By Bart Cannon/Special to the Times-Review
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In a matter of days, Guitar Center’s King of the Blues Grand Finals will unveil the identities of the top five undiscovered blues guitar players in America. These hand-picked pickers will be welcomed into the spotlight by big-name guitarists Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Derek Trucks and the legendary Honeyboy Edwards.
Despite the well-deserved hubbub over these ax-wielding newcomers, if I had a choice, I’d vote for an equally obscure yet highly deserving write-in candidate: Darrell Gunter of Pearl, Miss.
After the British Invasion, circa 1964, many of my friends in the Pearl area stormed music stores, such as Skeets’ Guitar Shop, and commenced to hammer out their chops. I fell asleep many a night with my cherry-red Gibson SG Jr. nestled in my arms, but being self-taught has its limitations.
That’s when I called Gunter. We weren’t close friends and didn’t hang together at school, because he was a few years younger. Nevertheless, Gunter invited me into his home and jump-started my guitar soloing. Under his tutelage, I learned several Jimi Hendrix tunes and my favorite blues standard — a song I still play today — “Call it Stormy Monday (but Tuesday’s Just as Bad).”
My student-teacher relationship with Gunter wasn’t unusual. Fellow Gunterite Cecil Dawkins recalled, “I used to go over to Darrell’s house when he was about 14 or 15, and he was already getting very good. He would learn exactly note-for-note about every song that came out. He would sit there for hours and say over and over, ‘Have you heard this?’ and then he’d play it perfectly.”
“I think Darrell invited you and me over because he loved music so much that he was always interested in everything that everybody else was doing,” added Dawkins. “It wasn’t because he wanted everyone to know how good he was — we all knew that!”
Gunter’s guitar-playing career started in garage bands in central Mississippi but soon graduated to the big time — albeit in the shadows behind headliners.
“If I remember correctly, Darrell and drummer Tommy Aldridge [later of Black Oak Arkansas, White Snake, and Ozzie Ozbourne fame] went down to New Orleans and played with Jose Feliciano for a while,” explained Dawkins.
The guitar prodigy of Pearl, Miss., later recorded on Paul Davis’ Top 40 hit, “I go Crazy” and shared the stage with a plethora of popular acts — Steppenwolf, Vanilla Fudge, Ozark Mountain Daredevils and the New Christy Minstrels.
At age 39, Gunter proved he still knew his way around the fret board by out-riffing hordes of competitors in the 1990 “Best Guitarist in Mississippi” regional contest hosted by Hal & Mal’s Restaurant in Jackson. However, guitar players are like gunslingers. There’s always someone a little faster with a bit better moves just down the road. Gunter placed second in the state final.
After that, Gunter’s career struggled to regain traction, and his immense talents found expression in a studio in the back of Ronnie’s Music Center — imparting his knowledge to a new wave of guitar-god wannabes.
If obscurity wins awards, Gunter surely gets the nod. Out of curiosity, an Internet search for the finest guitarist of Pearl, Miss., found not one single reference to Gunter. Considering the number of lives touched by Gunter’s musical genius, this lack of space on the web should qualify as some sort of cyber crime.
At some point, Gunter gave his heart to the Lord Jesus Christ, but drug abuse claimed his body on Aug. 4, 1998. “His death was a real loss to the music community,” Dawkins lamented.
Though gone and in many cases forgotten, Gunter may yet experience his finest musical hour at the event Pink Floyd dubbed the “Great Gig in the Sky.”
“I traded in a white Fender Stratocaster with maple fingerboard at Ronnie’s, and a few days later, Darrell came out to my house, and he had bought the thing,” Dawkins said. “I never saw him play after that when he wasn’t playing that white Strat.”
Perhaps when Gunter’s understudies and fans behold him on the celestial stage, he’ll be playing a heavenly version of that white Strat — hand-crafted by angels in God’s Custom Shop.
On that stage, Gunter won’t have to beat out the competition or impress fickle, human judges. Rather, he can let fingers fly or squeeze every note for all it’s worth, and when it’s time, he’ll share the stage with his students as we plug in and take our respective turns making “joyful noises” — just as he taught us.
As is often the case, treasure comes to us in imperfect vessels. Regardless of his faults, Darrell Gunter was a gift, and it’s high time somebody said so.
