7 TYPES of GUITAR LESSONS, Part Three, The Blues
by Rick Cittar
“All you people, you know the blues got a soul
Well this is a story, a story never been told
Well you know the blues got pregnant
And they named the baby Rock & Roll”
I find a great truth in the immortal words of Muddy Waters. The blues, born from the desert sands of sub-saharan Africa, and transported by slavery to the cotton fields and work gangs of the Mississippi delta, has had the most profound influence on American pop music. It gave birth to Rock & Roll and the world hasn’t been the same since.
The blues are very accessible to the beginning student. There are two basic structures, either an eight-bar or a twelve-bar “go around”. This means that the entire song, lyrics, breaks, and solos, follows the same repeated structure. The most basic blues will use the three primary chords of the key center; for example, a blues in E will use the E, A, and B chords.
Many blues songs are played to a “shuffle” feel, where the 1/8 notes are unevenly divided into a 2/3 to 1/3 ratio. This creates a different rhythmic pulse than evenly divided or “straight” 1/8’s. The shuffle allows some very slow tempos that still have a good sense of progression.
A first approach to playing solos and melodies in the blues will use both the major and minor Pentatonic scale. A student armed with three chords and one scale pattern can begin to jam and have a great time learning with other players. I find the blues to be an excellent common ground for people of all levels of ability and experience to get together and play.
Good blues has a “feel” to it, and that’s not something you can learn from a book. You have to listen to the blues and get them inside you. Great artists like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Albert King, Freddie King, and Ali Farka Toure are waiting to show you their take on the universal themes of suffering and redemption, trains and riding the rails, doing sixty days time, the joy of loving a good woman, and the danger in loving a bad man.
Albert King said it best, “If you don’t dig the blues, you got a hole in your soul”.
