los Angeles in the late 1960s that he began to be appreciated
beyond the Southern ‘chitlin circuit.’ His 1978 Alligator label
debut, Ice Pickin’, kicked his career into high gear and led to
international tours, a Disney film cameo (Adventures in
Babysitting), an appearance with Bruce Willis in a Seagram’s
wine cooler television commercial , even a gig at a 1989 Inau-
gural gala for George Bush. The critically-acclaimed 1985 Alli-
gator album Showdown! earned Collins a Grammy for his play-
ing with fellow Houstonian guitarslinger Johnny Copeland and
a young man at whose high school prom he had once per-
formed, Robert Cray. But perhaps the accolade which meant
the most to Collins was the observance of Albert Collins Day
in 1986 as part of Houston’s Juneteenth Festival. He played
on his day before 50,000 of his old neighbors.
Collins came to Houston when he was nine. Born in a log
cabin on a farm near Leona, Texas, he heard the country blues
sounds of his cousin, Lightnin’ Hopkins. “He practically raised
me,” Collins told Larry Birnbaum (“Albert Collins: The Iceman
Strummeth,” downbeat July 1984). “I used to just watch him
play, mostly like at family reunions—they called `em associa-
tions then. He’d be out on the big grounds they had, sittin’
there on a stool and playin’ guitar.”
It was another cousin, Willow Young, who offered Collins
his first real instruction and taught him his unorthodox guitar
tuning. “He would lay the guitar in his lap and play it with a
knife, like you do a steel guitar,” Collins told Birnbaum. Collins
called Young’s tuning D-minor. In a May 1988 Guitar Player
feature, Dan Forte detailed Collins’s tuning as follows: “From
low to high, F, C, F, Ab, C, F. It’s an F minor triad, or a Dm7b
without the root.”