How To Learn Blues Guitar By Listening

If you love listening to blues guitar playing you will probably have a thirst for knowledge of the blues guitarists who turned blues music into a language spoken, played and sung worldwide. You can find the arrangements and compositions of many blues players in guitar tabulature, and if you do your daily practice, you will soon be able to play songs by people like Robert Johnson, B.B. King and Eric Clapton.

Looking on the internet for blues guitar tablature will give you quite a variety of lessons in blues guitar besides tab for traditional blues music by singers, guitarists and composers of the early twentieth century. I should say that alot of songs cannot be traced back to their origins but nonetheless they have been popular songs since the beginning of the blues. So it is time to get aquainted with some of the blues guitarists who helped make the blues what it is today.

You need to listen to the artists of the past in order to find a direction for yourself as a blues guitar player. You need to know the meaning of a few terms in order to know what you are listening to when you start to explore early blues music.

So I will outline a couple of common words you will come across in blues lessons. Groups of notes which are utilised in guitar solos are called “licks”. They might be scales or arpeggios but all blues guitar players have a stash of licks that they can throw into a guitar solo or use to begin a new improvisation. You also need to know about riffs. A riff is a repeated pattern of notes which appears throughout a song. Riffs were used alot in the ’60’s and if somebody says, “Smoke On The Water” and you can immediately hear a guitar in your head, you know what a riff is.

Mississippi John Hurt was a blues pioneer who came to fame as an elderly man playing at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. With his guitar playing and singing as good as ever he spent the 1960’s recording traditional blues songs. But he made many blues records in his youth and the sessions from the 1920’s brought us blues standards like “Frankie And Johnny” and “Stagger Lee”.

Robert Johnson was born in 1911 and was an extremely talented guitarist, singer and song writer. We do not know a whole lot about him apart from the legend of his meeting with the Devil. Apparently Johnson’s success as a blues artist was due to the fact that he swapped his soul for mastery of the blues guitar. Johnson’s prime was in the 1920’s and 1930’s but he did not achieve wide reaching acclaim till the 1960’s. He delivered his soul to the Devil in 1938 at the age of twenty-seven.

And then there was Leadbelly. Huddie Ledbetter was born in 1888 and is strongly associated with the twelve-string guitar which he played like an angel. The rest of his life was far from angelic consisting of romping with numerous women, drinking copious amounts of alcohol and killing a person or two. His virtuosity on the twelve string guitar inspired Pete Seeger to popularize the instrument in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

You may already have some idea about whether you want to play acoustic or electric blues. The three blues guitar players I have mentioned were all acoustic guitarists, partly due to electric guitars being unavailable to them in their heyday. But to many people blues guitar music is synonymous with the electric guitar. B.B. King, Eric Clapton and Roy Buchanan were, in their individual approaches to the blues, pioneers of electric blues music.

In closing, a YouTube guitar video of Jimi Hendrix playing acoustic blues.