Stefan Grossman Teaches Big Bill Broonzy's Willie Mae
Okay, well now it’s time to delve into the key of A. Fit your index finger out and thread it on to the second fret of the top four strings just like I’m doing here and you have a monotonic strong bass. You’re just going walk away on that fifth string. If you’re tapping it hard enough, it just sounds like a very percussive thud. Now, you can get that into a shuffle B. What I’m doing is putting my ring finger down on the fourth fret of the fourth string. So I have A chord one, two, one, two and now you’re playing the blues in A. We’re playing rhythm of the guitar and your rock and roll band in the country.
One thing you do on top, this is the play lick. This is sound that Lightning Hopkins did and it’s one that we investigated in the video, “How to Play Blues Guitar”. Let me just go over it real quickly for you. You have this phrase which has your middle and your index fingers bearing the fifth fret of the second string and a third fret of the first string. You’re going to slide up to that and now in triplets, one, two, three, one, two, three, one two, three and then we’re sliding back and then into that shuffle B.
Now, there are other guitar players that took this key of A and went to town. Let’s begin with a sketch. By the way Big Bill Broonzy would play in the key of A. He had a tune called “Willie Mae” and it went a little bit like this.
Let’s call Willie, Willie Mae there. How about trying to tackle this? It’s not so difficult. One of the things that’s very important though is you can’t be afraid of playing a guitar. Make sure that you’re playing a guitar and the guitar isn’t playing you. What do I mean by that? When I’m playing this, it’s not really slamming down on the strings. I’m not choking with my guitar. The positions are pretty straightforward. We have that long A chord and we have a D position which has that index finger and middle finger playing the fifth frets of the first string and the seventh fret of the second string.
Our ring finger might go down to the eighth fret of the first string. You could also pull off on the seventh fret of the first string. I haven’t gone on to the straight first position of E chord. In fact with this, we’re going to have a very nice lick and that’s just a D7th chord. Put up two frets to make it an A7th. So we go from an E, E7th back into that D. Now the other positions when I have the guitar calling out the Willie Mae.
What was this? This just had my index finger and middle fingers on the ninth fret of the first and the tenth fret of the second. Basically, that’s playing around an A chord. When we need the full A chord, we just need the top two strings and then, we take that position and we bring it up three frets and then back into that D or on the fifth and seventh frets.
Okay, take a look at your tablature and let’s see what we have here. The most important thing as I mentioned is that we have that monotonic bass. We don’t have an alternating bass. Let me just play for two seconds for you. If I played with an alternating bass, it would sound like this. Do you know how different that sounds? That’s a little bit of Monday Morning Blues by Mississippi John Hurt. It just sounds like a happy blues. This has a different feeling. It’s insisting itself a little bit differently.
Okay, let’s split that screen up into two parts and let’s go down to tap music and check that we have everything. Are you ready? Let’s do it. Again, isn’t that easy? Make that guitar cold now, seventh of E, pick up real speed, variation. Talk to me! Yeah!
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