A flashy showman who stressed his strings and his audience

John Watson Jr. was born in Houston, Texas, and his father, a pianist, taught him the instrument. But the boy was drawn to the electric guitar as played by T-Bone Walker and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. His grandfather, a preacher, offered him a guitar at eleven on one condition: that he not play any of the devil’s music. His parents separated when he was fifteen, and his mother took him to Los Angeles.

In his new city Watson won local talent shows, and as a teenager he worked with jump blues bands such as Chuck Higgins’s Mellotones and Amos Milburn as a vocalist, pianist and guitarist. He first recorded for Federal Records in 1952 and was billed as Young John Watson until 1954, when he saw the Joan Crawford film Johnny Guitar and found a new stage name. He cultivated a swaggering, humorous personality, with flashy clothes and wild showmanship.

His attacking style, played without a pick, meant he often had to change strings once or twice a show because he “stressified” them so much. His 1954 instrumental “Space Guitar” was the first record to show that off-the-wall madness, although it did not chart. Music historian Larry Birnbaum said it was where he came into his own as a guitarist. Watson toured and recorded with Larry Williams, Little Richard, Johnny Otis and, in the mid-1970s, David Axelrod, and in 1975 guested on Frank Zappa’s One Size Fits All.

The 1970s brought a funk-flavoured reinvention and hits with “Ain’t That a Bitch” and “Superman Lover”. His highest-charting single was 1977’s “A Real Mother for Ya”. “Gangster of Love”, first released in 1957 and missing the charts then, was re-recorded and became a hit in 1978, his most famous song. His career lasted forty years until his death in 1996, and he later influenced a younger generation of guitarists.