Blues Guitar For Dummies. Jon Chappell

to why the blues-rock age saw the worshipping of so many rock gods, it seems that the blues was custom-made for six strings, so any development in guitar technology, guitar styles, and creative guitarists themselves naturally include the blues. While bawdy singers front many a blues band, you’d be hard pressed to find a blues group without a guitar player to lend the sense of credibility, history, and heart that the blues demands. The guitar captures the nuances of blues soul in a way no other instrument can. Blues is simply the perfect guitar music.

      

The newer generation (born after 1970) is out there and coming into its own, too. I cover many of the most recognizable names in Chapters 12 and 13. To see such young players working so hard at mastering the craft, studying the history, and paying homage and respect to their blues elders encourages me that the blues is flourishing safely in the hands of the next generation.

      The qualities that made blues cats hit the big-time

      In addition to all the great chords, riffs, and solos you get in Blues Guitar For Dummies, you can also read about many of the most important blues guitarists who helped shaped the history of the blues and why you should care about them. A blues guitarist can be significant for many reasons, but the criteria I use for including the artists that I do in this book is that he or she must meet at least one of the following requirements:

       He or she had great influence and a historical impact. Muddy Waters, for example, merits inclusion not because of superior technique (although his playing was certainly formidable), but because he transplanted the blues from its acoustic, rural Mississippi roots to post-War Chicago, where it exploded into an entire movement that would define “Chicago blues” and influence everyone who played electric blues after that, including Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. No Muddy, no Stevie.

       The guitarist has technique that is innovative or unsurpassed in virtuosity.Robert Johnson, for example, was at the tail end of the Delta blues movement and learned many of his licks from other players. But he was an extraordinary player and provided the best examples we have on record for Delta blues playing.A lot of people tried to meld electric blues with the emerging heavy rock sound in the mid-1960s, but none quite as masterfully as Eric Clapton did. He was the best of a generation.In the 1980s, Stevie Ray Vaughan was so good that you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who even got close to him in terms of raw talent.

       The guitarist’s style is unique or so highly evolved that it’s responsible for his or her widespread success. Sometimes you don’t have to be the greatest player to achieve greatness. With many blues guitarists, it’s not all about the technique, but the artistic work created with modest technique. Bonnie Raitt may not have the blistering chops of a Duane Allman or Stevie Ray Vaughan, but her beautiful tone, impeccable taste, and unmatched lyricism in world-class songs have advanced the blues into the mainstream like no other blues player has before.

      Often a guitarist featured in this book has more than one of the three qualities in the preceding list. Take a couple of examples:

       T-Bone Walker, the great early pioneer of electric blues, was not only technically dazzling and innovative, but also historically significant as the first electric blues player to establish the guitar as a lead instrument, thereby influencing every great player in the succeeding generation.

       Jimi Hendrix is the best at everything as far as the guitar, the blues being no exception. He scores top marks in all three categories, so that’s why he’s in the book. Also, if you leave Jimi Hendrix out of any discussion about guitars and guitarists, people get really, really mad at you and make your life miserable.

      You may or may not see your particular favorite blues guitarist in the pages of this book, which is understandable, as there are too many great blues guitarists for any book to list them all. But every guitarist you do read about here in some way changed the world of blues for the better — for listeners as well as other blues guitarists who heard them.

It’s Not All Pain and Suffering — The Lighter Side of Blues

      Built into the blues is its own sense of irony and even humor. How else could you sing of such misfortune if you didn’t retain a sense of humor about the whole thing? It’s not uncommon to see performers smiling while singing about loss and heartache, yet they’re still totally sincere and convincing. It’s maintaining that objective perspective — along with the hope of retribution and revenge — that keeps the blues performer going while airing his life’s disappointments.

The blues isn’t above parody, either, and this often includes the blues’ strict sense of who’s “allowed to have the blues” and who isn’t. For example, you do not have a “right to sing the blues” if you live in Beverly Hills, make a killing in the futures market, or think that “my baby done me wrong” means losing your villa in Tuscany to your spouse in negotiation.

      

Among the early African American blues artists, the word baby was sometimes used as code for the boss man. This way the performer could complain or take a shot at the overseer on the farm or plantation without him being any the wiser. Of course, the African American audience understood.

Surveying the Means to Make the Music: The Guitar in All Its Glory

      Just as soon as people could utter the primitive strains of proto-blues music, they sought to reinforce their vocal efforts through instruments. Unfortunately, the Fender Stratocaster and the Marshall stack weren’t invented yet, so people did what blues players always did in the early part of the blues’ history: They made do with what was available. And in the rural South at the turn of the 20th century, that wasn’t much.

      Some of the first blues instruments included a one-string diddley bow (a wire stretched between two points and plucked with one hand while the other changed pitches with a bottleneck or knife dragged up and down the string) and a banjo, descendant of the African banjar that was constructed from a hide-covered gourd and a stick. The harmonica followed close behind. Guitars didn’t arrive on the scene until after the Civil War when they were left behind in the South by Union soldiers.

      

All guitars have six strings (except for 12-string guitars, of course) and frets, whether they’re electric or acoustic. You can play chords, riffs, and singlenote melodies on virtually any guitar. When the first mass-produced electric guitars were publicly available, in the mid- to late ’30s, blues and jazz players similarly flocked to them, and not too much attention was given to what kind of guitar was best for what style of music.

      The low-fi acoustic guitar

Early blues musicians weren’t professional musicians. They were ordinary working people who created their instruments out of household items: washboards, spoons, pails, and so on. If you were a little more industrious, you could fashion a homemade guitar out of bailing wire, a broom handle, and a cigar box. Those fortunate enough to acquire an actual guitar would probably have an inexpensive acoustic guitar, perhaps picked up secondhand. As the blues became more popular, many musicians could make a living by traveling around to work camps and juke joints (which were roadside places without electricity that offered liquor, dancing, gambling, and sometimes prostitution) playing acoustic guitars and singing the blues for the weary working folk.

      The semi-hollowbody electric guitar

      Gradually, the different preferences of electric jazz and blues players started to diverge, with jazz players preferring the deeper hollowbody guitars and blues players choosing the