I have two favorites: Les Paul and T-Bone Walker. Les Paul is a phenomenal soloist and jazz player, but he also invented a lot of the tools that we take for granted now. He was instrumental in inventing the solid-body electric guitar, of course, and he also invented the multitrack tape recorder.
When I was a child, Les actually gave me my first guitar lesson. My dad was a tape-recorder nut -- he had probably the only one in Milwaukee. What happened was, Les came to Milwaukee and my dad went over there with a tape recorder and asked if he could record him. I watched him play every day; I was four or five years old and thought it was the neatest thing in the world. That was a huge influence on me.
Later, my family moved to Texas. One day, my dad rented a piano. I was getting ready to go to school, but I immediately got sick and stayed home -- I was nine. T-Bone Walker showed up. He drove into our driveway in a flesh-color Cadillac convertible with leopard-skin seats and stepped out. He was the sweetest man and a phenomenal player.
The reason T-Bone is so important is that he is the bridge between jazz and blues for the electric guitar. Charlie Christian was great; T-Bone was even cooler, because he was bluesier, and that's where I learned to play lead guitar and where I also learned to put the guitar behind my head and do the splits.