Having presented a chorus of the blues in A recently (The Ninth Degree), I thought I'd offer up a chorus with some of my favorite fingerstyle blues moves for dropped-D tuning. "D-Mocracy" is a twelve-bar alternating-thumb blues combining basic open-position licks with some up-the-neck, string-crossing moves for both the D7 (at the end of line 1) and G7 (in bars 6 and 10). There's also a cool inversion move for the G7 in bar 5 and a quick V-to-I move at the end of bar 6. Check out the tab below, and the audio as well, to get the whole picture.

What fingerstyle blues sensibilities I possess are more than somewhat the result of two formative sources from my teenage years, Richard Saslow's book The Art of Ragtime Guitar and Stefan Grossman and John Renbourn's second duet record, Under The Volcano. More to the point, Saslow's "Bloozinay" and Grossman and Renbourn's version of "Mississippi Blues" were how I learned to think about playing blues in the key of A, even though I've since forgotten most of Saslow's three beautiful choruses and I didn't learn "Mississippi Blues" properly for more than twenty years, and even now it's a sometimes still a stumble to play it just so.

I learned about 9th chords and the sound of D7/F# from Grossman and Renbourn, and about walking bass lines and chord subsitutions from Saslow. The idea of a scripted three-chorus blues also inspired my own "Weekhawken or Bust" from my record Plays Blues, Ballads and a Pop Song (and which I teach on my Truefire New School Fingerstyle Guitar course....