John Miller Teaches Billy Lyons and Stack O'Lee

John Miller Teaches Billy Lyons and Stack O'Lee And we’re going to look at Furry’s version of a song about a character that is very famous in African American folklore, Stacker Lee and he called it Billy Lyons and Stack O'Lee. Now I should mention right now that I'm not going to sing all of the verses, there are many verses but the lyrics will be included in the tab booklet that accompany this video. So you’ll be able to pick all the lyrics up there and I should also mention, you should really make an effort to, heres Furry’s renditions of all this tunes in the video, and the rest of his stuff. I won't be doing any of his Battle Night pieces and he was a fine slide player. So you want to pick up his records, there’s one devoted entirely to his music in Yeah Zoo, that’s the next on compilation. So now I'm going to be playing Billy Lyons and Stack O'Lee. Okay let's take a look at Billy Lyons and Stack O'Lee, phrase by phrase now and I don’t think on this song, it's going to be necessary to go through it in a kind of detail that we did on Dry Land, it's a bit simpler of an arrangement and I think both the right hand and the left hand are a little bit less unconventional you might say. So this is in C as you have already observed and on the opening measures, the thumb is just alternating between the fifth and fourth strings, in a sort of alternating bass that you’ve probably played many times in other blue songs of John Herder, other people. And so I think what I’ll do is just play this first C phrase all at once and really, the little fingers doing all of the work, and all its doing is coming on and off the first string like that, really not all in much to it, so it's like this. Okay now at that point it goes down to the second string and does a pull-off from this third fret of the second string to the index, which is already fret in the first fret of the second string. So I’ll play that entire phrase one more time. Alright, and one other ingredient which I should add that you can't put in this if you wish, is string snapping in the treble. Furry does allot of this on his tune and if you want to do this, what you need to do is get a bit of meat under the string, a little bit more of your, the tip of your index and little fingers under the string. And you actually come up from under the string, so that if you pluck it, it snaps on the finger board. I’ll play the same phrase ones with the strings snapping just so you get that sound. Okay, not Furry goes to an F chord, and for this particular F, he does not fret the sixth string. He doesn’t play the bass from the sixth string as people often do when playing an F chord. Instead he plays bass alternating from the open fifth string, up to the fourth string which makes a heck of a lot easier to finger in the left hand, so it's like this. Okay I’ll play that again, little finger pulling off, and then back to C, to G and in the G phrase; you’ll notice the little finger ends up getting the third fret of the second string rather than the first string. Now it goes back to C, and in this measure he’ll alternate the ring finger down to get the third fret of the sixth string on the third beat, then once again. Now the next thing you’ll find notated in your booklet that accompanies this is a little interlude that he plays sometimes in between verses and this is—in Jazz music called sometimes an interpolation, in other words, he’s playing something from an entirely different song as part of Stack O'Lee. In this to me, sounds like some, some old march that it goes like this, let's see. Very straight forward in C and to F, a little bit unusual there. He hits the sixth or the fifth string once and then plays this long bass run on the fourth string, I’ll do that again. If you check out the right hand here, you’ll see what's involved. Then to G and you can see that G phrase concluded with the little finger pull-off from the third fret of the second string, to the open second string. Pull-off C, alternate the bass down, C again. Now for his solo, he does kind of more fleshed out version of what he does in the interlude. And he begins in C with the little finger doing this bends on the third fret of the second string, and you really sort of had to lean on them. And on that second measure you can see, you only actually pluck the down beat of the measure, but you keep bending that string twice. So it's like, bend two, bend four, bend okay, and back to F. The same bass run, now to G, and to G he does a kind of clever thing here that John Herd did sometimes also and that is, he’s going to move up the neck. But as he moves up the neck, on the first string he just follows along in the bass and plays same frets on the sixth string, so it goes like this, if you could check the left hand here. Okay, then back to C, then still in C, pull-off, G, G, C, yeah. So there’s the slowed down version of Billy Lyons and Stack O'Lee.