Derek Trucks

A young Trucks (right) with musician Livingston Taylor

Trucks age 9-10 with the Gregg Allman band

Trucks was born in Jacksonville, Florida. According to Trucks, the name of Eric Clapton's band, Derek and the Dominos, had "something to do with the name [Derek] if not the spelling".[2]

Trucks bought his first guitar at a yard sale for $5 at age nine and became a child prodigy, playing his first paid performance at age 11.[3][4] Trucks began playing the guitar using a slide because it allowed him to play the guitar despite his small hands as a young guitarist.[5] By his 13th birthday, Trucks had played alongside Buddy Guy[6] and toured with Thunderhawk.[4][7]

“Being tied to the Allman Brothers’ name and legacy when I was a kid certainly helped get gigs,” Derek Trucks said. [8]

Trucks formed The Derek Trucks Band in 1994, and[3][9] by his 20th birthday, he had played with such artists as Bob Dylan, Joe Walsh, and Stephen Stills.[10] In 1999, he toured as a member of Phil Lesh & Friends. [11] After performing with The Allman Brothers Band for several years as a guest musician, Trucks became a formal member of the band in 1999[3] and appeared on the albums Peakin' at the Beacon, Live at the Beacon Theatre, Hittin' the Note and One Way Out. In 2006 Trucks began a studio collaboration with JJ Cale and Eric Clapton called The Road to Escondido and performed with three bands in 17 different countries that year.[3] Trucks was invited to perform at the 2007 Crossroads Guitar Festival, and after the festival, he toured as part of Clapton's band.[3][12]

Trucks built a studio in his home in January 2008, and his band and he recorded the album Already Free. Trucks and his wife, Susan Tedeschi, combined their bands to form the Soul Stew Revival in 2007 and performed at the Bonnaroo Music Festival in June 2008.[13][14][15][16] In late 2009, Trucks and his band went on hiatus, after which the band dissolved. In 2010, Trucks formed the Tedeschi Trucks Band with his wife.[16][17] On January 8, 2014, Trucks announced that he and fellow guitarist Warren Haynes planned to leave the Allman Brothers Band at the end of 2014.[18] That band announced its retirement, with Trucks playing as a member through their final show on October 28, 2014, at the Beacon Theatre in New York City.

Trucks credits guitarist Duane Allman and bluesman Elmore James as the two slide guitarists who influenced his early style, but has since been inspired by John Lee Hooker, Ali Akbar Khan,[19] Howlin' Wolf, Albert King, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian, Wayne Shorter, Toy Caldwell, Johnny Winter, Freddie King and B.B. King.[19][20][21]

His music is rooted in blues and rock, embracing jam band, Southern rock, and jazz.[22][23] Trucks plays an eclectic blend of blues, soul, jazz, rock, qawwali music (a genre of music from Pakistan and eastern India), Latin music, and other kinds of world music[24] Trucks became a fan of Hindustani classical musician Ali Akbar Khan, known for his virtuosity in playing the sarod and popularising Indian classical music in the West, often in conjunction with sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar. Trucks studied at the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, California.[25][26]

Trucks playing a resonator guitar

Trucks plays the guitar in an open E tuning,[27] using a Dunlop Blues Bottle slide.[12]

In 2006, two vintage (1965 and 1968) Fender Super Reverb amplifiers, a Hammond B-3 organ, two Leslie speaker cabinets, and a Hohner E-7 clavinet were stolen from Trucks and later recovered by the Atlanta Police Department.[9]

Trucks has appeared twice in Rolling Stone's list of "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".[24][28][29] He was listed as 81st in 2003 and 16th in 2011. A 2006 article in The Wall Street Journal described him as "the most awe-inspiring electric slide guitar player performing today".[26] In 2007, Trucks appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone for an article called the "New Guitar Gods".[20] Trucks is a creative guitarist according to his uncle, Allman Brothers drummer Butch Trucks: "He never does the same thing twice".[30] The Washington Post in 2009 described Trucks' guitar style as "notes and chords that soar, slice, and glide, sounding like a cross between Duane Allman on a '61 Gibson Les Paul and John Coltrane on tenor sax".[31] The Derek Trucks Band's album Already Free debuted at number 19 on the Billboard Top 200 chart,[32] and number one on the Internet chart, number four on the rock chart, and number one on the blues chart.[13][32]

In 2010, The Derek Trucks Band won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album for the album Already Free. In 2012, Trucks and Tedeschi won the Grammy Award for Best Blues Album for the Tedeschi Trucks Band's debut album Revelator.[33] On February 12, 2012, Trucks accepted a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award along with 10 other members of The Allman Brothers Band.[34][35] On February 21, 2012, Derek Trucks and his wife joined other blues musicians for a performance at the White House for President Obama and his guests.[36]

In September 2012, John Mayer and Derek Trucks joined B.B. King on stage at the Hollywood Bowl for an encore version of B.B.'s song "Guess Who". Concluding the performance, B.B. King made several remarks about Trucks's guitar work, ending with, "That is as good as I've ever heard it".

Trucks' uncle, Butch Trucks, was a founding member and drummer of The Allman Brothers Band. His younger brother is Duane Trucks, who is a member of Widespread Panic and Hard Working Americans.[7] His great-uncle, Virgil Trucks, was a major league baseball pitcher in the 1940s and 1950s, winning 177 games in his career.[37] In 2001, Trucks married singer and musician Susan Tedeschi, and they had a son in March 2002 and a daughter in 2004.[38][39][40]

Trucks is an avid fan of the Atlanta Braves, the Florida State Seminoles,[41] and his hometown Jacksonville Jaguars.[42]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Derek Trucks.

• Derek Trucks official website
• Derek Trucks Band collection at the Internet Archive's live music archive
• Derek sits down with Ira Haberman of The Sound Podcast for a feature interview