Barry Cleveland

Jeff Beck’s love for Jimi Hendrix was well known in his lifetime. He frequently mentioned Hendrix in interviews, sharing stories about their interactions and their occasional adventure jamming or hanging out. It’s been equally well established that Beck felt Hendrix sidelined his career and took the shine off his rising star when the American guitarist arrived in London in late 1966. In seemingly no time at all, Hendrix was the player everyone was talking about.

When the original Black Sabbath reunite to perform their final live gig on July 5 in Birmingham, England, a lot of guitar history will be onstage with them. As the band’s founding guitarist, Tony Iommi forged the sound of heavy metal more than 50 years ago, setting in motion an entire genre full of downtuned doomy riffs.

Think you’ve heard the most show-stopping, gut-wrenching hardcore blues solos of all time? We don’t think you have until you’ve heard every solo on this list of what we consider the 50 greatest badass blues guitar solos of all time. Let’s face it: Thousands up thousands of great blues solos have been played on the electric guitar, so you can imagine how daunting it was for us to narrow our selection down to just 50.