“In all the years I’d played with Albert, I’d always wanted to hear him play something in a minor key – and he smoked it!”: Robert Cray tells the story behind the greatest all-star blues team-up of the ‘80s

[From left] Albert Collins, Robert Crae, Johnny Copeland are pictured with their guitars for the cover of their 1985 blues classic, Showdown!.

Despite all the hair metal, shred, synth-pop and early-stage hip-hop, the Eighties was actually an incredibly fertile period for blues guitar.

Obviously, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Robert Cray, and Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble were among the primary forces behind the genre’s rebirth (in its traditional and/or modern forms); but, just as the British blues boom of the mid Sixties had inspired young listeners to look beyond Eric Clapton, Peter Green, and Mick Taylor and rediscover an earlier generation of American blues masters, fans of the Vaughan brothers started to look backwards and rediscover their heroes’ heroes.