Forget about Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ B-movie mania and Alice Cooper’s gory stage show. At 6′3″ and 300 lbs., Howlin’ Wolf used to approach the stage on all fours, screaming his whiskey-rotted scream, getting into character in a frightening show of pure emotional intensity that scared the living doodie out of anybody within a hundred yards of the roadhouse shacks where he played. With an influence spanning far beyond the limits of blues, Howlin’ Wolf stands as one of the premier figures in American music. A supernaturally booming voice fraught with paranoia, anxiety and freaked-out possession threatens to bust the speakers wide open, even on the “easy” numbers. The band that played behind this towering giant is as much a part of the genius — thanks to the diabolically nasty guitar work of Willie Johnson and Hubert Sumlin. Sumlin’s precise single-note phrases defy all accepted blues rules. They barge in all over the place, chaotically fathering a seamless rhythm that often runs in a dissonant tangent to the rest of the band. Howlin’ Wolf’s best songs feature this dynamic clash of sounds; fervently repeated two-chord mantras gather a spine-shaking momentum as the Wolf twitches and shrieks his deepest fears. Howlin’ Wolf may not have been the most versatile of musicians, but the sheer power of his delivery and sonic force of his music is something that has been imitated by many but matched by none.
- Mike McGuirk

The late Albert Collins was an important and influential blues artist with an unmistakable sound. Playing a Fender Telecaster with his fingers through a hundred-watt amplifier, Collins produced a lead guitar sound that was brittle, biting, and funkily syncopated. His cool tone, and a number of early instrumentals he cut with titles like “Frosty” and “Sno-Cone,” earned him the title “The Iceman.” In the early 1960s Collins led big horn bands, but played with smaller bands and bounced from label to label after that. He signed with Chicago’s Alligator records in the ’70s, became a star attraction on the international blues circuit, and was a bona fide blues superstar by the time of his death in 1993. He was an important influence on a whole generation of guitarists, from Billy Gibbons to Stevie Ray Vaughn and Robert Cray.
- Tom Heyman

Mississippi Fred McDowell played acoustic slide blues with a resonance and intensity of feeling rarely matched in recorded music. A rich tone sets the slow-rollin’ foundation for sharp, lyrical phrases and baying vocals. Although he’s working solo, it often sounds like there are three different people playing the song. The few electric recordings McDowell made are supersonic: he slashes at the guitar with unrestrained power, emitting sparks and riffs that seem to buzz over your head and split off in a thousand directions. His material was often religiously tortured in a Robert Johnson vein, not quite as hopeless as Johnson’s lamentations, but often just as haunted, with redemption seemingly paid for with lifelong agony. Songs “Jesus on the Mainline” and “When I Lay My Burden Down” sound less like the joyous praise songs they were meant to be, and more like desperate bids for salvation. The complex battle between one’s desires and one’s beliefs is a bottom-line issue for most of humanity, and to hear the struggle expressed with such passion and primal beauty is moving, if not scary as hell.
- Mike McGuirk

The loss of Stevie Ray Vaughan in a 1990 helicopter crash was a rock (and blues) death on par with the loss of Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding, so deeply was the public moved. Vaughan had been the catalyst for a massive blues revival in the 1980s, with a distinctive guitar tone and a string of singles that managed to cross over to mainstream rock radio. This was somewhat detrimental to his image, as Vaughan was at heart a pure blues guitarist, and his mainstream success did more to damage any authenticity he might have enjoyed as an obscure axeman, especially with purist blues fans. But in the years since his death Vaughan’s music has come to represent a pinnacle of Texas or Modern Blues, and no longer seems like the call to arms for beer-swollen George Thorogood fans that it did at the height of his popularity. All his early studio albums are worth checking out (they’re certainly better than Robert Cray’s), but the real fun begins with Vaughan’s live recordings, on which he repeatedly goes wholly over the top.
- Mike McGuirk