Re: Better for the Blues?
Whatever the black blues men of the Mississippi and Chicago used: Strats.
Depends what period you're looking at. They started with a lot of hollowbodies with P-90's (like BB King with an ES-5) in the late 1940's and early 1950's. Can't ignore this crucial time period. Fenders didn't catch on right away, especially Tele's, and were popular with country players first, who liked the twang. By the late 1950's Fenders were common in blues, but by then, blues was rapidly going out of style in the USA, being replaced by other genres, as young urban blacks didn't like the plantation association of blues. Blues venues dried up fast and bluesmen struggled to find work.
It had all but died in America, and was only revived because of the Folk Blues tours across europe, where the biggest names in blues performed for white crowds for the first time, and were proclaimed as heroes. And in the audience were young Brits, like Mayall, Korner, Clapton, Green, Page, Beck, Jagger, Richards, etc, who soon introduced blues to white America, mostly playing Gibsons.
Gibsons were integral in the post-war blues boom, and in the 60's blues explosion in the UK and USA.
