THE CROSSROADS T-Bone Walker & Charlie Christian Connections
In the early 1930s, guitar teacher Ralph Hamilton took on a pair of students, the two teenaged friends taking lessons in basic theory and reading skills. Ralph could not have imagined just how monumentally important this pair, Aaron Thibeaux ‘T-Bone’ Walker and Charles Henry Christian, would become in the worlds of electric blues and electric jazz guitar respectively.
T-Bone was one of the first significant blues guitarists to take to the amplified electric guitar, with a style that combined technical mastery, melodic ingenuity and jazz inspired sophistication. Walker’s style possessed an uncanny balance of classy melodic phrasing with urgent raw blues emotion, with a great command of both tone and timing. If this were not enough then we should also consider his compositional flair, his soulful voice and his dynamic stage persona
