50 Global Guitar Greats

Forget about Hendrix, Beck, Clapton, Page and Van Halen; we want to highlight the guitarists who have made an impact outside of the usual rock’n’roll axis of axes. It’s a list full of invention, customs passed down through generations and a focus on rhythm as much as volume. These are the musicians who defined soukous, bossa nova and Touareg desert blues, who soundtracked revolutions and revelations, and made their traditions that little more recognisable to a global audience. These are our guitar heroes...

Franco (1938-1989)

Franco Luambo was the towering figure of 20th-century Congolese music. Known as the ‘Grand Maître of Zairean Music’ and ‘Sorcerer of the Guitar,’ he led OK Jazz, the most popular and significant African band of its era, for more than 30 years. Growing up on the streets of Kinshasa, his first guitar was made from a tin can with electrical wire for strings. After graduating to a real instrument, he swiftly developed a fancy finger-picking style and, at 18, became a founder member of OK Jazz. The group really took off when independence came to the Belgian Congo in 1960 and went on to enjoy huge popularity across the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. Playing with a hard, metallic urgency, the rumba style he patented subsequently mutated into soukous. On his death in 1989, Zaire (as it then was) declared four days of national mourning with radio stations playing classic OK Jazz recordings non-stop.

Rigo Star (1955-2023)

Among the many guitarists influenced by Franco Luambo as the rhythms of Congolese rumba accelerated in the 1980s to create the sound of modern soukous, Rigo Star was probably the finest. He recorded a handful of solo albums, but his best work can be found backing the likes of Papa Wemba, Kanda Bongo Man and M’bilia Bel.

Paco de Lucía (1947-2014)

A towering figure in 20th-century flamenco, Paco de Lucía juxtaposed fluent picados (fingerstyle runs) with furiously rhythmic rasgueados (strumming) laced with jazz accents. His recordings with singer Camarón de la Isla are landmarks in flamenco history, and he also collaborated with jazz guitarists John McLaughlin, Al Di Meola and Larry Coryell.

➤ The Songlines Guide to Flamenco

Django Reinhardt (1910-53)

Few would argue that all modern guitar-playing could be said to begin with Django Reinhardt. Born in Belgium into a Roma family, he spent his youth in Gypsy encampments in France, where he became adept at stealing chickens for the campfire pot in addition to playing violin and banjo. It was when he was given a banjo-guitar at 12 that he began to master the guitar, and he was able to make a living from playing music by age 15. That he was one of the first to develop the guitar as a lead instrument with sinuous and fluid single-note soloing was all the more remarkable given that he lost the use of his fourth and fifth fingers on his left hand in an accident and played using primarily the index and middle fingers. His work with the violinist Stéphane Grappelli in the 1930s with the legendary Quintette du Hot Club de France created the genre that has come to be known as ‘Gypsy jazz’, and its influence can be heard to this day.

V M Bhatt (1950-)

Playing the Indian guitar known as the Mohan vina across his lap, Bhatt started as a Hindustani classical musician but has gone on to become an audacious fusionist. His 1993 album A Meeting by the River with Ry Cooder won a Grammy, while he’s also collaborated with Taj Mahal, Béla Fleck and dobro king Jerry Douglas.

Lotfi Attar (1952-)

Inspired equally by the Arabic music he heard growing up in Algeria and the blues-rock of Hendrix and Santana, Attar began playing electric guitar in the late 1960s and formed the band Raïna Raï in 1980, playing a groundbreaking style of raï-rock and, at times, making his guitar sound like an electrified gimbri.

Omar Khorshid (1945-1981)

In a country noted for producing great oud players, Omar Khorshid stood out as a rare and outstanding guitarist. He recorded several albums of belly dance music under his own name, backed Egypt’s greatest singers, including Oum Kalthoum and Farid El Atrache, and performed for President Jimmy Carter at the White House.

Madala Kunene (1951-)

Known as ‘King of the Zulu Guitar’, Kunene grew up playing folk tunes, but by 14, he had become a street musician playing The Beatles. He was in his 40s before he began recording, his singular self-taught technique fusing everything from western pop to township jive into a unique style he calls ‘the Madala-line.’

Ali Farka Touré (1939-2006)

As Songlines noted in a 2023 cover story paying tribute to perhaps the finest guitarist ever to come out of Africa, ‘from the early acoustic tracks that appeared on the Red and Green albums in the 1980s… to the concentrated power of his posthumous final album Savane, you only needed to hear one note to know it came from Ali Farka Touré.’ Dubbed ‘an African John Lee Hooker’, his music found a correspondence in the American blues but his inspiration and techniques were firmly rooted in the Songhai, Fula and other Malian traditions. It was a meeting heard to brilliant effect on Talking Timbuktu, his 1994 Grammy-winning album of guitar duets with Ry Cooder, while his immersion in the deepest roots of African music were showcased on the albums of guitar and kora sessions he recorded with Toumani Diabaté. More than a guitarist, Ali was, as Oumou Sangaré noted, a “monument” to the culture from which he emerged.

➤ At home with Ali Farka Touré

Vieux Farka Touré (1981-)

They say the acorn never falls far from the oak tree, but Vieux’s father, Ali Farka Touré, discouraged his son from following in his footsteps – so Vieux taught himself in secret and became one of the finest electric guitarists of his generation with a style influenced by Ali, but all his own.

➤ Vieux Farka Touré interview: “It’s difficult to be the child of someone who has gone to the top of the mountain”

Jorge Ben Jor (1939-)

The veteran Jorge Ben Jor released his debut album in 1963, the same year as The Beatles’ first LP, and is credited as the father of samba-rock, as well as one of the progenitors of Brazil’s tropicália movement. Playing both acoustic and electric guitar, boss nova, soul, funk and jazz all fold seamlessly into his hybrid virtuosity.

Carlos Santana (1947-)

Born and raised in Mexico, Santana can be credited with almost single-handedly inventing Latin rock. Fusing blues-based lead lines with Latin American and African rhythms, his performance with the band that bore his name at Woodstock in 1969 introduced an entire generation of white kids to the notion that there was a world beyond rock’n’roll.

Gabby Pahinui (1921-1980)

A pioneering master of the traditional Hawaiian slack-key guitar, down-tuned to an open-string chord with low bass notes, Pahinui made the first-ever slack-key recording in 1946. His solo instrumental, ‘Hula Medley’, went on to become a standard. Ry Cooder was a huge fan and featured Pahinui’s finger-picking on his 1976 album Chicken Skin Music.

Rokia Traoré (1974-)

We might think foremost of Rokia Traoré as one of West Africa’s most gifted songbirds, but she’s also a formidable guitarist on both acoustic and electric instruments. The daughter of a jazz-loving Malian diplomat, her father’s career meant she spent much of her youth outside Africa, while the Dire Straits and Pink Floyd cassettes of an older brother instilled a love of western rock’n’roll. Early albums such as 2000’s Wanita are notable for their understated elegance, lush harmonies and hushed atmospherics, but on 2008’s Tchamantché, she strapped on a Gretsch electric guitar, and the resonant blues-rock sound clinched her the Best Artist gong at the inaugural Songlines Music Awards. On 2013’s Beautiful Africa, produced by long-time PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish, she rocked even harder as guitar and ngoni riffs vied with each other in thrilling style. Her most recent album, 2016’s Ne So, featured contributions from Led Zep’s John Paul Jones and Devendra Banhart.

Mdou Moctar (1984/1986-)

Growing up in Niger, Mdou Moctar built his first guitar out of salvaged wood with bicycle cables for strings. Eventually, he graduated to a Fender Stratocaster, blending his Touareg desert blues grooves with flanger, echo and reverb to stunning effect. ‘It’s a feeling of being free to do whatever you need to do,’ he told Guitar World.

➤ Mdou Moctar: Niger's desert rock resistance

Baden Powell (1937-2000)

Brazil has produced a battalion of fine guitarists, but many aficionados will tell you that Baden Powell de Aquino was the greatest of them all. Fusing jazz harmonies, classical guitar technique and every idiom of 20th-century Brazilian popular music, many of his guitar compositions are now considered standards of the repertoire.

João Gilberto (1931-2019)

Gilberto’s acoustic guitar playing and intricate melodic patterns mixed samba rhythms and jazz chords to create bossa nova, turning Brazilian music into a global phenomenon with his million-selling 1964 album Getz/Gilberto, recorded in collaboration with the US saxophonist Stan Getz. The record also included a song called ‘The Girl from Ipanema’, sung by João’s then-wife, Astrud Gilberto.

➤ Obituary: João Gilberto (1931-2019)

Robbie Basho (1940-1986)

Basho was the most expansive of the school of guitar playing called ‘American primitive’, which also includes John Fahey and Leo Kottke. After studying sarod under Ali Akbar Khan, he set about creating a raga system for 12-string steel guitar, fusing Eastern modes and scales with country, blues and other Indigenous American styles.

Davey Graham (1940-2008)

Of all the finger-picking guitarists who helped spearhead the 1960s British folk revival – Bert Jansch, Wizz Jones, John Renbourn, Martin Carthy and John Martyn among them – Davey Graham (who originally spelt his name Davy Graham) was the most adventurous and groundbreaking. He achieved little commercial success, but his influence on his fellow guitarists was inestimable. If he didn’t invent the DADGAD tuning, he certainly popularised it, recording ‘Anji’ in 1961; it became a seminal instrumental subsequently covered by Jansch, Renbourn and Paul Simon, among others. Jimmy Page’s acoustic playing also drew heavily on Graham’s influence. He peaked early, and his most consistent album was 1965’s Folk, Blues & Beyond. Following his travels around North Africa, the ‘beyond’ went on to encompass Arabic and Middle Eastern scales and styles. His later career was dogged by addiction and mental health issues, but as Jansch put it, he was “courageous and controversial – he never followed the rules.”

Bert Jansch (1943-2011)

A product of the British folk revival of the 1960s, the Scottish-born Jansch stood out for his austere but brilliant finger-picking on a string of dazzling solo albums and with folk super-group Pentangle. Those he influenced on the further shores of folk-rock included Jimmy Page and Neil Young, while Richard Thompson also credits him as a major inspiration.

Joseph Spence (1910-1984)

In 1958, the US musicologist Sam Charters was in the Bahamas looking for musicians to record when he discovered Joseph Spence. So rich was Spence’s sound that from a distance, he initially thought he was listening to two guitarists. The resulting recordings for Folkways are exquisite, ranging from calypso to blues to spirituals.

Taj Mahal (1942-)

The musical journey of Taj Mahal shows how far a guitarist with ears as open as his fingers are nimble can travel. Starting as a country-blues man, he went on to explore the music of his father’s Caribbean heritage and has recorded with Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté and with musicians from India, Zanzibar and Hawaii.

Djelimady Tounkara (1947-)

As a boy, Djjelimady played djembé and ngoni, but guitar became his main instrument after moving to Bamako in his teens. By the early 1970s, he was lead guitarist with the legendary Rail Band; his intricate lead runs offering a counterpoint to the soaring lead vocals of Salif Keita and Mory Kanté. His 2001 solo album, Sigui, won a BBC Radio 3 award for world music.

Ernest Ranglin (1932-)

Over the years, all kinds have claimed a hand in creating the unique rhythms of reggae. There was a fellow called Marley who certainly played his part. But if you got out the Ouija board and managed to contact Bob, he would surely confirm that the true architect of Jamaica’s musical gift to the world was Ernest Ranglin, who in the 1960s created the rhythmic guitar style that came to define the form. Ranglin played on the first international ska hit, Millie Small’s ‘My Boy Lollipop’, worked with the Wailers, Jimmy Cliff and Toots & the Maytals and played on and arranged hundreds of classic ska, rocksteady and reggae recordings. As a band leader, he also played a sophisticated kind of Jamaican jazz heard to best effect on his 1998 album In Search of the Lost Riddim, which traced the music back to Africa and was recorded in Dakar with Senegalese musicians.

Earl ‘Chinna’ Smith (1955-)

The high priest of reggae guitar, Earl ‘Chinna’ Smith has played on more than 500 Jamaican albums by the likes of Bob Marley, Mighty Diamonds, Augustus Pablo, Gregory Isaacs and countless others. His tight rhythm and skanking riffs have set the gold standard to which every other reggae guitarist aspires.

Amadou Bagayoko (1954-)

Amadou Bagayoko learnt to play the guitar at a school for the blind in Mali, where he also met his future wife, Mariam Doumbia. As the duo Amadou & Mariam, their early cassette releases were only available in West Africa before Amadou’s melodic blues guitar found wider acclaim with their 1998 international debut Sou Ni Tilé.

King Sunny Adé (1946-)

Hailed as Africa’s answer to Bob Marley, Sunny Adé’s jùjú music made him the first Nigerian to earn a Grammy nomination when he was bestowed the honour for his 1983 album Synchro System. The comparison with Marley was crass, for his sound was totally original, led by his polyrhythmic and hypnotic guitar playing.

Yomo Toro (1933-2012)

The king of the ten-string Puerto Rican guitar known as the cuatro, you can hear Yomo Toro’s electrified instrument clear and strong amid the blaring horns and clattering percussion of the Fania All-Stars. He also worked extensively in a folkloric style and recorded with everyone from Arsenio Rodríguez and Harry Belafonte to Paul Simon and David Byrne.

Ry Cooder (1947-)

There are at least four distinct phases of Ry Cooder’s career, each of which would earn him a place on any list of guitar greats. There’s his unforgettable slide playing on records by the likes of Captain Beefheart and The Rolling Stones. Then there were his 1970s solo albums, in effect, primers in American roots music, spanning folk, blues, gospel and country with journeys into Tex-Mex and Hawaiian styles, not to mention a series of evocative movie soundtracks such as Paris, Texas. By the 1990s, he had become a bold global music adventurer, recording albums with musicians from India, Mali and, of course, Cuba. Finally, into the new millennium, he resumed his solo career, fusing roots-rock, corridos, Latin swing, polkas, pachuco and much else besides, on albums such as Chávez Ravine and My Name is Buddy before his most recent release, 2022’s GET ON BOARD, an acoustic folk-blues set with Taj Mahal.

Debashish Bhattacharya (1963-)

Designing and building his own instruments, Debashish Bhattacharya has created a new genre best described as ‘Hindustani slide guitar.’ Fusing traditional and contemporary elements and composing new guitar ragas, he has taken Indian classical music into previously uncharted territory. His 2008 album Calcutta Chronicles: Indian Slide Guitar Odyssey was nominated for a Grammy.

John McLaughlin (1942-)

Never mind his origins as a British bluesman or even his jazz years with Miles Davis. McLaughlin merits inclusion here for his immersion in Indian music, which began with the fusions of the Mahavishnu Orchestra and reached an apotheosis in the mid-1970s when he formed the incomparable Shakti with some of India’s finest classical musicians.

Manuel Galbán (1931-2001)

The electric guitar has never had a prominent role in Cuban music, but Galbán was an exception, backing legendary vocal group Los Zafiros in the 1960s and later playing with the Buena Vista Social Club touring band. Mambo Sinuendo, his 2003 Grammy-winning album of guitar duets with Ry Cooder, is a gem.

Carlos Paredes (1925-2004)

The 12-string Portuguese guitar is a glorious instrument – and nobody has ever made it ring more fulgently than Paredes. Amália Rodrigues begged him to join her band. But, although he occasionally appeared with her on stage, his focus was on being a soloist. Known for his political activism, especially following the Carnation Revolution, he also remarkably continued his profession as an x-ray archivist alongside his musical career.

Derek Gripper (1977-)

When South African classical guitarist Derek Gripper released One Night on Earth in 2012, the general reaction was, “How on earth did he do that?” Taking the kora recordings of Toumani Diabaté, he painstakingly transcribed them, note by note, ‘as though it was a composition by Bach or Villa-Lobos’ – and then applied himself to working out how the intricate themes, cycles and ornamentations of the kora’s 21 strings could be presented on a solo six-string classical guitar. Somehow, he cracked it, playing basslines, harmonic accompaniment and melodies simultaneously without overdubs. Classical guitar legend John Williams said he thought it was “absolutely impossible until I heard Derek Gripper do it,” while Toumani thought it must be a trick and sought confirmation that it was indeed one guitarist playing without overdubs. Both Williams and Toumani went on to perform with Gripper, whose most recent release was an album of guitar and kora duets with Ballaké Sissoko.

➤ Ballaké Sissoko and Derek Gripper: “We’re happy to disrupt”

Rahman Mammadli (1961-)

Born in Fuzuli, in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, when it was still part of the Soviet Union, Mammadli’s innovative electric guitar technique has led to him being dubbed ‘the man with the singing fingers’ in his homeland. Blending Indigenous traditions, Arabic mugham and a psychedelic surf sound, he made his first tour of Western Europe in 2024.

Marc Ribot (1954-)

Having cut his teeth as a session man with Tom Waits and Elvis Costello and ventured into the avant-garde with John Zorn, Ribot went Latin, founding Los Cubanos Postizos (The Prosthetic Cubans). The group’s 1998 debut album, Marc Ribot Y Los Cubanos Postizos (The Prosthetic Cubans), is a classic with Ribot gliding elegantly through the rumba songbook of Arsenio Rodríguez.

➤ Marc Ribot: A Beginner's Guide

Paco Peña (1942-)

Paco Peña was discovered performing in a Spanish restaurant in Covent Garden in the mid to late-1960s. A year later, he was sharing a bill with Jimi Hendrix. Playing in a traditional flamenco style, he went on to perform on the world’s most prestigious concert platforms, while as a composer, his works include a flamenco mass.

Manitas de Plata (1921-2014)

Born in a caravan into a family of Catalan gitanos, Manitas de Plata did more than anyone since Django to popularise Gypsy guitar. In the 1960s, he played Carnegie Hall and The Ed Sullivan Show, while a fan called Picasso drew squiggles on his guitar. Inspired by Manitas de Plata’s example, younger members of his family formed the Gipsy Kings.

Diblo Dibala (1954-)

A graduate of Franco’s mighty band, the lightning speed with which notes cascade from Diblo Dibala’s guitar earned him the nickname ‘Machine Gun’ and made him an in-demand session player on high-energy soukous recordings by Kanda Bongo Man, Pépé Kallé and just about everybody else in the ‘who’s who’ of soukous.

Mother Maybelle Carter (1909-1978)

Maybelle Carter formed The Carter Family in 1927 as a trio with her cousin Sara and Sara’s husband AP Carter. With songs such as ‘Can the Circle Be Unbroken (By and By)’, ‘Wildwood Flower’ and ‘Wabash Cannonball’ they went on to become the most important and influential group in the early recording history of American folk and rural country music. AP sang and played a little guitar, Sara took the lead vocals and played autoharp, and Maybelle was the principal guitarist, inventing what came to be known as ‘the Carter Scratch,’ a style that elevated the acoustic guitar from providing a simple accompanying rhythmic strum into a lead instrument by simultaneously playing a bass melody with her thumb on the bottom strings and a rhythm on the top strings with her index finger. “When I started, I didn’t have nobody to play with me, so that’s how I developed this style,” she explained.

Bombino (1980-)

Omara ‘Bombino’ Moctar had been a professional musician for more than a dozen years before his high-octane guitar playing mixing Touareg tradition and Hendrix-style pyrotechnics came storming out of the desert with his 2011 album Agadez. Since then, he’s become a favourite at rock festivals and been dubbed ‘The Sultan of Shred’ by The New York Times.

Ibrahim Ag Alhabib (1960-)

Tinariwen have within their ranks a battery of fine guitarists, but Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, as the band’s de facto leader, sets the tone for their desert blues-rock. His fluid notes and loping grooves have created a unique genre that has been much imitated but never bettered.

Lobi Traoré (1961-2010)

With a down-and-dirty style which he deployed in Bamako’s less reputable bars and clubs, a BBC review once described Lobi Traoré’s blistering electric blues as ‘somewhere between John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Page.’ After releasing a ferocious debut full-length in 1991, he went on to record albums produced by Ali Farka Touré and Damon Albarn.

Barthélémy Attisso (1945-2021)

Born in Togo, Barthélémy moved to Dakar in the 1960s and became a founder member of Orchestra Baobab, playing on all of the band’s classic 1970s and 80s recordings. He then put down his guitar to become a lawyer, but when the group reformed in 2001, he swiftly proved that his elegant, jazzy phrasing had lost none of its lustre.

Yasmin Williams (1997-)

Picking the strings of her acoustic guitar and tapping out a rhythm with her fingers or her feet, the Virginia-born Williams makes fresh, life-enhancing currency out of a rich folk heritage from Appalachia and beyond. Her technique is dazzling, but there’s no showboating, and the virtuosity is deployed only in the strict interests of the music.

Rodrigo (1974-) y Gabriela (1973-)

The Mexican acoustic duo of Rodrigo Sánchez and Gabriela Quintero seem to divide opinion with their populist combination of flamenco-derived rhythmic flair and rock’n’roll aggression – but as Songlines once noted, when they play with such joie de vivre, who cares whether their tunes are written by Paco de Lucía or Metallica? With Gabriela beating out a percussive rhythm on both the strings and body of her guitar and Rodrigo filling the places where you’d expect the vocal to be with smartly structured melodies rather than indulgent soloing, their second studio album in 2006 was a breath of fresh air as accents borrowed from nuevo flamenco and tango mixed with frenzied, rocked-up dynamics and their fingers flailed furiously on original compositions and improbable covers, including ‘Stairway to Heaven’. They could easily have become a one-trick novelty act but have continued to grow, with subsequent albums incorporating Middle Eastern and Cuban influences, wah-wah guitar and much else besides.

Justin Adams (1961-)

Inspired equally by the Indigenous sounds he heard growing up in the Middle East and a teenage passion for The Clash, Adams’ eclectic guitar playing has accompanied Robert Plant, Gambian griot Juldeh Camara and Italy’s Mauro Durante among others, while as a solo artist, the superb Desert Road (2000) was much influenced by his work producing Tinariwen.

Raphael Rogiński (1977-)

Eastern Europe hasn’t produced a glut of great guitar players, but Rogiński is an outstanding exception. He began playing the kemenche, a three-stringed lyre given to him by his grandmother, but today plays a Gibson electric guitar, creating numinous instrumentals with his group Shofar or on solo recordings such as 2023’s Talàn.

Ateshkhan Yuseinov (1970-)

One of the world’s great undiscovered guitar mavericks, we first heard the unique playing of Bulgaria’s Ateshkhan Yuseinov accompanying Ivo Papasov on the 2003 album Fairground. Combining both Balkan and jazz influences, his 2019 solo album Strange Suite offers a broader insight into his intricate instrumental skills.

Manuelcha Prado (1955-)

Peruvian guitarist and troubadour Manuelcha Prado numbers Jimmy Page among the fans of his arrangements of traditional Andean folk songs, while his own graceful compositions have been recorded by Susana Baca, among others. His recordings, once hard to find, are now available on the main streaming platforms. Start with his sublime 1981 debut, Guitarra Indígena.

This article originally appeared in the December 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today