Slow Drag's 1st variation by Ernie Hawkins Part 3/3
This is a very typical but I think probably unique to Gary Davis chord progression. He moves from the C to B flat, he place this B flat in his own little way, by using his thumb to cover the first two low string from the low strings in the first fret and he just kind of flattens his fingers out to play a almost like a bar with his last two fingers covering the third fret, the first four strings. So it’s C, it’s B flat, the next chord of this progression is an F with an open A base and then the next chord progression is an A flat. Here is your regular A chord if you move this down in half step you have the chord, an A flat chord and because when you’re playing this A chord, what you’re playing is really a G chord, moved up G, G sharp A, so if you’re just playing the bases of that, G form with an A chord with your low strings instead of your high string, you have your little finger on the fifth fret, third finger on the fourth fret and then A chord where he uses in A blues or 12 cases and you move that down one fret, move down half step to an A flat. You’ve got his A flat note there setting up the next G chord.
The cool thing about how this progression moves, is that he’s kind of jumping his thumb instead of playing straight which he does sometimes and as you’re learning the songs certainly it’s fine to do that, that C, B flat, F with an A base, A flat, the way he normally plays this is he jumps his thumb and hits the finger, sometimes he just hits the same note twice. Anyway it gets that kind of jumping rhythm going, C and he just jumps up the next string or hits the same note, hits the first finger note, hits the third fret there, F with the A base, it’s kind of a jazzy sound and when you think about it, in the themes in the 20s they started calling this music jazz, it really was the beginning that separate itself from rag time and a lot of what constituted jazz over rag time was breaking up the rhythm like this and so this really becomes 20s jazz in a way, so his jazzing it up.
So it’s C, B flat, first fret of the string base, F with an A base and then back to beginning, back to high C and then the last chord progression, which starts on a F and once again he is kind of doubling up on his thumb and he is playing two F notes, goes from F to another kind of an A flat, this is just A7 moved down but this time the base is on the F sharp, repeating that F sharp that the third string is playing the first string so it’s F, A flat to F sharp base, C with the high G note, so your base is moving up, D, G so it’s F, A flat, C with G base on the high G note up here, up to the A7, regular A7, the A base, D7, G7, C.
So that’s the cool thing about this very first part of slow drag is how the base and the treble are interacting against each other. The base is pretty solid, keeping quarter notes going so that the treble syncope itself against it, but at the same time, the base is kind of jumping through these progressions a little bit, so the whole thing starts to move and people might feel getting up and dancing.
So it’s a slow drag, a dance. There was a famous New Orleans bass player named Slow Drag, Slow Drag Pavageau and the slow drag was a kind of a popular dance out of the 20s teens in 20s I believe.
So what I’m going to do now is we’re going to the split screen, I’m going to play this very first part probably the most part of the chord of this particular song, really slow with the split screen so that you can watch both hands playing it and maybe at the same time follow along a little bit with the tablature.
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