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Chapter 2

      Blues Meets Guitar: A Match Made in Musical Heaven

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      The guitar and blues go together like apple and pie — as if they were made for each other. And you could argue that they were. The guitar allows you to sing along with yourself (try that with a flute), and singing was the way the blues started. And it’s much easier to bring out on the front porch than a piano. It’s cheaper to own (or make yourself) than many other instruments, and that helped bring the blues to many poor folks — the people who really had the blues.

      As the blues developed, guitar makers adopted features that helped bring out the qualities of the blues to even better effect. An electric guitar is played with two hands and leaves your mouth free to sing (as an acoustic does), but electrics, with their skinnier strings, are easier to bend (a way of stretching the string while it’s ringing, producing a gradual, continuous rise in pitch), and electronic amplification helps project the guitar’s sound out into the audience of (often raucous and noisy) blues-loving listeners. In this chapter, I show you in detail why the blues and the guitar — both acoustic and electric — make great music together.

Because the blues was concentrated in the rural South, in the time before musical instruments adopted electricity, the earliest blues guitar music was played on acoustics. The “Delta blues” style was the first recognized style of the blues and consisted of strummed and plucked acoustic guitars with chords formed the same way as in other forms of folk music.

Beyond the Delta: Defining the Blues Guitar Sound

      Blues guitar can take many forms, and has grown dramatically since its humble beginnings in the south-central United States. Blues players of this time were largely self taught (and many of them illiterate), and one of the easiest ways to create different chords was to tune the guitar to an open chord, such as G major or E major, and then use a metal or glass slide (a pocket knife or bottle neck) to change chords. In both slide and fretted guitar styles, guitarists would emphasize the driving rhythm of the blues by thumping out steady bass notes on the low strings with their thumb while in turn, or simultaneously, fingerpicking upper strings to sound out chords, melodic riffs, and fills.

      Playing simple chords to back up a blues singer is still a form of blues guitar — as is playing chords with a slide. You can’t help but sound bluesy when you move a slide from one position to another to play the different chords in a song — especially if you do it expressively. But beyond this, you can ascribe certain musical hallmarks to the blues that don’t make you play any more soulfully but provide you with a deeper understanding when you hear the blues.

      In the following sections, I’ve broken down the elements of the blues into four musical concepts. Keep in mind that these concepts are the main ones and there are certainly more, but thinking of and listening to the blues while considering these criteria helps in your understanding of this sometimes elusive music form. You may not be able to define the blues, but you’ll know it when you hear it. Or as Sonny Terry says:

      The method to the music: Chord progressions

      What defines a blues song is the way chords are put together, or the chord progression. Although there’s such a thing as a jazz chord, there’s not really a blues chord (but don’t worry, there’s no such thing as a classical chord, either). But if you put certain chords together in a certain way, you can definitely have a blues chord progression. The most common blues progression is the 12-bar blues, which I cover in Chapter 6.

      Chords used in blues include major and minor triads (simple, three-note chords), dominant-7th chords — triads with the flatted (lowered by a half step) 7th added, and sometimes even jazz chords (with complex-sounding names like G13♭9/♭5).

      The guitarist’s language of melody

The blues definitely has a harmonic and melodic language, and even a scale named after it: the 6-note blues scale. If music is described as “bluesy,” it usually means that the melody borrows or enlists notes from the blues scale (nicknamed “blue notes”) rather than the standard major and minor scales that make up other, non-blues styles. Blue notes are the minor third, minor seventh, and flatted fifth (in shorthand, those notes are ♭3, ♭5, and ♭7). Figure 2-1 shows the C major scale (the familiar do, re, mi — and so forth) with the blue notes shown below their unaltered counterparts.

      FIGURE 2-1: The C major scale with blue notes.

      

When discussing scales, you don’t include the octave note, in this case, the second, higher C. That’s why it’s in parentheses. So a major scale is a 7-note scale, though in practice musicians usually include the octave eighth note.

When playing the blues, guitarists incorporate aspects of both the major scale and the blue notes to come up with two new scales of their own: the 6-note blues scale and the 5-note minor pentatonic scale (covered in detail in Chapter 8). Figure 2-2 shows both scales in letter names and in music notation.

      

If all this talk of scales, intervals,

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