Big Bill Broonzy's Saturday Night Rub Guitar Lesson
The next tune I’m going to play for you and help you out in the teaching is Saturday Night Rub. It’s actually a duet that Big Bill recorded in I believe 1932 with Frank Braswell playing flat-pick guitar behind them and it’s one of my favorite pieces. It’s one of the most hard driving Rag tune that’s ever recorded and it’s in the key of D. And it really just again illustrates that kind of hard drive rhythm of displaying in that syncopation especially with the added flat picking baselines behind it.
So, if you hear the recording, you will hear exactly what I mean. And also it’s one of the most inventive guitar parts that I know of in all Blues. I don’t know of anybody else who plays this particular way and the whole song is just your basic three chords. And it’s very unusual fun rag piece. And it’s a great one to learn and jam on when you’re in a jam session. So, let me get into Saturday Night Rub for you and I’ll show how it goes.
[Demonstration]
The Saturday Night Rub is one of my favorite Broonzy tunes and it’s a song he recorded in the 30’s with a second guitar Frank Braswell playing back-up base on it. And basically the song starts out in the left hand, the positions are just D, G and C. In the first D chord is this D7th chord. It’s on that third of fifth fret and it goes to a G. And throughout the tune in the right hand, the picking is basically an alternating base. But the difference in sound is when he’s playing the alternating base, he’s brushing a lot of the string. So, instead of this sound, it’s more of, almost a full brush which gives it that great Broonzy drive to it. So, it’s really simple base but it has that kind of relentless kind of sounds, that real full rich sound.
Almost sounds like you’re strumming the guitar and that’s what we’re kind of striving for in the base. And this is a great tune to play because the left hand is very simple in terms of the positions in the melody notes. And it has the alternating base. And this is a good one to sit with and just try to work on the sound just to get that. In the second part of the left hand follows the same chord progressions and its D7th but here, the base is playing basically in the melody and the rhythm of the piece. So, you have this figure in the thumb.
It’s really important to play that second string with the thumb because you can hear that’s the rhythm of the phrase. The base is really—and the melody is really just, it’s not much going on. So, the whole feeling of the tune is in that thumb and that is again, that keeps going back to that theme throughout a lot of these tunes and in this video when Broonzy is playing it general is that driving playing. So, just try to brush the thumb and then after that D7th chord, it goes to the G with the exact same figure in the right hand and to finish out the phrase, you play as a single string, fourth string to G, to a D7th and back to the G.
And if you are in the spot since it’s a duet with Frank Braswell’s great single string base lines, I still have some of the notes from his part and put it in the Broonzy part. For instance, when it goes to the C, I play that C# which is that part and also in the G little section here. Broonzy is just playing on the top note and the second guitar is playing the base note but some of the spots and some of the other tune on this video is some of Broonzy’s duets and we pick some of the parts from the second guitar and put it in works real nicely.
So, let’s go to the split screen now and that should illustrate a lot easier and we will try to get into that brush thumb right here. So, here’s the split screen of the Saturday Night Rub.
[Demonstration]
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