Jon Chappell - Blues Guitar For Dummies

Chapter 1

IN THIS CHAPTER

Discovering the roots of blues

Identifying the different parts of the guitar and how they work

Differentiating between acoustic and electric guitars

Looking like a blues player

Testing your blues guitar knowledge

Playing the blues is a healthy way of expressing emotion — therapeutic even. The great irony about the blues is that it’s fun — don’t let those gloomy lyrics fool you for one second. Experiencing the blues is entertainment for both the listener and the player. Because the blues is fun and healthy, it draws people into jam sessions, crowded clubs, and grand concert halls.

To listen to the blues is to be healed. To play the blues is to be a healer. Want to help people? Forget about being a doctor; you’re only allowed to see one patient at a time. And there’s no pill you can prescribe for an ailing mojo. Be a blues player instead and help thousands at a time just by playing a smokin’ blues riff on overdrive. Now, that’s what I call medicinal!

The blues has a wide range of sounds, feels, emotions, and passions, and people have many different associations when you say the word blues. To some, the blues is the sparse-sounding acoustic fingerpicking of Robert Johnson. To others, it’s the gritty sound of Muddy Waters in a crowded club on Chicago’s South Side or the hard-rock wall of sound coming from a stadium playing host to Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, or Johnny Winter. It doesn’t matter which particular image is conjured, because it’s all the blues. After reading this book, playing through the examples, and listening to the audio tracks, you may have a more complete and expanded picture of all that the blues can be.

As perfect as the blues is for the guitar, it didn’t come from the guitar. The blues sprang from the unaccompanied human voice. There have been sad songs since the dawn of music, but the blues is a special kind of sadness that was born out of the African American experience at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. When the African-influenced field hollers and work songs met European folk songs, spirituals, and ballads (supported by harmonicas, banjos, guitars, washtub basses, fiddles, drums, spoons, and other instruments of the time) a unique form of music emerged that was neither wholly African nor European, but totally American.

Today, the blues can be anything from a solo acoustic guitarist strumming simple chords to a big band with a horn section, a lead singer, and background vocalists. Artists as diverse as blues diva Bonnie Raitt, rockabilly giant Brian Setzer (and his band), rock god Eric Clapton, and the great traditionalists B.B. King and Buddy Guy all play the blues. That sort of diversity proves how flexible, adaptable, and universal the blues is. It doesn’t matter if you feel like crying in your beverage, listening thoughtfully, singing along, or dancing the jitterbug, you can find a blues format for any mood and occasion.

When Muddy Waters famously said, “The blues had a baby and they called it rock ’n’ roll,” he was both chronologically as well as metaphorically correct: Of all the popular forms of American music, blues was the first.

The music that draws on the subjects of misfortune, infidelity, and bad karma for its inspiration pretty much sums up the blues. The great W.C. Handy, known as the father of the blues, once said that the blues were conceived in an aching heart, but it’s pretty hard to tell what kind of guitar playing is appropriate for an ailing ventricle. However, you can identify certain common characteristics that help define blues guitar — including song structure, harmony, scales, and phrasing techniques. You can study and master these elements to create this special form of music that expresses a special kind of sorrow in song — special because it’s not completely without hope, humor, irony, useful life philosophies, and, dare I say it, some joy. That’s the blues for you.

I get into forms and progressions in Chapter 6, but you should know the song structure that makes the blues the blues. Besides the subject matter, blues uses a simple form that people can immediately understand. Classic blues consists of two lines that are the same in length and verbiage, followed by a third line that’s different. Here’s a quick example of the blues scheme:

Woke up this mornin’ and I’m feelin’ so blue.

Woke up this mornin’ and I’m feelin’ so blue.

My baby left me and I don’t know what to do.

Believe it or not, that’s the format that started it all. If you can think of a blues song — such as “Kansas City” or “Hound Dog” or “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” — you see that the formula applies.

The blues was born in the southern United States out of the African American experience in the fields and work camps that sprung up in the late 19th and early 20th century. Though many parallel developments took place, the most important growth occurred in a very specific part of the southern United States — the region in the state of Mississippi known as the Delta.

The “Delta” in Delta blues describes not the Mississippi River Delta, which is in southern Louisiana, but a vast alluvial plain a couple hundred miles to the north in northwest Mississippi. Many of the great early blues players were born and lived in this cotton-growing region, loosely outlined by the Mississippi River to the west, the Yazoo River to the east, Memphis to the north, and Vicksburg to the south.

The Delta isn’t really a delta in the geological sense, nor is it limited to the state of Mississippi, because there were important developments and contributions from artists that came from Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana, too. In most uses, Delta blues denotes more of a style instead of a narrow geographic perimeter.

Now roughly 100 years old, American blues has become timeless music, and its success over the past half century can be attributed in part to those blues-rock musicians who’ve kept the blues’ torch burning and brought successive generations into clubs, concert halls, and record stores.

The blues remains so relevant and compelling because its songs are about honest, human feelings. Or maybe it’s because the blues captures the human condition in a way that slick pop music or digital electronica can’t. Blues is the music of real people, real lives, and real life lessons.