Texas Blues Guitar

and the instrument. An apparent reaction to Walker’s urbanity
came from the likes of Lightnin’ Hopkins, who experienced
surprising success with spare and rough-hewn ‘downhome’
blues at a time when a West Coast -bred sophistication domi-
nated black popular music. Hopkins and fellow Texans Lil Son
Jackson, Smokey Hogg, and Frankie Lee Sims led a country
blues revival which rallied in the late 1940s and early 1950s,
when their recordings often made the rhythm & blues charts.
By the mid-1950s the audience for Texas downhome blues
had been usurped by the tougher band sound of Muddy Wa-
ters, while Walker’s pervasive influence was absorbed into early
rock ‘n roll via Chuck Berry. The rise of the Chess empire fo-
cused much of the post-War blues business in Chicago and
the dominance of Mississippi migrants in the Windy City un-
derscores our stereotype of blues as Mississippian at root.
Perhaps it is, but the influential strides made by Jefferson in
the Twenties and Walker in the Forties are unexcelled in the
history of blues guitar. And the Texas blues guitar tradition
didn’t dead-end with T-Bone; it continues to deliver such rus-
tic anachronisms as Henry Qualls as well as sundry young
Stevie Ray wannabes, disciples of a man who cut his teeth
absorbing the lessons of Freddie King. At its best, the Texas
blues guitar tradition is, like the state itself, outsize and hard
to corral, disarmingly diverse and, despite fits of legendary
Lone Star bluster, beguilingly genuine. It is embodied by the
four legendary Texans in this video.
Photo by George Pickow