Confession time. I had fallen behind a little bit again in my 52 Guitarists series and then news hit of Prince’s passing. That threw a spanner in my works for a few reasons. Firstly, Prince was the next intended entry in this series—the list of 52 has already been compiled and has been for some time now. Secondly, I didn’t want to appear to be attempting to benefit with this article through Prince’s passing. Finally, the 52 Guitarists series to date had only featured living guitarists and I really didn’t want to change that with Prince. There are guitarists to come in the list that are deceased of course, but they’ve been deceased for quite some time now.

I decided to take some some time before publishing this article out of respect and also to reconsider my approach to this particular entry. On that note I eventually decided to write the entry almost as I’d intended on writing it prior to Prince’s passing. So with that in mind, let’s look at the reasons I consider Prince to be an incredibly inspirational guitarist. … 52 guitarists, week 15—Prince