The most influential white/bluesman guitarist is someone you never heard of.... Well that's probably not true here since this is a "hip room" judging from the all the previous knowledgable postings (over 2+ years!!!).
Anyway it's a guy called Dave van Ronk. Seriously. Even those of you that know of him probably don't feel he belongs here, but his invaluable contribution, even besides his superb guitar playing (finger-picked acoustic heavily influenced by Rev. Gary Davis) is that he was the FIRST white person, at least not born in a southern milieu & perhaps even including that as far as I know, to perform the blues in the exact same style & intensity as the black bluesmen, starting in the '50s. No namby-pamby vocals or smoothing out jagged rythyms or substituting "nice" lyrics for the Eisenhower era audience. He wasn't mimicing the black style either, he was respectful but a pretty funky & earthy guy. A wheezy voice not unlike Joe Cocker. He hollered & swore & sweated & had a remarkably intricate country blues picking style. No compromise blues. He taught guitar to many of the folkies, later rockers, who came out of Greenwich Village in the 60s. His albums were known in England's folk & blues circles in the pre-Beatles 60's. The arrangement of House of the Rising Sun on Dylan's first album was literally stolen from Dave's act, causing the dissolution of their friendship. The BEST guitarist...maybe not, but I felt his passing last year went just as unnoticed as his key contribution to popular music has. Perhaps some of the young players here might run across some of his early bluesy LPs sometime & give a listen.
As for Clapton being tired, maybe. But you have to realize when that first album came out in, oh 1964, nobody was playing like that. Nobody outside of the clubs in the southside of Chicago that is & most of America was utterly oblivious to that. We were being force fed pop acts and even those r&b acts & bluesy rockers like the Stones, Kinks & Animals that broke through had nothing that compared to EC's sound -sustain & distortion- as well as his speed, accuracy and feeling. It was stunning at the time, and that stuff all through the 60's & early 70's still stands up today. Beck & Hendrix & all the rest followed EC and stood on his shoulders, just as he admits he stands on the shoulders of Muddy, Freddy, BB and all the other, up to then, ignored greats.
