Top 100 guitarists/ Vintage Guitar magazine

I agree Cathy - all very subjective as usual. At least Mike Campbell is there at 72 but no mention of Paul Kossoff!!!!!

Just look at some of the names that Joe came out ahead of! Congratulations to Joe, well deserved.

Those lists are always so boringly predictable. Always the same in the top 5.  It's like they don't want to accept there has been some pretty fantastic guitarists come around in the last 30 or so years.

I cant believe what you have written.

Great players that Larry and Robben are, they are still of pretty minor importance in the landscape of guitar history.  Chuck Berry is arguably the most important electric guitar player there has been.  He virtually invented rock and roll.  The riffs to Johnny be Goode, Maybelline, Roll over Beethoven etc. virtually defined everything that followed.

Guitar skills are almost irrelevant without considering the era in which they were used.
There are a million 15 year old kids that can tap as well, if not better than Eddie van Halen - Should they be on the list - Of course not.

What I like about this list is that the greats of some other stylings are included.  e.g. Segovia is probably the greatest and most important guitarist of them all.  Rankings are a bit iffy, but that's what you get when people vote for their favourites.

Good to see Paco (should be top 3 of any list) and Charlie Christian and Tommy E though

Yeah I have to agree with this. There are many great guitarists that are taking the craft to levels perhaps never even thought of before. But, as the saying goes, they have been able to do this because 'they stood on the shoulders of giants'. The guys who 'invented' this stuff. Hendrix had Elmore James under his arm. Clapton had Robert Johnson. They followed the creators of this stuff. I don't think there is any comparison. Now we have guitarists like Joe, Eric Steckel, Matt Schofield, Kirk Fletcher, and so many others that are furthering what Clapton, Page and Beck did. But they are not creating anything really new. I think guys like Chuck Berry were innovators who created new sounds, like the Beatles. We sure as heck had never heard anything like that prior to them. So it just seems logical that the guys who really came up with this stuff, are pretty much out ahead of those who polished it. Just my 2 cents.

Edited to add: In retrospect I think Clapton, Hendrix and Beck, to name three, really are in the category of 'top' guitarists of all time. They took a language, the music that existed many, many years before them, and from it they created a new 'language' of music. For those of us old enough to have heard Clapton for the first time in the early sixties, or were there to listen to the freshly minted 'Are You Experienced' LP on a friends 'hi-fi' it was completely and absolutely new to us. We just stared at each other slack-jawed. It was new as the Beatles had been a few years before. So they really did come up with something new that we have been polishing for the last fifty years.

I hate these lists because they are so subjective.  But congrats Joe.