Blue Guitars VII – Blues Ballads

Blue Guitars is the twenty-first studio album by British singer-songwriter Chris Rea, released on 14 October 2005 by his independent record label Jazzee Blue and Edel Records. The Blue Guitars album, packaged as a box set in the style of an earbook, consists of eleven CDs, one DVD and a full colour book, including paintings by the artist, liner notes and song lyrics. It is an ambitious project about blues music with the 137 songs recorded over the course of 18 months with a work schedule—according to Rea himself—of twelve hours a day, seven days a week. 2007 saw the release of a 2-CD "best of" compilation Blue Guitars: A Collection of Songs, which with individual albums can be also found in digital format.

Initially the project was inspired by Bill Wyman's Blues Odyssey and can be called an "odyssey" in its own right, for depicting a journey through the various epochs of blues music, starting at its African origins, then going through various American regional variations, different styles including Celtic & Irish and finishing with modern-time blues from the 1960s and 1970s.

The earbook album sold over 150,000 copies in Europe, and 170,000 until 2017. Several live exhibitions of the album's artwork paintings were held, like in October 2005 at The Cork Street Gallery, Central London, England, and Spazio Oikos, Milan, Italy.

According to 2005 De Standaard's review, it should be considered as Rea's "magnum opus", and in 2025 Blues Rock Review was described as "arguably the most ambitious blues-related project of the 21st century".