Credit: Far Out / Apple Music

Carlos Santana’s favourite guitarists of all time: “A circle of seven”

Wed 19 November 2025 15:52, UK

Lists of top guitarists of all time will often rattle off the big names in rock music, usual suspects including Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Mark Knopfler. It’s a boys’ club, that’s for sure, but it also has another serious bias.

Without intent to take anything away from these extraordinarily gifted musicians, the “guitar hero” label is often thrown disproportionately in favour of guitarists who rose to worldwide fame in pop music of the late 20th century. Whether that’s because the era provided a better pedestal for those performers to straddle or they were just better back then is up for debate.

Virtuosity is technically objective; however, when deciding who the cream of the crop is, especially in the guitar world, we encounter a tangle of opposing yet valid opinions. Surely, above all else, this is what makes music fun.

The prime reason for this is that there are various styles of guitar that put different skills to the test. For instance, English folk musician Nick Drake was a dab hand with the acoustic, and while exploring the wonders of alternate tuning, he mastered fingerstyle playing. Whereas Hendrix was rarely seen with an acoustic guitar, his style was rooted in the electric blues style.

A painter might be technically more talented than his or her rival, but they will always be judged by their art, the subjective image that has the power to raise or lower their status. It’s much the same in the musical world. Therefore, when asked, musicians will often have a varied spread of names to offer when naming their favourite guitarists.

If one were to embark on the wild goose chase that is seeking out the greatest guitarists of all time, there is no one better to ask than Carlos Santana. One of the world’s most beloved and best performers, Santana has often provided perhaps the most balanced opinion on the art form, with his ability allowing him to command a serious position worth listening to.

The Mexican-American virtuoso, famed most for his defining performance at 1969’s Woodstock, brought a diverse background in jazz and flamenco styles to the hip and happening rock scene in the 1960s. His unique angle of rock induction made for a truly seminal career. It allowed him to perform both within the mainstream and yet provide a leftfield angle on all his work.

During the late 1960s, Santana frequently spoke of his fondness for countless guitarists, including Ritchie Valens, BB King, Gábor Szabó, Mike Bloomfield, and, of course, Jimi Hendrix. But over the course of his career, he encountered hundreds of musicians he adored, even if they were not typically classed among the elite virtuosos. One of Santana’s particular favourites was his Woodstock neighbour and lead Grateful Dead frontman, Jerry Garcia.

“Most people who play the blues are very conservative,” Santana once wrote of Garcia in a feature for Rolling Stone. “They stay a certain way. Jerry Garcia was painting outside the frame. He played blues but mixed it with bluegrass and Ravi Shankar. He had country and Spanish in there. There was a lot of Chet Atkins in him – going up and down the frets. But you could always hear a theme in his playing. It’s like putting beads on a string, instead of throwing them around a room. Jerry had a tremendous sense of purpose. When you take a solo, decide what to say, get there and give it to the next guy. That’s how Jerry worked in the Dead.”

“Jerry was the Sun of the Grateful Dead – the music they played was like planets orbiting around him,” he continued, ostensibly referencing the band’s psychedelic sensibilities. “He wasn’t a superficial guy at all. It was a lot of fun to play with him because he was very accommodating. He’d go up and down; I’d go left and right. And I could tell he enjoyed it because the Dead always invited me back.”

In a separate interview, journalist Steve Newton asked Santana: “If you had to pick just one [guitarist] that blew you away the most, as both a player and a person, who would it be? My guess would, if I might be so bold, would be BB King, but you might have another?”

“BB King, the chairman of the board, is definitely one of them,” Santana replied pensively. “I would say it’s a circle of seven: Wes Montgomery, Jimi Hendrix, BB King, Manitas de Plata,” he began to list.

With the mention of de Plata, Santana deviated to illustrate his love for flamenco and identified de Lucía as one of the oft-mentioned all-time greats. “For flamenco, most people go with their favourite musician as Paco de Lucía or whoever; my favourite is Manitas de Plata,” he said.

Though Santana didn’t appear to complete his entire proposed “circle of seven,” including both Garcia and Chet Atkins, we get close, and when he mentioned the American blues legend Otis Rush as a late addition to the list, he completes it. “Otis Rush!” he said. “I love Otis Rush.”

Watch Otis Rush perform Willie Dixon’s ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’ below.