Quinn Sullivan

With his third studio album scheduled for release this March, the future’s looking bright for this teenage blues player

Quinn Sullivan has shared the stage with Buddy Guy, Eric Clapton, Derek Trucks and Joe Bonamassa. He’s opened for BB King and appeared on US TV a number of times, including The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Ellen DeGeneres Show. It may sound as though we’re talking about a veteran blues performer – but Quinn is just 17 years old.

Obviously a prodigious talent, he first picked up the guitar when he was only three. “My parents had a whole bunch of music in the house,” he tells us. “We used to listen to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, The Allman Brothers – a lot of different rock bands and my mum and dad used to bring me to a lot of festivals around where I lived in New Bedford.”

When he was five, Quinn began to take lessons and the guitar came to be a dominant feature in his life. But there was a noticeable gear shift after he saw Buddy Guy on the DVD of Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival. “Eric, Jimmy Vaughan, Robert Cray and BB King were all on stage and Buddy came out and did Sweet Home Chicago and there was just something about it. It wasn’t just the guitar playing that really caught my attention, it was everything else. At the time I was only around five or six, but I just remember looking at him playing and how he was capturing the audience. It really made me want to go and see him play.”

A year or so later Buddy played a gig in Quinn’s home town in Massachusetts and, by a stroke of luck, Quinn’s father knew the people who ran the theatre. “We found our way backstage to meet him and he signed my guitar and asked me to play something for him. Then he said, ‘You be ready when I call you…’ and I was like, ‘What? What did he just say?’”

Buddy called Quinn up on stage that night to play and has been a valuable mentor to the young bluesman ever since. “He’s really taken me under his wing,” Quinn enthuses, “nurturing and helping me out.”

So what gear powers his performances? “On tour I’ve been using a Fender Deluxe Reverb. As far as guitars go, I play a lot of Strats. I have a Fender American Standard with Noiseless Pickups, that’s my main guitar. I also have a 60th Anniversary Sunburst Strat, and at home I have a Gibson 335 that I sometimes bring out at gigs. As far as my pedalboard goes, I’m running through a Jimi Hendrix wah-wah pedal, an Ibanez Tube Screamer, an MXR Custom Badass overdrive pedal and a Memory Man.”

With upcoming gigs in Chicago and Mumbai, it looks like there’s another star ascendent in the blues universe. [DM]