THE ROOTS OF SLIDE GUITAR. Fred Sokolow. Metodo per suonare e cantare il blues con 3 titoli acustici e 2 elettrici.
THE SONGS AND LICKS THAT MADE IT HAPPEN
A SURVEY OF SLIDE GUITAR, ITS PIONEERS, AND HOW IT DEVELOPED
This book/CD pack is a complete survey of slide guitar, its pioneers, and how it developed. It includes: 6 note-for-note transcriptions of famous slide tunes :
-Come On in My Kitchen (Robert Johnson)
-Motherless Children (Mance Lipscomb)
-Roll and Tumble Blues ("Hambone" Willie Newbern)
-You Can't Lose What You Ain't Never Had (Muddy Waters)
-You Gotta Move ("Mississippi" Fred McDowell)
-You Shook Me (Earl Hooker with Muddy Waters);
instruction in the essential playing styles; the history and the development of slide guitar; biographies of its representative artists; and recordings on CD of the songs, exercises and licks.
You gotta move -come on in my kitchen -motherless children -roll and tumble blues -you can't lose what you ain't never had -you shook me. CD TABLATURE
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK AND RECORDING
It swoops, wails, whines, moans and growls: slide guitar sings. It's a crowd pleaser, and it reaches people because it conveys naked emotion-especially when playing the blues. And most slide guitar heard today, whether in a blues, rock or country song, is played in a style derived from early Mississippi Delta blues.
Modern blues and rock slide guitar evolved from traditional acoustic styles. This book is about the guitarists who made that evolution happen. It takes you to the roots of slide guitar. Each of the six classic blues tunes transcribed here demonstrates a particular style and tuning. Every song is preceded
by information, exercises, scales, licks and chords that are needed for that style.
Timing is such a major part of slide guitar that it's almost impossible to learn from the printed page alone. Listen to the recording that comes with this book before playing a note. Once you know how a tune sounds, then it's time to check out the tablature and/or music notation.
If you want to learn any style of music, it helps to imitate the masters. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced player who wants to get back to the roots, here is the essential guitar stuff. This is an introduction to and an appreciation of great vintage music, and it's a foundation on which you can build your own style.
." Fred Sokolow
All guitars and vocals on the recording that comes with this book are by Fred Sokolow. Bass, drums, piano and horns are by Dennis O'Hanlon, and it was recorded at O'Hanlon Recording.
MUSICAL INTRODUCTION
A LOOK AT THE ROOTS OF SLIDE GUITAR
Most musical historians trace slide guitar to Hawaii, but Johnny Shines, friend and accompanist of Robert Johnson, is one of many who claim that blues-style slide developed in Africa, along with open-chord tunings. The first literary mention of blues slide was W. C. Handy's famous 1903 sighting of a singer at a Mississippi train depot who used a knife to slide on his guitar strings. Like most Mississippi blues players, he made his guitar sing and mimic his voice.
Early players slid on the strings with pocket knives or beef bones, and some held the guitar on their lap, Hawaiian-style, but by the 1930s, most blues players held the guitar upright and used a brakenoff bottleneck or a sawed-off length of pipe for a slide. This was a major stylistic development, because if you hold a knife in your left hand, it's impossible to fret the strings with your fingers; fitting a slide on the ring finger or little finger frees up two or three fretting fingers. Most slide players tuned the guitar to a major chord, usually 0, E, G or A, and used the slide to play major chords, as well as individual notes.
There was a blues craze in the 1920s, and by the middle of that decade, major labels began recording blues guitarist/singers. The first crap of slide players who recorded included Sylvester Weaver, Barbecue Bob, Hambone Willie Newbern and Sam Butler. Following them were the Mississippi bluesmen Son House, Charlie Patton, Bukka White, Kokomo Arnold, Sam Collins and Robert Johnson. They played a raw, very rhythmic, emotional style of blues and sang and wailed with passionate intensity. Texans Blind Willie Johnson and B. K. Turner (the Black Ace) were influential early slide blues players, as were Tampa Red and Furry Lewis, who boasted a polished, gentler slide style.
THE COUNTRY CONNECTION
Hawaiian guitarists developed a lap style of playing: the guitar lies in your lap, strings facing up, and you hold a steel bar down on the fretboard. This technique migrated to the mainland and, in the 1920s, with the help of Cliff Carlisle, Jimmie Tarlton and slide players who accompanied Jimmie Rodgers, it became an essential part of country music. By the '30s, Hawaiian and country pickers began using electric, fretless "lap steels." These evolved over the years: they grew legs, more strings, twin and triple necks (in different tunings), and foot pedals and knee levers to bend notes while playing.
Thus was born the pedal steel guitar that is now a signature country sound. But country pedal steel and lap steel bear little stylistic resemblance to blues or rack slide playing.
In the early '50s, the acoustic lap style slide guitar (see Dobro picture, below) began appearing in bluegrass bands. The wooden, acoustic whine of the Dobra is also heard in contemporary country music. Usually played in a bluesy style in open tunings, country Dobra is more related to bottleneck guitar than is its cousin, the pedal steel.
All-metal Dobro
Wooden-bodied squaredneck Dobro
BLUES SLIDE PLAYERS PLUG IN
Before instruments were amplified, it was hard for a guitarist to be heard over a piano, horn or even a banjo. In the late '20s, the National Company answered this need by making all-metal guitars, fitted inside with convex aluminum resonators, like speaker cones. Sounds crazy, but it worked: the guitars were louder, with more sustain, and they rapidly became popular with jazz, country and blues players. Lap style players used the square-necked models with a nut that lifted the strings high off the fretboard (better for the metal slide), but bottleneckers favored the round-necked National that could be played like a normal guitar. To this day, the all-metal National and its cousin, the Dobro, are favored by many an acoustic slidester. The Dobro company also makes a wooden, square-neck guitar with a metal resonator fitted into its body (it looks like someone stuck a hub cap over a guitar's soundhole) that bluegrass players use.
However, even the National or Dobro could not cut through drums, saxophones and electric guitars. By the mid-'40s, many Mississippi players had relocated in Chicago, and a new kind of blues was brewing. Elmore James and Muddy Waters led full electric bands, playing screaming, amplified slide.
It was loud and distorted, and single-note solos became the norm-with a whole band for backup, a guitarist didn't need to fingerpick or play chords. You could wail with one note, like a sax or trumpet.
Waters' and James' styles were clearly rooted in the Delta, and so was the playing of electric slide pioneers J. B. Hutto and Hound Dog Taylor. But Robert Nighthawk and Earl Hooker began playing electric, single-note style in standard tuning, which was a new direction for bottleneckers.
THE '60S BLUES REVIVAL AND BEYOND
During the '60s, white blues fans, many of whom had learned to play by studying old blues records, sought out the first-generation blues artists. Legendary players whose careers had petered out were rediscovered and brought into the limelight, and many excellent artists who had never played outside their own county recorded and performed all over the world. Folk festivals, concerts and coffee houses featured acoustic and electric blues.
American and European audiences loved the aging but passionate blues legends, and by the mid· '60s a blues revival was in full swing on both continents. Besides giving players like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf a bigger audience, the revival encouraged young players to form new blues bands, and to use blues techniques in rock and pop bands. After playing with John Mayall's blues band, enthusiastic blues disciple Eric Clapton brought blues guitar skills to his rock and pop bands (Cream, Derek and the Dominoes, Bonnie and Delaney). While still playing with the Butterfield Blues Band, guitarist Mike Bloomfield backed up Bob Dylan on one of his first electric albums. And slidemaster Duane Allman used his blues chops with the Allman Brothers Band and, as a studio player, infused all kinds of pop recordings with the blues.
In the '70s and '80s, pop audiences were introduced to slide sounds by Johnny Winter, George Thorogood, Eric Clapton, Duane Allman, George (post-Beatles) Harrison, Bonnie Raitt, Little Feat's Lowell George, Ry Cooder, David Lindley and the Rolling Stones. Many Southern rock bands had slide guitarists, and they influenced a new crop of country stars who, in the '90s, used slide on Nashville hits. Slide is heard more and more in movie and television soundtracks. Fortunately, as its audience grows, slide guitar has retained its down home character.
MUDDY WATERS
Often called the "father of electric blues," Muddy Waters was the leading force in the post-war
Chicago blues scene and an important figure in the development of rock and roll. The roster of players who learned their craft playing in his band reads like a "who's who" of blues legends: Little
Walter, Junior Wells, Otis Spann, James Cotton and Jimmy Rogers are just a few. While T-Bone
Walker and B.B. King, with their big-band sound, urbanized and streamlined the blues, Waters
brought it back to its funky Delta roots with a small but powerful band whose lineup (two guitars,
piano, harp, bass and drums) would evolve to become the typical rock band format.
Born McKinley Morganfield of sharecropper parents in Rolling Fork on the Mississippi Delta, April 4, 1915, Muddy Waters built his own guitar when he was seventeen. Robert Johnson and Son House
were his main influences; he watched Son House in action when House came to Clarksdale,
Mississippi. House taught him riffs, open tunings and songs, and showed him how to break off and
flame-smooth a bottleneck.
In '41, folklorists Alan Lomax and John Work came to Clarksdale and recorded Waters for the
Library of Congress. In '43, ready for bigger things, Waters moved to Chicago. Though his style of
choice was rough and old-fashioned compared to the reigning blues artists like Tampa Red and
Lonnie Johnson, (of whom he could do a simple imitation) Big Bill Broonzy helped Waters get his
start playing in clubs. In '44, his uncle gave him his first electric guitar, and by the following year he
had teamed up with guitarist Jimmy Rogers. In the next few years, he started to develop his electric
sound and began recording for the Chess brothers.
In 1950, with the release of "Rollin' Stone," (backed with a Robert Johnson-derived version of
'Walking Blues"*), Waters' career was in high gear. In the next several years he had a series of
regional and national R&B hits. He was Chicago's reigning king of the blues, working every night, his style imitated by other bands, and even some of his sidemen had hit records! He recorded blues
classics like "Hoochie Coochie Man," "Honey Bee" and "I Just Want To Make Love To You."
In the mid-'50s, when rock and roll came roaring onto the charts, Waters' record sales dwindled. Still, he held his Chicago fans and his legend grew. In '58 he played in England and then was a hit at
Carnegie Hall and the Newport Jazz Festival. The early '60s British invasion brought him wider
recognition, as the Rolling Stones (who took their name from the Waters tune), John Mayall, the
Beatles and others sang his praises ... and his songs! In the blues revival that ensued, Waters was
acknowledged as the founding father by the British and by American guitar heroes like Mike
Bloomfield, Steve Miller, Johnny Winter and Jimi Hendrix. He played festivals, college concerts and clubs, was filmed for television in England and the U.S., did world tours, starred at the Montreaux Festival, and played stadiums and arenas.
In the late '70s and early '80s, Waters won three Grammys, played for the White House Staff Party,
appeared in the movie The Last Waltz, and toured with Eric Clapton. On April 30, 1983, he died
peacefully in his sleep at his suburban Chicago home.
78 and 45 rpm singles had an "A side" (the featured tune) and, when you flipped them over, a "6 side," or backup song.
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