06 Jan 12 The Blues – Choosing A Style Of Blues Guitar
There won't be too many budding guitarists who watch a blues man play a tear jerking riff on the guitar and not wish it that it were him playing that cool stuff. There's something very cool attached to it that transcends the actual technique. music doesn't have to be super complex or showy - Lightnin' Hopkins could play a simple bass pattern that could make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. The first thing we have to do is choose which style of blues guitar we'd would like to play. This is crucial - you have a lot of practice ahead of you, and you need to be passionate about the music.
If you say ' blues guitar ', various ideas will spring to mind for a wide variety of people, depending on their age and character. For some, the blues guitar of Buddy Guy and Stevie Ray Vaughan is the goal. Others search for the truth of the classic acoustic blues. For the purposes of this discussion, I'll lump all the electric styles into one category and simply name it ' electric ' , as I'm really just interested in the roots of all electric blues, acoustic blues guitar. What are the different styles of acoustic blues and how should we categorize them? This could be done by technique, sound or location. In fact, location seems to have had quite an effect on the regional styles, possibly due to the fact that guitar players took ideas from each other. This is how regional musical styles evolved.
The Delta Blues Guitar Sound. It's imagined that Delta is the place where it all started, although it's more likely that began in several areas at about the same time. Certainly, several mississippi blues men traveled North to play in cities like Chicago and Detroit when they realized that they could make a living without working 15 hours every in the fields. The early acoustic songs of Muddy Waters (Walkin' Blues) is a fine example of this basic delta technique. Incidentally, Waters said that his version of Walkin pre-dated that of Robert Johnson.
The delta blues sound might be described as relatively simple, often basic and intensely emotional. The bottleneck style of picking guitar was perfect for the area. The conditions were often hot and humid, which easily disturbed the tuning of a wooden guitar. Slide tunes played in open G or D were easier to keep in tune, and it was also easy to compensate for tuning errors by moving the slide around. Pieces from mississippi delta played in normal tuning were more often in the Keys of E and A, and used a monotonic bass line. The picking technique might be often basic but powerful. Blues men to listen to are Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters and Fred McDowell.
The lone star state has always produced a continuous stream of blues guitarists. Back in the early days, several notable players originating from Texas formed a distinctive musical style. A giant blues man, Lightnin' Hopkins, played mostly in E and A, employing a monotonic bass pattern. However, his picking thumb could move quickly and he was more inventive than the players in the. Hopkins penned many slow temp blues songs in E, but could quicky up the beat for an audience that wanted to dance a while. In his hay day, he easily packed the local halls and made some records. However, after being ripped off by a recording studio, he forever after insisted on being paid before every gig. Check out the music of Mance Lipscomb, another legend from the area.
For some reason, certain regions produced a plethora of remarkable blues men, as was the case in the state of South Carolina. Much of the music seems to be a crossover between Texas blues and complicated ragtime guitar, but that description is a little too simple. Several such as Pink Anderson and Willie Walker were very comfortable with the true alternating bass line normally with ragtime blues, but others, like Floyd Council, might break out of the pattern whenever he wanted to accent certain musical phrases in his songs. It's clear that these guitarists learned from each other, and we can identify similar patterns in the work of Blind Boy Fuller, Floyd and Gary Davis. All of these blues men were known to one another. Scrapper Blackwell penned some great examples of amazing songs with clever and attractive words.
Maybe the most complicated blues style of them all, the top performers were real masters of the technique. Ragtime guitar patterns normally have chord structures around the keys of G and C, and often feature 6 or 7 chord changes in place of the 3 or 4 associated with Mississippi or Texas pieces in E or A. (Of course,there are the exceptions that prove the rule!) Other characteristics are a strong bass line alternating between 2 or 3 strings, a melody picked simultaneously on the higher strings and often lyrics punctuated by single string runs picked with thumb and finger. Possible the two supreme masters of ragtime blues were Arthur Blake and Reverend Gary Davis. Blind Blake's bass picking was particularly slick, often doubling up on the tempo and rolling his picking thumb from one bass string to the next, producing a very rhythmic effect. Davis could really play all styles - blues, gospel and ragtime blues.
Some performers, such as Big Bill Broonzy, employed a monotic bass style, but was considerably more diverse than the majority of the delta blues men. He would play Tin Pan Alley standards, ballads, and often cross over into jazz and ragtime in his approach. Broonzy developed a blues niche we could call Chicago swing.
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