iblues.co.uk

Duane Shinn asked:


Piano players and other musicians who desire to learn the foundations of purely American music should start with the blues. This music form began over a century ago. Today’s jazz, hip-hop, rock-and-roll and rhythm and blues owes a debt to it.

Certainly, the word “blues” evokes a sense of the mood of being blue. The music has those qualities, but in its own way it is also capable of being very uplifting. Many blues songs are cries of hope for better days to come.

The blues form developed out of the African-American experience. The music we call blues is a touchstone back to their struggles in America and their growth as a people to more freedom. Blues songs are rooted in work songs, field chants, singing and talk. They also have their basis in spiritual songs and country ballads.

The first blues emerged out of the Deep South, in Texas, Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta. The music sang of the struggles of the worker and the impoverished lives many of them lived. Their great toil and sacrifice had articulation in stories, with many of them presented in song form.

A big boost to the stature of the blues came in 1912, when William Christopher Handy transcribed and published the song “Memphis Blues.” He was an African-American dance orchestra conductor. He gave himself the name “Father of the Blues” because of his tireless efforts to write, transcribe and publish blues music to get it to the masses.

The blues progressed from the Deep South to the north and entrenched itself in cities such as Chicago and Detroit. The music changed as it moved northward. No longer all about the poor conditions in the south, the music began to speak of the urban environments African-Americans were now living in.

The blues changed even more in the ’40s and ’50s as radio continued to spread its songs all over America. New electronic innovations lent the blues a different sound, with electric guitar at the forefront. Musicians carried this fresh electric sound with blues elements into the rock and R & B genre, which developed.
Those who hear that blues sound in much of today’s music may not understand that the music is very basic in its construction. A piano player desiring to learn the blues can understand its elements quickly with a little bit of study.

The most common blues heard and played are the 12-bar blues. Blues musicians found they could express their thoughts fully in a mere 12 bars or measures of music. However, there is room in these 12 bars for much creativity, whether musical or lyrical.

Almost all of blues music is in 4/4 time. This means there are four beats in each bar. Within a bar, each quarter note receives one beat. Further, a 12-bar blues song is broken down into three sections of four bars each. Musicians usually build blues chords on the first, fourth and fifth notes of an eight-note music scale. These form the blues chord progression. The first chord is typically prominent in the first four bars. The second four bars normally highlight the fourth chord of a scale, and the last four bars highlight the fifth chord of a scale.

For the lyrics to a blues song, the AAB pattern is predominant. A singer will sing the first and second four-bar verses with the same lines sung in each. The third four-bar verse will have different lines. Therefore A and A refer to the verses with the same lines; the B refers to the verse with different lines.

There can be different 12-bar segments in a blues song. When one 12-bar section gets resolved with the last four bars answering the previous eight, a new motif can develop in the next 12-bar section. In addition, while the 12-bar blues are the most common form in the blues arena, there are exceptions to it for variety and experimentation.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a movement in Britain, which brought about the “British Blues.” They were followers of the American blues tradition and very strict in following this form to a tee. This ended in the middle 1960s as the musicians from this country began to develop their own blues concepts and styles, although still based on the pioneering American blues school of thought.

The blues lends itself to much of the piano music available for playing today. Its influence is apparent in Broadway show tunes, film music and much music of the love-ballad type. Blues music can be a welcome addition to any pianist’s repertoire.

Christopher Buckley asked:


It is not that easy to pull out a definition of blues. You can tell that Robert Johnsons’ Rambling on My Mind or B.B. King’s Everyday I Have the Blues is definitely blues, but what about van Halen, Al Di Meola or Pavarotti’s songs?

Of course, you could define the blues by the call-response structure, the dominant 7th chords, the shuffle rhythm, the I-IV-V progression and things like these, but the most complete definition is one that Eric Clapton himself gave to blues music in an interview in 1998:

My definition of Blues is that it’s a musical form which is very disciplined and structured coupled with a state of mind, and you can have either of those things but it’s the two together that make it what it is. And you need to be a student for one, and a human being for the other, but those things alone don’t do it. (Eric Clapton, 1998)
The Blues History

There are many books on the history of blues. It was born in the 20th century’s Mississippi Delta in the U.S., short after the Civil War. This music style was played by slaves and white people referred to it as sorrow songs, plantation songs or workaday songs. The term blues was used for the first time around 1925.

It is believed that the band leader William Christopher Handy was the one to write the first blues songs in 1909, which was later printed and documented. The song was initially called Memphis Blues and got the name of Mister Crump later. He got his inspiration from a blues song he heard in the Mississippi railway station six years earlier. W.C. Handy wrote other songs too, such as Beale Street Blues or St. Louis Blues and nowadays there’s a blues award named after him - the W.C. Handy Award.

What Do You Need To Learn To Play Blues Guitar?

In order to learn to play blues guitar, there are a few things you need. First of all, you need to own an electric or acoustic guitar with strings made from other than nylon in standard tuning. You also need to know how to read tablature, as well as have some basic guitar knowledge and know how to play a few chords.

You also need some Eric Clapton CDs with blues classics, such as Blues Breakers, From the Cradle or Eric Clapton Unplugged and a good CD player with an auto-repeat shuffle. There’s also a plug-in for Winamp you can use to slow down music. A small chord book you can find in any guitar shop is also handy. But most importantly, in order to learn to play blues guitar, you need some good ears.

If you already have some basic guitar knowledge, you can learn to play blues guitar on your own, with the aid of a simple chord book. However, finding a blues guitar teacher who is willing to help you learn to play blues guitar in your area is definitely a good thing. If you have the time and money to take up private lessons, this will probably help improving your guitar playing skills.

Nick Koch asked:


He moves slowly now, his 82-year-old body starting to betray him, joints aching from time and the endless miles he’s traveled over a lifetime. He steps onto the stage, throws the strap of the Gibson ES-335 over his shoulder and squints slightly into the cheering crowd. His face breaks into a wide, humbled, almost embarrassed smile as a rumbling "Good Evening" floats out to his audience. As his left hand moves to the neck of the guitar and the right hand reaches down and strikes the strings, the years melt away and suddenly you find yourself watching a master craftsman ply his trade. The house fills with those unmistakable midnight blue tones that raise the hairs on the back of your neck. B. B. King half closes his eyes, screws up his face, and…he’s off into his own place, taking you with him.

Born Riley B. King on September 16th, 1925 on a plantation in Mississippi, his early life was as a farm worker. A guitar-playing pastor at the Sanctified Church awed him with his playing when B. B. was five years old, but he did not buy his first guitar until he was 12. Working has a house-boy for $15 a month, he saved as much as he could (still needing a loan from his boss) and bought a red Stella Acoustic from a man down the road. Like so many blues guitar players of his time, he gave himself guitar lessons with the assistance of a couple of books and the popular recordings of the day. At fifteen he played on the streets for change in his native Indianolo, but later got the itch to move on in search of a music career, hitchhiking to Memphis in 1946.

After busking and playing in gospel groups in Memphis for a year, King was given an opportunity to play on a popular radio local radio show hosted by harmonica legend Sonny Boy Williamson. From there, he moved to regular gigs in Beale Streets clubs. Soon after, B.B. secured a stint on WDIA hosting a radio spot, singing blues and playing records under the self-appointed air-name Beales Street Blues Boy, shortening it to B. B. King. His first recordings were done in 1949, for Sam Phillips’ Sun Records, but his first hit came in December 1951 with his remake of Lowell Fulson’s "Three O’Clock Blues”. He scored four number one R&B hits between 1951 and 1954, including his now signature "You Upset Me Baby”.

By 1955, King had quit his radio show on WDIA, bought a bus, and embarked on a cross-country tour. In 1958, the bus hit a gas truck on a bridge in Texas. Although King nor none of his band members were on the bus at the time, the truck driver was killed. It took King several years to pay the debts incurred as a result of the accident.
Although King remained very popular with black audiences, he had yet to break free from the chitlin’ circuit. This changed dramatically for King with the recording of "Live at the Regal", a live recording of a show done at a South Side Chicago blues club in 1964. This recording is often referred to as being one of the best lives records ever made.

It was his performance at the 1967 Montreaux Jazz Festival that exposed B. B. to a wider audience. During this time when so many British guitarists were paying homage to American blues artists, King struck well in the U.K. landing an tour opening for The Rolling Stones on their sixth U.S. tour.

In 1970, King recorded his most famous song "The Thrill Is Gone”. Immediately recognized from the electric shrill of the opening notes to his booming, friendly voice, it is not only a staple of his shows but also a song that any self-respecting blues guitarist is obligated to learn.

His most famous band mate has always been “Lucille”, the guitars named from an incident in Twist, Arkansas. During the show, two men started fighting, a kerosene heater was kicked over, and in moments the wood framed club was on fire. King escaped but ran back inside to rescue his cherished guitar, barely making it out with his life. When King learned that the fight was over a woman named Lucille, King named all of his guitars Lucille to serve as a reminder never to do something that reckless again. Gibson has issued a special commemorative B. B. King signature edition of the famed ES-335 named, of course, Lucille.

King said early on that he wanted to become a blues ambassador to the world, just as Louis Armstrong had done with jazz- and he did just that. In among his distinctive blues guitar licks are elements of rock, jazz and gospel that result in a style uniquely his own. King does not play chords nor does he sing while he plays. King sings out in a warm, friendly manner that deftly combines elements of pain and humor, and when he halts his voice Lucille picks up the song where King leaves off, carrying on in a round robin of singer and guitarist, call and response in the rich Delta tradition.

B. B. has always been a tireless performer. In his early days as a struggling musician, he would often play as many as four towns a night, making it back to WDIA in time for his on-air shift. His touring schedule is legendary; it is estimated that now, in his early eighties, King has played in the neighborhood of twenty thousand shows in his career and is still managing over two hundred shows a year. It’s easy to see time wearing him down-he seems to talk more in his shows than he plays these days-but when it comes to King, the thrill is still there.

It’s impossible to know how much longer we’ll have him around. He has won Grammy’s, been inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and been awarded several honorary degrees, but he still ties directly to the rich, verdant Delta soil and the heavy tradition that it brought. Don’t miss your chance to see blues royalty while you can- go see The King of the Blues.