# The 16 Best Blues Rock Bands of All Time

> The bands that plugged the twelve-bar blues into an amplifier, from Cream and the Yardbirds to the Black Keys — with Led Zeppelin, whose first album was mostly blues, among them.

*By YPB Team · Published September 16, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-16-best-blues-rock-bands-of-all-time*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Led Zeppelin** — score 1000/1000
   Built a first album almost entirely out of blues covers and blues borrowings, then took the form somewhere heavier.
2. **Cream** — score 733/1000
   Clapton, Bruce and Baker turned the blues trio into a vehicle for extended improvisation.
3. **Canned Heat** — score 551/1000
   Boogie specialists whose Woodstock set kept the pre-war blues audible to a rock crowd.
4. **The Jimi Hendrix Experience** — score 466/1000
   A blues guitarist with a fuzzbox and a rhythm section that could follow him anywhere.
5. **Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble** — score 466/1000
   The 1980s revival act that made a Stratocaster and a Texas shuffle commercial again.
6. **Joe Bonamassa** — score 466/1000
   The most visible current standard-bearer, playing theatres on a catalogue of originals and deep covers.
7. **The Rolling Stones** — score 363/1000
   Named themselves after a Muddy Waters song and spent sixty years arguing they meant it.
8. **Fleetwood Mac** — score 363/1000
   Before the California pop era, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac was Britain's most serious blues band.
9. **ZZ Top** — score 363/1000
   A Texas trio that kept the twelve-bar form intact through disco, MTV and everything after.
10. **The Yardbirds** — score 363/1000
   The band that employed Clapton, Beck and Page in turn, and invented the rave-up.
11. **The Black Keys** — score 363/1000
   A drums-and-guitar duo from Akron who dragged the form back onto modern radio.
12. **The Paul Butterfield Blues Band** — score 363/1000
   The integrated Chicago band that plugged in behind Dylan at Newport in 1965.
13. **Derek and the Dominos** — score 363/1000
   Clapton and Duane Allman for one album, which happened to contain 'Layla'.
14. **The Allman Brothers Band** — score 0/1000
   Two lead guitars, a Fillmore East live album, and the Southern half of the genre.
15. **The White Stripes** — score 0/1000
   Two people, a red-and-white uniform, and a catalogue built on Son House and Blind Willie McTell.
16. **Gary Moore** — score 0/1000
   An Irish guitarist who left hard rock for the blues in 1990 and made the best-selling record of his career.

Tags: music, rock, bands, guitar, blues rock