The Country Blues






Though I'm primarily an electric player, I am greatly influenced by the acoustic playing of Lightnin' Hopkins and Robert Johnson-two of the greatest blues guitarists who ever lived. These guys invented a large portion of the language of blues guitar (for both acoustic and electric); every blues guitarist alive today plays handfuls of their licks, whether they're aware of it or not. You hear bits of Johnson and Hopkins' styles in the playing of everyone from the Vaughan brothers to Jimi Hendrix, from Freddie King to Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. I love this stuff, and I'm still in the process of learning as much of it as I can.

To focus on licks in the style of country blues rhythm guitar, let's use a medium shuffle in the key of E as our point of reference. Most of the licks that I'll be demonstrating here are based on the first-position E blues scale (E-G-A-Bb-B-D). The only twist is that I also throw in G# (third string, first fret), which is the major third of E and is a chord tone in both an E and an E7 chord.

FIGURE 1 illustrates the first four bars of a medium/slow blues shuffle in E. I've included picking/strumming strokes above the tablature to guide you. Be sure to allow the open high E string to ring clearly during bars one and three. Using upstrokes where indicated will help accentuate the high E string, as Johnson and Hopkins did.

AUDIO FILES FIGURE 1A
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AUDIO FILES FIGURE 1B
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When I switch to the A chord (the IV chord in a I-IV-V blues progression), I like to play the figure shown in FIGURE 2, which incorporates A and A7 chords. The A chord that falls on the downbeat of beat two is strummed with an upstroke, as are the next two notes, and the subsequent A7 chord. The figure ends with an E blues scale lick (similar to the one shown in Figure 1), which brings you back to the I chord, E.

AUDIO FILES FIGURE 2
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FIGURE 3 is a little rhythm guitar thing I like to play during soundchecks and is based on this type of A-A7 chord change. It's in the key of A, and it's built from sliding the same partial barre-chord form up the neck to play each change in the I-IV-V chord progression.

AUDIO FILES FIGURE 3A
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AUDIO FILES FIGURE 3B
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Though there are no songs on my first album where I use this type of rhythm playing, I love to play this stuff when I'm jamming. I didn't learn this style from any particular song, but just about every Robert Johnson and Lightnin' Hopkins tune has a rhythm part along these lines. Listen to as much of their music as you can get ahold of, and see what you can pick up from it. Enjoy.