The Southern slide maestro tells us why gear doesn’t make a player, why mediocre guitarists should pipe down, and why he’ll never be satisfied...

The first time the wider world became aware of the Derek Trucks phenomenon was a piece on American TV news in the early 1990s. The duckling-blond kid in the baseball cap might have been swamped by his instrument, yet his touch and feel were sufficiently dazzling to make fellow slide guitar maestro Sonny Landreth snap to attention.

"Any sense of Southern rock nepotism evaporated as he ascended through the ranks on his own merits"

“I saw this clip on the news, this little kid playing slide,” Landreth later remembered. “Me and my bass player, we just looked at each other and said, ‘Yep, that kid’s got it...’”

Landreth’s prediction was right on the money. Born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1979, the precocious slide man might have been the nephew of Allman Brothers drummer Butch Trucks, but any sense of Southern rock nepotism evaporated as he ascended through the ranks on his own merits.

By the late 90s, Trucks was juggling his Grammy Award-winning solo band with stints as the planet’s most celebrated sideman, sprinkling bottleneck fairy dust over the oeuvre of everyone from the Allmans to Eric Clapton.

Yet for many, his greatest creative outlet came in 2010, when he joined forces with wife Susan Tedeschi to form the genre-blurring Tedeschi Trucks Band. “When this band is firing on all cylinders,” he tells us, “it’s hard to beat.”