And as far as guitars go, I loved Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West's stuff.
Eric Clapton's scales - when he comes off a high note and it's time for a refrain or a little bit of a rest, he peals off scales going downwards that are so good it's unbelievable.
Growing up in Dallas, my first influences on the guitar were T-Bone Walker and Les Paul. T-Bone taught me how to play lead guitar behind my head and do the splits in 1951 when I was nine.
I started on acoustic guitar after I heard Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy.
If your going to learn to play lead guitar, get an electric guitar .. it doesn't have to be an expensive one .. acoustic guitars aren't good for learning lead, because you can't play up very high on the neck and they take heavier-gauge strings which makes it hard to bend notes
To make harmonics scream, I first dump my Floyd Rose real quick, hit a harmonic with my left hand while the string is still flapping, and then use the bar to pull it up to the pitch I wanna hit.
Some of my favorite harmonics are located between frets. There are two really cool ones between the 2nd and 3rd frets that I use a lot.
I was interested in the electric guitar even before I knew the difference between electric and acoustic. The electric guitar seemed to be a totally fascinating plank of wood with knobs and switches on it. I just had to have one.
I do a very poor man's pedal steel on the Stratocaster.
I love the sound of Elmore James, the sound early guitarists like him got just by using minimal means.
My main electric guitar belonged to Clarence White, the great guitarist for the Byrds.
The best slide guitar, unless you're playing the Muddy Waters-style, is the old '52 Goldtop Les Paul.
I was a virtuoso of all the folk-blues guitar styles by the time I reached 17.
If anything, even though I can play in the sort of standard string-bending style, in the B.B. King mold and all of that, I've always had a great interest in the more primitive playing, the open chord playing, rhythm and figures.
Play the pentatonic blues scale, just for fret- and pick-hand dexterity and to mesh them both together.
I was in awe sometimes listening to Mick Taylor . Everything was there in his playing - the melodic touch, a beautiful sustain and a way of reading a song.
When I got into songs like 'Exist,' I was like, 'Okay, this riff has some bass sweeping in it, I'm definitely going to have to use a pick... but I guess I'll have to learn how to sweep first!'
Listen to the great guitarists of the Fifties. They didn't do that nasty sort of industrial distortion. They played musical compositions as solos - Scotty Moore, Cliff Gallup, Django Reinhardt. There wasn't a bad note in any of those solos. I listened to that and stayed with those rules.
I have no secrets; all of these things have been discussed at length in guitar magazines over the years but are far too elaborate to cover in one article.
The stainless-steel frets were a major breakthrough, because of the amount of playing and bending that I do. I have to get my guitars refretted every couple of months.
I am trying to build the biggest callus possible on my first finger so I can do one-finger bends and vibrato like B.B. King.
I started doing all kinds of weird stuff on the guitar, which became part of my playing. I started doing harmonics and tapping on the guitar and pulling off strings and doing all this weird stuff that no one had ever done before.
In my early days, I never used finger vibrato at all. I originally carved my reputation as one of the 'fast' guitar players.
My guitar is a 1934 National Trojan. They call it a resonator, which is the guitar guys played in the honky-tonks before amplification. It's very loud. It's the type of guitar that Son House and Robert Johnson played.
A guitar is so tactile, and when you're playing bends - and bending notes is a big part of my style - there are so many notes within the note you're bending from and the note you're bending up to.
