Stevie Ray Vaughan is the best guitarist of all time.
Don’t believe me? Check out his performance of “Texas Flood” from the Live at the El Mocambo DVD:
I have watched this video dozens of times, and every time I watch it, I get goosebumps. I shake my head in disbelief. I utter profanities in my head as I watch in awe.
No other guitarist plays with as much feel as SRV. No one else can get the tone he got. No one else can play with every fiber of their being like Stevie.
SRV is quite simply the best to ever pick up a guitar.
Who is the best guitarist?
Of course, what I really mean to say is, “I personally find Stevie Ray Vaughan to be the best guitar player ever.” Or to be even more accurate, “SRV is my favorite guitarist.” Because really, let’s be clear — there is no “best” guitarist, and there never will be.
The debate over the best guitarist is good for discussion. It sells a lot of magazines, and it gets a lot of keyboard warriors up in arms on the internet. And I’m a sucker just like the rest of you — I read the lists and get sucked into the conversation too.
But at its core, who is the best guitarist? is an unanswerable question.
The best in which genre?
The first reason this question cannot be answered is because there is no agreement on which genre “the best” refers to. Most people who argue about such things are really limiting the conversation to rock and roll, which often includes blues.
But what about jazz? Surely Django Reinhart belongs on the list. The man was the major force in jazz in his lifetime and could absolutely tear up a guitar solo — and don’t forget, his hands were a mangled mess due to injuries he sustained in a fire. He could literally only play guitar with two fingers.
But then that would still leave out classical guitarists, many of whom are phenomenal musicians. Segovia is the most famous, but Raphaella Smits is outstanding in her own right. Surely the intricacies of the classical guitar are much more difficult than most standard rock tunes, so players like Smits must be better than their rock contemporaries, right?
The best at which techniques?
But it gets more complicated. Which techniques matter when deciding on “the best?” As far as I know, SRV never learned finger tapping, so if that’s the criterion, then Eddie Van Halen would have to be the best guitarist. But as much as I love Eddie, he couldn’t capture the emotion that SRV did (in fairness to Eddie, no one can).
Of course, tapping is just one technique. What about legato, sweep picking, bending, and slide guitar? If we’re talking slide guitar, then surely Duane Allman or Derek Trucks would have to be in the conversation (although Eric Johnson is quite good too).
If we are limiting our decision to precision picking or speed, probably some metalhead in a basement in Ohio would be the winner; however, as far as noteworthy guitarists go, I’d have to give the nod to Tim Henson from Polyphia.
On the other hand, if we define “the best” as overall mastery of the most techniques, then the hands-down winner is Guthrie Govan, and I seriously don’t know how this fact could be argued.
And of course, that’s just scratching the surface. We could go on to talk about the best acoustic players (Phil Keaggy, Tommy Emmanuel), the most influential players (Joe Satriani, anyone?), or the most innovative (surely this award goes to Jimi).
The best according to whom?
This is really where the idea of “the best” guitarist breaks down.
The issue here is, who gets to decide who “the best” is? There is no International Guitar Committee or ISO standard on guitar-playing with which to make some objective decision. There is no checklist or law to help us, either.
And with no objective criteria to guide us, polls and surveys don’t offer much help; all they can do is tell us who people like the most.
The only way to truly give someone the award for “best guitarist” would be to appoint a regulatory body in some arbitrary fashion to decree a musician “the best” in some arbitrary manner, which of course would be a ridiculous and pointless thing to do, and even then we would all still argue about their decision.
Music is not a contest
At the end of the day, debates about who “the best” guitarist is will continue until Jesus comes back, and probably even after that. There is just no way to define what “best” means and who would rise to the top even if we could define the criteria.
And for me, that’s just as well. Music isn’t — or at least shouldn’t be — about competition. I understand we all want to progress in our guitar playing and be the best musicians we can be, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who is better than whom.
Music is collaborative. Music is a journey. Music is a good time on a Friday night. But music should not ever pit one person against another in some ridiculous game of comparison.
When I play music with others, I care about making music and having fun, not who’s the better musician.
That’s not to say it’s not fun to talk about subjects like “the best guitarist of all time.” It is, so long as we understand that we’re really talking about our own biases and preferences. And for God’s sake, we have enough to divide us already.
Besides, as I established earlier, Stevie Ray Vaughan is the best guitarist of all time.
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