I've always enjoyed SRV's playing and he certainly led the field during his brief career—the field being white guys playing high-energy electric blues. Still, as GUEST says above, I think Mike Bloomfield is the only white guy that actually understood the blues from the inside out. His playing actually stands up along side the best black bluesmen. Bloomfield was playing before the genre had broken through as mainstream music and a lot of fans never bothered to go back and listen. Bloomfield's playing wasn't just a long series of difficult percussive licks, it was connected and smooth on top of being well composed and difficult. Well before joining Butterfield, Bloomfield had mastered the blues. It's worth noting that Bloomfield, not surprisingly, played in the Chicago blues style, not the Texas style used by SRV.

I don't play anything by either of these great players but I do put heavy flat-wound strings on my Tele. I also have a humbucker at the neck position. As I watch my old tapes of SRV playing on Austin City Limits, I'm amazed to learn that he used heavy strings. You can watch him stretch the treble strings half way across the fingerboard—easy to do with Super Slinkys but damned tough with heavy strings.

      - Mark