How to Play Spoonful with Ernie Hawkins Part 1/2
One of Reverend Davis’s simpler blues, very straight forward song, it’s a song that he thought to beginners when they would come in. People who didn’t really know very much about the guitar and he would start playing this song so they could sort of get into the swing of things. Its really, really very straight forward and simple song compared to much of his other stuff back from his blues cat days. This is his version of Spoonful, I didn’t sing this, we have attached to this DVD audio files of the Reverend playing this song and singing it and wonderful great long versus a sort of story he tells about the problems that a little spoonful can create. So before I get into teaching the song right away, first thing I’m going to do is just talk in general a little bit about the reverends style.
The reverend had a thumb and one finger style of playing, he wore a pretty big thumb pick, wore it up on his knuckle and a large plastic finger pick and for this video I’m just going to be playing with one finger pick and one thumb pick even though my style of growing up as a banjo player I often use a second pick when I’m playing my own stuff. There’s a lot of difference between in style with just one finger and a thumb and playing with two fingers or three fingers in that thumb and that difference is that thumb takes up a lot of the slack that this other finger would be playing and in my opinion it keeps the thumb really very, very prominent and primary in his playing. And that’s really where the power of his playing comes from, the use of his thumb, I’d say maybe 75, 80% of his notes are being played with the thumb and he’ll double thumb and he’ll drag his thumb into all kinds of things with it.
So just to represent his style, I’m playing with just a thumb and a finger as the reverend plays and he just generally as I say uses his thumb through all of this things and that’s if you really want to get into the power and the rhythm of his sound and his playing. Give that a try, just try it, it simplify things in a lot of ways and it just brings the rhythm through. Really this—a lot of this music tickle the reverends playing is the right hand. The right hand that takes a primary rule, it gives it power, it gives it rhythm and in the right hand it’s the thumb itself that is supplying most of that power and rhythm, something to keep in mind as we move through these lessons. This song as I said was a song he thought to beginner, its an A blues kind of a four chords he just goes from the A chord to the E7 chord , back and forth through the A chord and E7 chord, almost like a talking blues the way he plays it.
So I’m just going right into teaching this song and showing you how he does, he starts out often, not always with a little bit of a thumb drag where he’s hitting the low E string and coming with his right thumb up against the next string and just dragging that thumb. It’s a different sound I’m playing these two notes separately. Its almost like a pick up sound, it’s a pick up note, so the way he does is he does his little thumb drat, hits the first string, 5th fret with his long A by itself. Many pinches with the high bass, he’s basically using these two bases although often in that high bass he’s brushing and that’s giving the song its rhythm and its power, so it’s first string open by itself and 5th fret by itself. Pinched, and what he’s doing is his pinching on the one and playing the note by itself on the end so most of the time.
Work on these, it’s a bar each, so it’s a pinch and a note by itself and he’s alternating the basses or sometimes dragging his thumb up to the high bass. Going from the low bass to high bass, he brings this melody down a little bit from the 5th fret to the 7th and the 3rd fret, 2nd fret 1st string open and then it slides and this is really the core of the melody. This—because he’s speaking and what he’s doing is he’s sliding up from this regular A chord from this 1st fret 2nd string to the 2nd fret 2nd string, that’s from the minor 3rd to the 3rd, this is a move in A blues. Just about everybody in the world does, for my left hand, what I like to do is flatten my first finger out covering all three strings and then with my little finger I have it arched so that I can get a really clean sound.
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