The guitarist Jimi Hendrix was desperate for everybody to hear: ‘One of the best in the world”
Jimi Hendrix is regarded by legions of people as the ultimate guitar player. As a true innovator when it came to forcing unusual sounds out of his Fender Stratocaster, he was light years ahead of many of his peers for his approach to pushing the instrument’s capacity to its limits, and knew how to strangle some ungodly notes out of his instrument. It rarely ever mattered if Hendrix hit a wrong note, because it was always played with such ferocity that every mistake felt intentional, and therefore it was virtually impossible to find fault.
In a short space of time, his revolutionary approach helped dramatically reshape rock and psychedelia, taking the genres down far more expansive and adventurous routes that people are still figuring out how to emulate today. There have, of course, been plenty of guitarists who were influenced by Hendrix, but very few actually come close to recreating the magic he was able to produce in his brief time on earth.
Because there were so few other players before that sounded remotely like him, his own influences had to have come from somewhere else, and in his youth when he first picked up guitar and ukulele as a teenager, he was avidly listening to the music of blues icons such as Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson. Taking as many cues as he could from these guitar icons, he managed to use their techniques to forge his own trademark sound.
However, his knowledge and appreciation of the blues went further than this, and there were plenty of other players who opened his ears to the possibilities of how far he could take things on his instrument. Throughout his career, there was one player who he was continually looking up to as an idol, and who he believed the world should have taken more notice of for his mastery of blues guitar.
Albert Collins is frequently referred to as ‘The Master of the Telecaster’, and while his style isn’t anywhere near as complex as Hendrix’s was, there are certainly some similarities between the two. Much like Hendrix, Collins’ use of attack and his aggressive playing style were two of his standout qualities, and he was also an early proponent of using non-standard tunings and capos to alter the pitch. If you thought someone like Steve Cropper managed to produce gold with the same instrument, then Collins did it with a lot more venom.
While he was never widely known beyond the southern states, the Texan blues legend, who was also nicknamed ‘The Iceman’, was hugely appreciated by Hendrix, and in 1968, he declared in an interview that he believed more people should be paying attention to his brilliance. “There’s one cat I’m still trying to get across to people,” he claimed, referring to Collins. “He is really good, one of the best guitarists in the world.”
Even though their musical outputs didn’t mirror each other, there were certainly a number of features to Collins’ guitar playing that Hendrix picked up on and weaved into his own identity. It’s a shame that few ever picked up on his expertise during his lifetime, as in a just world, we’d be using his name side by side with Hendrix’s a lot more.
