“You’re talking about somebody who’s touched by the hand of God. You can’t even fathom it”: Paul Gilbert worshipped his playing, he tutored Luther Dickinson, and he remains, decades after his death, perhaps the greatest little-known guitarist of all time

Shawn Lane guitar lesson.

It would have been easy for memories of Shawn Lane to fade away after his 2003 death. He recorded only two solo albums.

His best-distributed work, 1992’s Power of Ten, barely captured his heart and soul and didn’t make a ripple in the day’s shred-saturated market. He spent years playing small clubs in his hometown of Memphis. He played only a handful of studio sessions for Johnny Cash, the Marshall Tucker Band’s Toy Caldwell, and Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Waylon Jennings’ supergroup, the Highwaymen.