Buttoned-Down Blues

Albert Cummings

No, he hasn’t spent time in jail. He builds big houses—really big houses.

And when he’s not running his award-winning construction business, the 39-year-old Cummings can often be found playing a mean blues guitar. His intense, rip-the-neck-off style has often been compared to Stevie Ray Vaughn. In fact, there are times when it seems Stevie Ray is being channeled through Cummings, a notion supported by the fact he often records with Vaughn’s famed rhythm section, Double Trouble.

Cummings, who has opened for B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Johnny Winter, and other icons, is not from East Texas or Mississippi. He grew up, and still lives, in the white-clapboard tidiness of Williamstown, Massachusetts.

In his khakis, plaid shirt and close-cropped hair, Cummings looks as buttoned-down as his home town. But his bland demeanor and unassuming way is in sharp contrast to his screaming guitar and heartfelt vocals. It’s as if he saves all his personality for his music. His playing is a continual homage and tribute to Vaughn, the late Texas guitar wizard who died in 1990.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” Cummings says. Though folks often compare him to his idol, he doesn’t really feel he’s worthy of all the accolades. “I couldn’t carry his guitar case,” he shrugs.

Cummings was, by his own admission, “a bluegrass, country-bumpkin kid” when his brother-in-law steered him toward the blues. “He gave me a tape of Stevie Ray’s Texas Flood,” he recalls, referring to Vaughn’s 1983 debut album. “In 1987, I’m going to school at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, and one day I’m walking down the street and in front of the Orpheum Theater are two big buses, and one has got a Les Paul guitar on the side. I look at the sign: ‘Stevie Ray Vaughn and Double Trouble Tonight.’ I was like, ‘Oh my God!’”

At that point, Cummings didn’t even play guitar. He had grown up playing five-string banjo, though guitar playing ran in the family. His father was a big band guitarist, the polished type whose solos always sounded the same.