The “best” blues player Ritchie Blackmore ever heard: “Never throws away a note”
If you go back to the earliest years of classic rock, there aren’t going to be many guitarists who weren’t originally inspired to pick up their instrument through a love of the blues.
It just so happened that blues music began to fall out of fashion in the 1960s, with the style inevitably going through a period of change and evolution, and rock music ended up being the most logical place it could land after this transitional phase. Blues hadn’t completely disappeared, but its legacy was living on through a new vanguard of players who had grown up appreciating it, but who were employing that influence in a different manner.
Take anyone from Keith Richards to Jimmy Page, and you’ll notice that all of their main influences were bluesmen, and that most of their signature guitar moves were borrowed from the biggest players in this field, like Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf. This isn’t a sign of their laziness or unoriginality, but them paying tribute to the people who had laid down the foundations for those who came up with these novel approaches in the first place.
However, one classic rock guitarist whose favourite player in this field was different from the usual suspects was Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple and Rainbow, whose own personal tastes have always been considerably more varied than those of his contemporaries.
Having grown up with a background in classical music and jazz before settling on the somewhat progressive version of hard rock that Deep Purple became known for in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Blackmore’s style is a little different to the other members of the rock canon from the same period.
During an interview with Guitar Player in 1996, he reflected upon his career and the many musicians he had encountered over the course of his time in the business, and proclaimed that his favourite blues player was not someone who predated him, but a contemporary of his.
“Shuggie Otis was the best player I’d ever heard,” Blackmore argued. “His father was Johnny Otis. He was only 14 at the time that he played most of his great solos. He had a very similar style to Mick Taylor, another favourite of mine, never throws away a note, and always that vibrato. I get a little lazy with my vibrato sometimes.”
While Otis is definitely not unheard of, he’s certainly a much more peculiar response for someone of the classic rock era to have such an infatuation with, considering he’s much younger than all of the legends. Born in 1953 and the son of a bluesman, Otis’ career didn’t really begin until the same time as Blackmore was beginning to emerge, but within him was a natural ability that he had inherited from his father before him, and a style that would go on to be influential to so many in the subsequent generations.
However, regardless of whether he’s an unusual pick for Blackmore or not, Otis is still a phenomenal player who demonstrated his raw talent from a young age and did his absolute best to keep the style alive. Appearing on the records of everyone from Frank Zappa to Bo Diddley, he is a truly versatile player, but above all, it’s hard to question his affinity for the blues.
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