How to Play You Got the Pocketbook I Got the Key

Well we’ve now had three tunes in the key of C and we’ve been alternating the bass like this. The blues man, the guitarist who taught me how to play the guitar was Reverend Gary Davis. When I would play the guitar in this style, he would stay, oh Stephen it’s old-fashioned picking. And I would say, okay well if it’s old-fashioned picking, what can you do in it. And he started the show with various tunes and this first one I’d like to show you of the Gary Davis repertoire in the key of C is a tune he called, You Got the Pocketbook and I Got the Key. It’s a lovely title. He never sang it for me nor did he ever record it and I never got it on tape myself by him playing it. so I'm going to play you—well I remember how he taught it to me but let me first talk a little bit about some of the ideas whereas the other three tunes we always start off with a C note. That was our root note, in the C chord. Well with Gary Davis, he plays this C chord and now if you take a look at my left hand, you see that my ring finger is on the third fret of the sixth string and the fifth string is dead. We’re not even going to play that. So that’s going to be the C position. After that the F position as we’ve had it. In fact for this tune, you don’t have to bar the first fret of the first string. So that’s going to be open though we’re not going to play it. We’re not going to play that open first string. And then we just play a G chord. A side note on the G chord, he sometimes will play it this way and sometimes he would play it with his thumb over on the third fret sixth string, that will make everyone very happy. Now why would he do that? It would allow him to put down his ring finger to make a G7 and then sometimes even get more elaborate G7s. That’s a real finger buzz but look at that one. You're not going to be doing this in this lesson but this is a nice G7 to try to learn. Take a look at that, you have your thumb then your middle finger hitting the second fret of the fifth string, ring finger on the third fret of the fourth, you got the open third, pinky has the third fret of the second and your index finger the first fret of the first string, a real difficult chord to play but it was one that Gary Davis played with ease. So let me play this tune for you it’s called You Got the Pocketbook, I Got the Key. It starts off, instead of like this, as I say we’re going to be in this C chord position and it’s called reverse picking because it doesn’t start from the low bass, it’s going to start from the fourth string bass. So let’s hear it. [Demonstration] Now this is one of the loveliest tunes. I just love playing it. Now let’s take a look at it slowly. It’s not difficult, there are a couple of things I want to mention, hammer-ons and pull-offs. When you have to do a hammer-on and a pull-off, you really want to feel that your skin, your left hand fingers are really going off the strings or hitting the strings. Hammer on, you're really hammering on the string, a pull of you’re literally pulling off the string. So when we start— [Demonstration] This first pull-off is my pinky comes down and the pull-off has to be parallel to the fingerboard, going down and you're literally almost like chopping an egg or slicing an egg. So you start off with the fourth string bass— [Demonstration] Pull off now into the F, another pull off, again, pull off and now into that G chord. [Demonstration] Pinch, pull off, F, hammer on, hammer on. [Demonstration] So rather simple but it has such a lovely flow to it that you really want to feel completely in control of the guitar so you get that musicality, that lovely atmosphere that this tune picks up. As well, let me mention two other things, Reverend Gary Davis played with only two fingers, two meaning thumb and index finger. And this is sort of mind-boggling because you think of the great finger-picking guitar players both white and black and I mentioned this many times in seminars, workshops and in guitar lessons. Almost all of them only played with two fingers. Let’s see, white players, Doc Watson, Earl Travis, only two fingers. And bluesmen, we have—Reverend Gary Davis, Lightning Hopkins, just two fingers.—Skip James, they used three and my approach to playing with my right hand is to basically use two fingers with the help of my middle finger and the help of my ring finger if I need. I say if I need because my ring finger probably comes into action about I’d say four or five times in a year, that’s about it. So you have to find out what feels comfortable for you. I wouldn’t suggest you use a classical position in playing this type of music where you have your ring finger on the high E, the middle finger on the B and the index finger on the G, on the first second and third string. That doesn’t seem to work, you don’t really get the feel of it. And remember the sound that you're trying to get is mostly in that thumb. [Demonstration] The thumb is really setting the carpet for it. And the other thing you may have noticed is my right hand position and almost all the players that I've met, the white and black musicians, they all rested either their pinky or their ring finger or their pinky and ring finger on the face of the guitar. There are a couple that didn’t do that but they're very rare in this type of guitar playing. Let’s split the screen now and let’s try to play You Got the Pocketbook But I Got the Key. [Demonstration]