Alvin Youngblood Hart

Hart’s praises have been sung by everyone from Bob Dylan to guitar gods Eric Clapton & Mick Taylor.

Mr. Hart was born in Oakland CA in 1963 to a family of post WWII Mississippi transplants. After a couple false starts, he began to play the guitar, in earnest, in 1977. “By that time, it had become an obsessive competition among us teenage boys – the guitar was the video game of our day,” Hart says.

The Hart family was never one to stay put. Spending his formative years on the West Coast, in the Midwest and the Mid-South surely influenced Alvin’s wide ranging musical perspective. “It really taught me to appreciate MUSIC for what it was …. not because it was this or that genre. I have a great disdain for genre segregation. I try to avoid that practice.”

Along with his 40 years of playing comes a nuts-and-bolts passion for the hardware of the trade. “I’ve been a guitar tinker since day one. I can recall my parents buying me a new guitar, and I would have every screw out of it by bedtime.”