Albert Cummings

Electric blues guitarists may come and go, but the really good ones — the players whose tonal touch and emotional delivery can make the hair on the back of your neck stand up — always attract a following of believers, those who know the real deal when they hear it. Meet Albert Cummings, for whom “blues guitarist” is a second profession — he started later in life — but without question his primary passion. At age 17, while in college, the Massachusetts-born Cummings saw two tour buses outside Boston’s Orpheum Theater, one of them with a Gibson Les Paul and a Fender Stratocaster crossed like swords on the side. “It was Stevie Ray Vaughan,” Cummings recalls. “I bought a ticket for that night and watched him do amazing things — stand on his guitar, throw it up in the air — I sat there in awe the whole time and walked out of there thinking, I really want to play guitar!” (He’d taken up banjo, and guitar, five or six years earlier.) Fast forward to just a couple of years ago — Cummings attracted the attention of Double Trouble (Chris Layton, Tommy Shannon and Reese Winans), the guys who backed up Vaughan for so many years (indeed, they were on the Orpheum stage that fateful night). The trio subsequently produced and played on Cummings’ album “From the Heart,” and toured with the young axe-wielder, who also counts the great B.B. King among his most vocal supporters. Not long ago, in King’s Beale Street club in Memphis, “B.B. saw me out in the crowd and called me up and introduced me to his audience, telling them that he considers me a wonderful guitarist,” Cummings says. “It was like being on Cloud Nine. I’m so proud to have B.B. King call me his friend. It’s the thrill of my life.” As Albert J. Cummings IV, he’s also an accomplished builder of custom homes in New England, the operator of a longtime family business. “We’ve been building houses for more than a hundred years around here,” he says. “I never thought there could be any other career for me.” Cummings was 27 years old when he finally decided to make the switch to full-time musician-hood. “There are a lot of young guys in this but they don’t have the depth, at the age I am, that lures me to it,” he says. “They haven’t lived long enough, and they’re not singing about what they know. That’s what I try to do.”