Jazz and blues streams have flowed side by side with occasional cross currents in the evolution of black music. The musical crosscurrents of Aaron "T-Bone" Walker bridge these two streams; he was equally at home in both jazz and blues. He performed with jazz musicians such as Johnny Hodges, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, and Count Basie, among others. Walker and Charlie Christian, in their teens, both contemporaneously developed the guitar in blues and jazz, respectively. Walker linked the older rural country blues—à la Blind Lemon Jefferson—and the so-called city classic blues singers such as Ida Cox and Bessie Smith of the 1920s, to the jazz-influenced urban blues of the 1940s; he also linked the older rural folk blues to the virtuoso blues. Walker has no antecedent or successor in blues—he was the father of electric blues...