Famous Blues Guitars

The story of BB King's Lucille



In the winter of 1949, King played at a dance hall in Twist, Arkansas. In order to heat the hall, a barrel half-filled with kerosene was lit, a fairly common practice. During a performance, two men began to fight, knocking over the burning barrel and sending burning fuel across the floor. This triggered an evacuation. Once outside, King realized that he had left his guitar inside the burning building. He entered the blaze to retrieve his guitar, a Gibson acoustic. Two people died in the fire. The next day, King discovered that the two men were fighting over a woman named Lucille. King named that first guitar Lucille, as well as every one he owned since that near-fatal experience, as a reminder never again to do something as stupid as run into a burning building.

Stevie Ray Vaughan's Number one Strat



No. 1 Strat
1962 Neck & body
1959 hot wound pickups
refitted with new gold hardware - left handed vintage trem,
jack socket and tuners
(Gotoh or Schaller)
the neck was refretted with Dunlop 6100 frets and because of the numerous refrets
the fingerboards radius became compound with the fingerboard being flatter nearer
the body joint. The fingerboard was also so worn down the neck was 'retired' and
replaced with the neck from Stevie's red Strat

Albert Collins Telecaster " Frosty "

Guitar: Blonde maple-neck 1966 Fender Telecaster with Gibson double humbucking pickup in the neck position, and a single coil bridge pickup
(he primarily used the single coil pickup).
Picking: Plucked strings with right hand thumb and forefinger
(popped and snapped).
Tuning: Used open F minor tuning with a capo.
F minor triad tuning: F C F Ab C F

Eric Clapton's Blackie

A serious look at any vintage Stratocaster invariably becomes a dissertation on neck dates, pickup codes, headstock logos and so on, but any such studious research is wasted on Blackie, Eric Clapton's most famous and faithfully Strat-shaped companion.  For Blackie is the sum of many parts from different Stratocasters that Eric bought one day...

"Right after I'd seen Steve Winwood playing his white Strat," begins Eric, "I was in Nashville and I went into this shop called Sho-Bud where they had stacks of Strats going for virtually nothing because they were so unfashionable and so unwanted.  I bought a big pile of them all for a song - they were really cheap, like three or $400 each - and I took them home and gave them out. I gave Steve one, I gave Pete Townshend one, I gave George Harrison one and I kept a few.  I made Blackie out of a group of them;  I took the pickups out of one, the scratchplate off another and the neck off another and I made my own guitar -
a hybrid guitar that had all the best bits from all these Strats.

"I wore it out too.  Its pretty well inaccessible now - there's not much of the neck left.  It's worn away on either side and on the back with wear and tear.
"What makes Blackie unique for me is the fact that I made it!  It was one of the last guitars that I actually built myself, really.  Therefore it felt like it was invested with some kind of soul, you know"