Short interlude for hellhounds and turntable

I had very little access to recordings of prewar blues when I was learning to play, and by the time I did, I was too scarred by my failure to conquer Sor studies and lute suites to take on any more perfectionist challenges. Instead, I listened to folk-revival pickers like Dave Van Ronk, Ry Cooder and Jorma Kaukonen, and, finding their playing more regular and their recordings literally easier to hear than those of Gary Davis, Blind Willie Johnson & Co., I set about trying to make something of a vocabulary and repertoire out of their best instrumental moments.

At the time, I wasn’t much into singing, and I couldn’t have sung those country blues songs about mules and mojos and mamas with any conviction  in the first place. All I wanted to know was: what does it take to sit down and play a few choruses of the blues in E and make it sound good?

With a lot of trial and error, and just a handful of LPs, I began to map the territory: alternating thumb, steady bass. Chords up the neck in keys like E and A. Rags in C. Dropped-D tuning. Open D for slide. In time, I found myself explaining to other people how to do it, too – through articles and books for Acoustic Guitar magazine, videos for Truefire and Homespun, and the weekly lessons on my Youtube channel. Putting what I was figuring out into words (and concise, tabbed out examples), over and over, I got to clarify my take, honing a version of how to play this kind of music. 

It turns out, hellhounds and black cat bones notwithstanding, playing fingerstyle blues is not really all that mystical after all. It’s something you can break down into a few key elements, which you can learn in small comprehensible pieces, and ultimately assemble into, if not an infinite number of combinations, then at least what the mathematically inclined would still refer to as “a whole bunch” of possibilities.