Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> What does it mean when someone says they play ‘blues guitar”? The sheer variation in musical style within the genre of ‘The Blues’ is almost immeasurable: it would be impossible to cover all of them in just one hundred pages of text and examples. The roots of the blues as a well-documented musical style in popular culture are in ‘spirituals’ ‘work songs’ and ‘field hollers’ sung by African-Americans in the era of captivity and in the years that followed emancipation. As a result the blues is rich in African-American rhythm harmony melody and phrasing. One of the most important melodic structures that retains a strong link to this time is the performance of ‘call and response’ or antiphony where one musical question’ is sung and is then answered by different voices. Since the first recorded reference to the blues Antonio Maggio’s I Got the Blues (1908) the musical form has grown spread and evolved into many different sub-genres. From early ‘Delta’ blues through to ‘Texas’ blues and later contemporary rock virtually all the music we hear today owes its origin to the blues. Chronologies of the blues are widely available and this is not the place for a history lesson (although Alan Lomax’s Land Where The Blues Began (1993) is a good place to start!). However it is essential that anyone wishing to study modern blues guitar understands the roots of the language. While the following list of names may not be to your personal taste please spend time listening to early performances of the blues. Some of the recordings are poor (or maybe don’t even include a guitar) but you should be able to identify elements in these early musical roots that influenced the work of more contemporary guitarists such as B.B. King the late Stevie Ray Vaughan and Robben Ford.