Advanced Guitar Player

To fans and admirers Stevie Ray Vaughan (Austin, Texas October 3, 1954 – August 27, 1990) is simply SRV.

He was a Grammy Award-winning American guitarist, singer, and songwriter, who released eighteen albums of redhot rocking Texas blues shuffle.

Stevie Ray was inspired to play guitar by his older brother, Jimmie, and was also heavily influenced by such guitar players as Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Guy.

With his astonishingly accomplished guitar playing, Stevie Ray Vaughan ignited the blues revival of the '80s.

Vaughan drew equally from bluesmen like Albert King, Otis Rush, and Muddy Waters and rock & roll players like Jimi Hendrix and Lonnie Mack, as well as the stray jazz guitarist like Kenny Burrell, developing a uniquely eclectic and fiery style that sounded like no other guitarist, regardless of genre.

Vaughan bridged the gap between blues and rock like no other artist had since the late '60s.

After a few years as a sideman in and around Austin, Vaughan formed the band Double Trouble, with whom he made four successful studio albums and established a reputation as one of the foremost blues guitarists in the world.

He was noted for using the Fender Stratocaster, with several guitars being made in tribute to Vaughan, including a Signature Strat and a replica of his famous Strat named "Lenny".

In 1986, after years of substance abuse from alcohol and cocaine, he spent a month in drug rehabilitation, and remained clean and sober for the final four years of his life, until his death in 1990 in a helicopter crash.

On February 22, 2000, Vaughan was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in Washington D.C., being one of only 79 performers to be inducted.

He also won several W.C. Handy Awards, during his lifetime and posthumously, including Entertainer of the Year and Instrumentalist of the Year in 1984.

In 2003, he was ranked #7 in Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. Classic Rock Magazine ranked him #3 in their list of the 100 Wildest Guitar Heroes in 2007.

Blues guitar legend T-Bone Walker's influence on popular music has been enormous.

He was highly respected as an authentic bluesman an B.B. King cites hearing Walker's Stormy Monday record as his inspiration for getting an electric guitar.

Chuck Berry took T-Bone Walker's licks almost note for note and applied to the more upbeat tempo that became Rock And Roll.

T-Bone Walker was also the childhood hero of Jimi Hendrix, and years before Hendrix, he was playing guitar with his teeth or behind his back.

Furthermore, T-Bone's  guitar style provides a fantastic bridge for playing jazzier-sounding blues and his chromatic used of 9th chords can be heard in the comping styles of jazz greats such as Kenny Burrell or Barney Kessell.

T-Bone Walker Biography

T-Bone Walker was born Aaron Thibeaux Walker in Linden, Texas in 1910. He was of African American and Cherokee  descent, and both his parents - Rance Walker and Movelia Jimerson - were musicians.

The teenage T-Bone Walker learned his craft amongst the street-strolling string bands of Dallas. His mother had remarried and his stepfather - Marco Washington - played in the the Dallas String Band.

Blind Lemon Jefferson sometimes joined the family for dinner - young T-Bone Walker became his protégé and hewould take him around town for his gigs.

In 1929, Walker made his recording debut with a single for Columbia, "Wichita Falls Blues"/"Trinity River Blues," billed as Oak Cliff T-Bone - Oak Cliff was the town he lived in at the time and T-Bone a corruption of his middle name.

He married Vida Lee in 1935 and had three children with her.

By the age of 26 he was working the clubs in Los Angeles' Central Avenue - sometimes as the featured singer and guitarist with Les Hite's orchestra.

His distinctive sound developed in 1942 when Walker recorded "Mean Old World" for Capitol Records. Much of his output was recorded from 1946–1948 on Black & White Records, including his most famous song, 1947's "Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just as Bad)". Other notable songs he recorded during this period were "Bobby Sox Blues" (a #3 R&B hit in 1946), and "West Side Baby" (#8 on the R&B singles charts in 1948).

Throughout his career Walker worked with the top quality musicians, including Teddy Buckner (trumpet), Lloyd Glenn (piano), Billy Hadnott (bass), and Jack McVea (tenor sax).

Walker's only record in the next five years was T-Bone Blues, recorded over three widely separated sessions in 1955, 1956 and 1959, and finally released by Atlantic Records in 1960.

By the early 1960s, Walker's career had slowed down, in spite of a hyped appearance at the American Folk Blues Festival in 1962 with Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon, among others.A few critically acclaimed albums followed, such as I Want a Little Girl.

Walker recorded in his last years, 1968 - 1975, for Robin Hemingway's Jitney Jane Songs music publishing company, and he won a Grammy Award in 1971 for Good Feelin' (Polydor), produced by Hemingway. Fly Walker Airlines (Polydor) also produced by Hemingway, was released in 1973.

Persistent stomach woes and a 1974 stroke slowed Walker's career down to a crawl. He died of bronchial pneumonia following another stroke in March 1975, at the age of 64. Walker was interred in the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California.

T-Bone Walker was posthumously inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980, and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.

Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode is such a standard at jam sessions that you just have to learn how to play it! I've included a video of Chuck Berry playing his version with a showband and there's a fantastic Jimi Hendrix's recording too. If you scroll down the page you'll find Johnny B. Goode tabs for the intro and solo - as it's a rock'n'roll 12-bar blues in A, you can work the rest out yourself.

This tab was created with Guitar Pro 6