Thirty years ago, a Fender Strat-wielding teenager from Shreveport, Louisiana by the name of Kenny Wayne Shepherd brought the blues back to the mainstream. It was 1995, the era of furrow-browed grungesters, when a sandy-haired guitar prodigy unapologetically celebrated a genre often pushed to the margins. With his fiery fretwork, pop-rock hooks, and reverence for the blues, Shepherd’s arrival was a much-needed palette-cleanser from the existential dread of the times.
