Stefan Grossman Teaches a Slow Blues in C Part 1/2

Stefan Grossman Teaches a Slow Blues in C Part ½ That was a Slow Blues in C, initially based on the planning of Blind Blake. Now, if you don’t know the name of Blind Blake, well you should stop right now and go down to your local record shop and get the record of Blind Blake’s recordings from the 1920’s, one of the great blues and rock time Blues guitar players that ever played. I started all playing sort of his Early Morning Blues—by the second verse I took off and I was playing some piano blues from Jelly Roll Morton, some other two little licks that I’ve made up and putting them all together into these mishmash of hits so Blues in C. Let’s get ourselves in tuned to begin with, and then we’ll get into this Blues mishmash together. Here is my high E. [Demonstration] Make sure you’re in tuned with that and should be tuned just about to pitch. Here is my B. [Demonstration] How about the third string of G? Here’s D and A and the E. [Demonstration] And let’s play a C chord, it’s the regular first position C chord that put your pinky on a third fret of the first string to add to it. It sounds likes we’re doing alright. Now, the chords are just first positioned chords. There’s nothing difficult at all about that, a C, an F. Check out the way I ma plying my F chord with my thumb hooked around on the first fret of the 6th string. I'm not doing a bar F chord. I do not find that all convenient to playing any type of music practically. And a G, sometimes we have a G7 and sometimes with my pinky on the third fret of the fourth string for G7th as well. The first verse, pretty simple. [Demonstration] I am trying to stumble the base a little bit like Blind Blake instead of just playing an alternating B solid, I’ll break up the base a little bit. And every once and a while I might go to syncope to give a little bit more drive, so from the beginning into the F into a C7 there. Now, we go into the F chord. You’ll notice that my pinky is helping to carry the melody. [Demonstration] C, tumble into the G, that’s a very typical Blind Blake riff. I’ll do it again. G7th and you have your pinky going from the fourth to the third of the second string, frets that is into the A7th. That’s something a little bit of grasping in the outside and up to this position of a D chord. Well, I have my index finger on the 5th fret of the first string, middle finger on the 7th fret of the second string. Now, it reminds me a little bit of big—he’s playing. If you like that, that’s also can be found in country Blues guitar after the video. And we went to the G, resolving to the C end tag. And this end tag by the way, we’re going to have a little bit of a base run. You can spend hours developing different end tags. Here’s one. Here’s another one. Here’s another one. Take your choice. Let’s put the screen now before we get into the second section which really tries to explore some of these ideas. Let’s make sure you have this down path. So, let's put the screen and take a look into tab music which you have there as exactly what I'm playing during the split screen. [Demonstration]