The 25 Greatest Women Guitarists of All Time

For most of the guitar's modern history, the story of the instrument has been told through a familiar collection of names.

Jimi Hendrix. Jimmy Page. Eric Clapton. Eddie Van Halen. Jeff Beck. Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Their places in guitar history are undeniable. But the conventional version of that history has often left out an enormous part of the story.

Women have been pushing the guitar forward since before rock and roll even had a name.

They played electric guitar when the instrument itself was still considered a novelty. They helped establish the sounds that would eventually become rock and roll. They carried blues traditions forward, wrote unforgettable riffs, stood on the world's biggest stages, explored the outer limits of technique and found entirely new ways to build careers in the digital age.

Some became household names. Others became guitarists' guitarists — the players whose names might not be recognized by everyone walking down the street, but whose abilities command immediate respect among musicians.

This list attempts to bring those worlds together.

Ranking guitarists across generations and genres is inherently subjective. How do you compare the historical importance of Sister Rosetta Tharpe with the technical precision of Jennifer Batten? The songwriting instincts of Nancy Wilson with the experimental approach of St. Vincent? A jazz master like Emily Remler with a modern virtuoso like Sophie Lloyd?

You can't — not perfectly.

So this ranking isn't based solely on speed, record sales or technical difficulty. We're considering musicianship, influence, innovation, tone, technique, songwriting, cultural impact, longevity — and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to make the guitar feel like something uniquely their own.

From the pioneers who helped lay the foundation for rock and roll to a new generation reaching millions of aspiring guitarists through screens around the world, these are The Guitar Plugged's 25 Greatest Women Guitarists of All Time.

25. Arielle

There are guitarists who simply play their instruments, and then there are guitarists who seem determined to understand every part of them. Arielle belongs firmly in the second category.

A singer, songwriter and guitarist with a deep appreciation for the instrument itself, Arielle represents a modern kind of guitar artist — one equally interested in tone, construction, composition and expression.

Her playing draws from the melodic side of classic rock and blues while maintaining an individual identity that avoids becoming a simple recreation of the past. There's an obvious reverence for the era when guitar heroes were larger-than-life figures, but the emphasis remains on musicality rather than empty displays of technique.

In a generation where the guitar has increasingly become intertwined with digital culture, Arielle has maintained something refreshingly old-school: the belief that the instrument itself matters. The wood matters. The feel matters. The relationship between player and guitar matters.

24. Sophie Burrell

The definition of a successful guitarist has changed dramatically. Once, the traditional path involved forming a band, playing clubs, securing a record deal and hoping enough people heard your music to build an audience.

Sophie Burrell belongs to a generation that has rewritten that blueprint. The British guitarist, songwriter, educator and online creator has built a large audience by combining musicianship with the accessibility of modern digital platforms. Her playing is rooted in contemporary rock guitar, but her importance goes beyond individual performances.

Burrell represents the democratization of guitar culture. A guitarist no longer needs permission from a record label to find an audience. A player with talent, personality and determination can pick up a guitar, turn on a camera and potentially inspire someone thousands of miles away to pick up the instrument themselves.

23. Poison Ivy

Great guitar playing isn't always about playing more. Sometimes it's about playing exactly what the music demands.

As the guitarist for The Cramps, Poison Ivy helped develop one of rock's most instantly recognizable musical identities — a twisted collision of rockabilly, garage rock, punk and the darker corners of American pop culture. Her guitar sound could be primitive, hypnotic, abrasive and seductive, sometimes within the same song.

There was little interest in virtuosity for virtuosity's sake. Instead, Ivy understood atmosphere. Her playing helped make The Cramps sound dangerous. Countless technically accomplished guitarists can play complicated passages. Far fewer can hit a handful of notes and immediately transport the listener into an entirely different world. Poison Ivy could.

22. Mary Ford

Long before guitar technology became a multi-billion-dollar industry, Mary Ford was helping demonstrate what was possible when musicians treated the recording studio itself as an instrument.

Her musical partnership with Les Paul became one of the most significant combinations of guitar performance and recording innovation in popular music. Ford's contributions can sometimes be overshadowed by Paul's enormous historical reputation, but that misses an essential part of the story.

The layered recordings associated with the duo depended on remarkable precision. Harmonies had to lock together. Parts had to interact. The technology was revolutionary, but technology alone doesn't create music. Musicians do — and Mary Ford was an essential part of a body of work that helped reshape how generations of guitarists would think about recording.

21. Lari Basilio

Few modern instrumental guitarists possess a melodic identity as immediately recognizable as Lari Basilio. Her playing is technically sophisticated without allowing technique to overwhelm the song.

That distinction matters. Modern guitar culture is filled with players capable of extraordinary feats of speed and precision. Basilio certainly possesses formidable technique, but her greatest strength may be restraint. Her phrasing breathes. Notes are allowed to ring. Melodies develop rather than simply explode.

Her work demonstrates that instrumental guitar music can be technically impressive while remaining emotionally accessible. For aspiring players, Basilio offers an important lesson: developing more technique should expand your musical vocabulary — not replace your musical voice.

20. Gabriela Quintero

One half of Rodrigo y Gabriela, Gabriela Quintero has helped redefine what audiences expect from the acoustic guitar. Calling her simply a rhythm guitarist would be technically accurate and completely inadequate.

Her percussive approach transforms the acoustic guitar into an entire rhythmic engine. The top becomes percussion. The strings become drums. The chord patterns become propulsion.

Alongside Rodrigo Sánchez, Quintero helped build a sound that draws from flamenco technique, rock energy, metal influences and acoustic tradition without fitting comfortably into any single category. Her playing is a reminder that rhythm guitar can be every bit as innovative and physically demanding as lead guitar. Sometimes more so.

19. Muriel Anderson

Muriel Anderson represents the guitar as an orchestra. A master of fingerstyle guitar and harp guitar, Anderson approaches the instrument with the kind of technical command that can make a single performer sound like an entire ensemble.

Bass lines move independently. Melodies float above chords. Harmonics shimmer. Inner voices appear between phrases. It's the kind of playing that can be difficult to fully appreciate until you attempt it yourself.

Anderson's musicianship demonstrates the extraordinary possibilities available to players willing to explore beyond conventional guitar roles. The guitar doesn't have to be rhythm or lead. In the right hands, it can be everything at once.

18. Emily Remler

Emily Remler's career was tragically short, but her impact on jazz guitar remains substantial. At a time when the jazz guitar world was overwhelmingly dominated by men, Remler established herself through musicianship that demanded attention on its own terms.

Her playing combined sophisticated harmonic knowledge with fluid improvisation and an obvious connection to the tradition of jazz guitar. But she wasn't interested in becoming a museum piece. Remler possessed her own voice. Her lines could be elegant and harmonically rich without sounding academic. There was swing in her playing, personality in her phrasing and a sense that the theory always served the music.

Her death at just 32 years old left one of guitar history's great unanswered questions: what might Emily Remler have accomplished with another three or four decades? What she achieved in the time she had was enough to secure her legacy.

17. Sophie Lloyd

Sophie Lloyd represents a major shift in how modern guitar heroes are created. Her rise didn't follow the traditional route. She built an audience online, turning technically demanding guitar performances into content capable of reaching millions of viewers. But dismissing Lloyd as simply an 'internet guitarist' would dramatically underestimate her musicianship.

The technique is real. The precision is real. And the career that followed is real.

Lloyd's evolution from online guitar creator to recording artist and touring musician demonstrates that the internet is no longer merely a promotional tool for guitarists — it can be the stage itself. Her music combines the vocabulary of shred guitar with the melodic instincts of hard rock and metal, while her visibility has introduced technically advanced guitar playing to audiences who may never have encountered the traditional instrumental-guitar world.

16. Samantha Fish

Samantha Fish plays the blues with one foot planted firmly in tradition and the other stepping somewhere considerably more dangerous. Her playing can move from gritty electric blues to slide guitar, roots music and full-throttle rock without losing its identity.

That's because the common denominator is attitude. Fish attacks the guitar. Her tone often feels physical — something pushed through an amplifier rather than politely produced by it.

At a time when blues guitar can sometimes become overly concerned with recreating the sounds of previous generations, Fish demonstrates how the genre can evolve without abandoning its foundations. The blues doesn't survive by remaining frozen. It survives because musicians continue finding something new to say with it. Samantha Fish is doing exactly that.

15. Yvette Young

Yvette Young approaches the guitar from a different angle entirely. As a central figure in the modern progressive and math-rock guitar world, Young has developed an approach built around intricate tapping, unusual voicings, alternate tunings and compositions that often blur the boundary between guitar and piano.

The result can sound almost impossible. Notes cascade across the fretboard. Melodies overlap. Chords appear in unexpected places. But the technique isn't the destination. Young's music often possesses an emotional delicacy that separates her from players who use tapping primarily as a vehicle for speed.

Her influence can already be heard across a younger generation of guitarists exploring cleaner tones, complex rhythms and two-handed approaches. She hasn't merely mastered an existing guitar vocabulary. She's helping expand it.

14. Gretchen Menn

Gretchen Menn is what happens when serious compositional ambition meets serious guitar technique. Known to many listeners through Zepparella, the all-female Led Zeppelin tribute band, Menn's abilities extend far beyond recreating Jimmy Page's legendary catalog.

Her original work reveals a musician with a much broader musical vocabulary. Rock. Classical composition. Progressive music. Complex harmony. Technical guitar playing. All of it exists within her musical world.

What makes Menn particularly compelling is that she approaches the guitar as both a performer and a composer. Technique isn't merely a collection of impressive physical abilities. It's a tool for realizing larger musical ideas.

13. Jennifer Turner

Sometimes a single performance can permanently change the way listeners hear a guitarist. For many, Jennifer Turner's work with Natalie Merchant — particularly the beautifully expressive guitar playing associated with the Tigerlily era — did exactly that.

“Before rock and roll had guitar gods, Sister Rosetta Tharpe was already playing like one. That's why she's number one.”

Turner's playing is a masterclass in supporting a song without disappearing inside it. Her guitar parts can be atmospheric, melodic and textural, occupying the spaces around the vocal rather than fighting for attention.

It's a different kind of greatness. The guitar world naturally celebrates players who dominate the spotlight. But some of the most effective guitarists understand how to shape an entire recording from the edges. Turner is one of them.

12. Ana Popović

Ana Popović combines blues tradition with the confidence of a modern guitar virtuoso. Her playing is fiery without becoming reckless, technically accomplished without becoming sterile.

Popović understands one of the fundamental truths of great blues guitar: the notes themselves are only part of the equation. The attack matters. The vibrato matters. The space between phrases matters. The way a note enters and exits matters.

Her career has helped carry blues guitar into the modern era while demonstrating that the genre remains fertile territory for musicians with something personal to say.

11. Kaki King

Kaki King helped an entire generation reconsider what an acoustic guitar could do. Her approach incorporates tapping, percussion, alternate tunings and extended techniques that transform the instrument into something larger than the traditional singer-songwriter accompaniment machine.

Watching King perform can feel like watching someone reverse-engineer the guitar in real time. The neck becomes one instrument. The body becomes another. Rhythm and melody become physically intertwined.

Her importance extends beyond technical innovation. She helped popularize an exploratory approach to acoustic guitar that encouraged younger players to stop asking, 'How is the guitar supposed to be played?' and start asking, 'What else can it do?'

10. St. Vincent

Annie Clark, better known as St. Vincent, is one of the most distinctive guitarists of the modern era. Her playing resists easy categorization. It can be angular. Fuzzy. Synthetic. Beautiful. Uncomfortable. Sometimes all within the same piece of music.

Rather than treating the guitar as a sacred object whose classic sounds must be preserved, St. Vincent treats it as raw material. Something to manipulate. Something to distort. Something to reshape. Her guitar work serves composition and atmosphere above traditional ideas of 'good tone' or conventional technique.

That willingness to challenge expectations is precisely why she belongs in the Top 10. Guitar history moves forward when players stop asking what they're allowed to do.

9. Joan Jett

Joan Jett doesn't need 30 notes when one power chord will do. That might sound like an insult in a culture obsessed with technical ability. It isn't. It's the point.

Jett's importance comes from understanding the elemental power of electric guitar. A distorted chord. A great riff. An unforgettable attitude. Turn the amplifier up. Hit the strings. Mean it.

From The Runaways through her career with the Blackhearts, Jett became one of rock guitar's most recognizable figures. Her influence isn't measured in sweep-picked arpeggios. It's measured in the countless people who saw her with a guitar and thought: 'I want to do that.' Few things matter more to the future of an instrument.

8. Susan Tedeschi

Susan Tedeschi is often celebrated first as a vocalist. Guitarists know better than to stop there. Her guitar playing carries the same emotional honesty as her voice — rooted in blues, soul and American roots traditions while remaining deeply personal.

As part of Tedeschi Trucks Band, she operates within a musical environment containing some of the finest players in contemporary roots music. Yet her guitar voice remains unmistakable.

Tedeschi doesn't need to overwhelm a song to leave a mark on it. Her strength comes from phrasing, touch and feel — three qualities that can never be measured by a metronome.

7. Nita Strauss

Nita Strauss is one of the most visible guitar heroes of the modern era. Her career bridges multiple worlds. Arena rock. Heavy metal. Instrumental guitar. Solo artistry. Online education.

Strauss possesses the technical vocabulary expected of a modern shred guitarist, but her larger significance comes from what she represents. She is a guitar hero in the traditional sense of the phrase. Big stages. Big solos. Big performances.

At a time when popular culture supposedly moved beyond the era of larger-than-life guitarists, Strauss demonstrated that audiences still respond to someone walking onto a massive stage and absolutely commanding the instrument. For a generation of young players — particularly young women interested in rock and metal — that visibility matters.

6. Orianthi

When Orianthi emerged into mainstream consciousness, the immediate reaction from many guitarists was simple: Who is this? And how is she playing like that?

Her combination of blues-rock phrasing, pop accessibility and high-level technique made her one of the most visible female guitarists of her generation. Her association with major artists brought her playing to enormous audiences, but Orianthi's solo career made it clear that she was never simply a hired gun. She could write. She could sing. And she could absolutely play.

Her style occupies the intersection between melodic rock guitar and modern virtuosity — a place where technical ability enhances the song rather than overwhelming it.

5. Lita Ford

Lita Ford didn't merely survive the male-dominated world of hard rock and heavy metal. She became one of its guitar heroes.

Beginning with The Runaways and continuing through a successful solo career, Ford established herself during an era when the image of the electric-guitar virtuoso was almost exclusively male. Her playing had muscle. Her tone had authority. And her presence mattered.

Ford helped make it increasingly impossible to maintain the outdated assumption that hard rock guitar belonged to men. She didn't need to argue the point. She plugged in and proved it.

4. Jennifer Batten

Imagine auditioning for Michael Jackson. Now imagine winning the gig. Now imagine standing on some of the biggest stages on Earth playing guitar in one of the most watched touring productions in music history. Jennifer Batten did exactly that. And then she went on to work with Jeff Beck.

That résumé alone would be enough to secure a place in guitar history. But Batten's importance goes deeper. She emerged during the explosion of technically advanced guitar playing in the 1980s, mastering an instrumental vocabulary that demanded extraordinary precision. Her two-handed tapping techniques and futuristic approach made her instantly recognizable, while her ability to perform under the enormous pressure of global stadium tours proved that technical brilliance could survive outside the practice room.

Her later work with Jeff Beck further demonstrated her versatility. Batten wasn't confined to a single role or era; she could operate alongside one of the most innovative electric guitarists who ever lived.

For generations of players, Jennifer Batten provided something invaluable: proof. Proof that a woman could stand on the world's largest stages, play technically demanding electric guitar and command exactly the same respect afforded to any male guitar virtuoso.

3. Bonnie Raitt

Bonnie Raitt doesn't need to shout through the guitar. She makes it speak. Her slide playing is immediately recognizable — not because it's overloaded with technique, but because every phrase seems connected to the human voice.

Raitt understands touch. That sounds simple. It isn't. Touch is the difference between playing the correct notes and making someone feel them.

Her career also represents an extraordinary combination of guitar playing, songwriting, interpretation and longevity. Raitt never needed to fit the conventional image of a guitar hero. She created her own. And decades later, the sound of her slide remains unmistakable. That's one of the highest compliments any guitarist can receive.

2. Nancy Wilson

There are guitar parts that introduce songs. And then there are guitar parts that become part of rock history. The opening of Crazy on You belongs firmly in the second category.

Nancy Wilson's place near the top of this list comes from a combination of musicianship, songwriting and influence. With Heart, Wilson helped create a body of music that could move effortlessly between delicate acoustic passages and enormous hard-rock riffs. That versatility became part of her identity. She wasn't simply 'the rhythm guitarist.' She wasn't simply 'the acoustic guitarist.' She was a complete musician whose playing helped define the architecture of the songs.

Her influence is particularly important because Heart emerged during the height of classic rock — an era dominated by male guitar heroes — and succeeded without sacrificing musical power. Nancy Wilson didn't ask for a place in rock history. She played her way into it.

1. Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Before rock and roll had guitar gods, Sister Rosetta Tharpe was already playing like one. That's why she's number one.

Tharpe occupies a unique position in the history of popular music because her influence reaches beyond the question of who the greatest woman guitarist might be. She belongs in the larger conversation about the origins of rock guitar itself.

Her combination of gospel music, rhythmic drive and amplified electric guitar helped establish a vocabulary that future generations would recognize as foundational to rock and roll. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame describes Tharpe as the 'first guitar heroine of rock & roll,' an appropriate description for a performer whose electric-guitar work anticipated a musical revolution.

Consider the historical timeline. Tharpe was bringing an electrified guitar sound to audiences before many of the musicians traditionally credited with defining rock guitar had established their careers. She wasn't following rock and roll. She was helping create the conditions from which it emerged. And she did it while navigating an industry and society that placed enormous barriers in front of Black women. Yet there she was. Guitar in hand. Amplifier turned up. Playing with authority.

Decades before the phrase 'guitar hero' became part of popular culture, Sister Rosetta Tharpe embodied it. Every guitarist who came afterward inherited a musical world she helped create. That makes her not merely one of the greatest women guitarists of all time. It makes her one of the most important guitarists, period.

The Guitar Has Never Belonged to Just One Generation — or One Gender

Twenty-five names. Twenty-five completely different relationships with the instrument. And inevitably, 25 reasons for someone to tell us we're wrong. That's part of the fun.

No ranking can fully capture the history of women and the guitar. Players like Memphis Minnie, Charo and countless others could make compelling cases for inclusion, and another version of this list written five years from now may look considerably different. That's a good thing. Because guitar culture is still moving.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe helped establish the foundation. Nancy Wilson and Bonnie Raitt became enduring icons. Jennifer Batten demonstrated that world-class virtuosity belonged on the world's biggest stages — from Michael Jackson's global tours to her later work with Jeff Beck. Players like St. Vincent and Yvette Young challenged assumptions about what guitar music should sound like.

And a new generation is changing how guitar heroes emerge. Sophie Lloyd built international visibility through online guitar content before expanding into major touring and original music, while Sophie Burrell represents the increasingly powerful intersection of guitarist, songwriter, educator and digital creator. Gretchen Menn, meanwhile, demonstrates that modern virtuosity doesn't have to choose between the visceral power of rock guitar and the sophistication of serious composition.

The platforms change. The technology changes. The definition of a guitar career changes. But the fundamental attraction remains exactly the same. Six strings. An amplifier — or sometimes no amplifier at all. And the possibility that someone, somewhere, is about to discover a sound we've never heard before.

Who did we miss? Who's ranked too high? Who's ranked too low? Let us know — because if there's one thing guitarists will always agree on, it's that we'll never agree on a list of the greatest guitarists. And we wouldn't have it any other way.