Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton remain two of the most important guitarists in history. They continue to inspire millions… but who inspired them?
One of the most common misconceptions in music is that influence works in a straight line. This isn’t the case. The truth is that influence is one big machine, and individual artists make up separate cogs. Some of those cogs are small, spinning on their own without contributing to the turning of anything around them. Meanwhile, other cogs are huge, connecting to thousands more and subsequently becoming an intrinsic part of the machine.
Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton are both pretty big cogs. Both of them inspired a great deal of musicians and have really made their stamp on modern music for different reasons. The truth is, if one of them didn’t exist, rock music would likely sound very different.
Jimi Hendrix was a great showcase of what someone can achieve with an unapologetic amount of talent. He would take to that stage, use his songs as a backbone, but then improvise, solo and do some of the most flamboyant animalistic stuff ever committed to the stage. He was an artist who grew with word of mouth because everyone who attended one of his gigs then told everyone that they knew that they also had to go to one of his gigs.
Eric Clapton was also a massive influence, but for different reasons. As Steve Van Zandt once said, “Eric Clapton is the most important and influential guitar player that has ever lived, is still living or ever will live […] Do yourself a favour, and don’t debate me on this.” Clapton had a style of playing that merged a number of different styles, including the blues, R&B and rock.
While prog rock can often be quite difficult to define, it’s generally considered rock music that operates slightly outside the mainstream. What Clapton did throughout his career, particularly with Cream, helped set the foundation that this prog rock style was eventually built upon.
Suffice it to say that both Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, because of their impact, are big cogs in the machine of musical influence, but even they’re connected to something helping them spin. Both guitarists have a range of influences, but one that they share is the blues and R&B legend Muddy Waters.
Waters was one of the first people to bring R&B to the UK, and his tour helped to influence the likes of The Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton. Everything Clapton has done in his career has an essence of Muddy Waters to it, and the guitarist himself admitted that Waters “Had the greatest influence on me.”
Hendrix is no different, as he also said that Waters’ work was an early inspiration and was responsible for his interest in the guitar. “The first guitarist I was aware of was Muddy Waters,” he said, “I heard one of his old records when I was a little boy, and it scared me to death because I heard all of those sounds. Wow, what is that all about? It was great.”
All of musical influence is just cogs in a machine, and Muddy Waters is one of the first, helping everything after him keep turning.
