Blues Guitar Lessons – “Sweet Home Chicago” Genealogy
FULL LESSON: su.pr Blues guitar lessons: www.truefire.com Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of teaching at various workshops in the company of some fabulous blues guitarists, including Paul Rishell, Steve James and Duke Robillard, among others. I’ve always soaked up as much as I could from these experiences, realizing early on that as long as no one who was paying me to teach realized just how much I was actually learning myself, I was pretty much sitting on so much velvet. The thing I’ve always envied about these guys is their hands-on connection to the past. Steve’s got stories about backing up Furry Lewis onstage in Memphis in the early ’70s. Duke told me once how he got called up to sit in with Muddy Waters, while Freddie King was already onstage too, and Freddie proceeded to glower at Duke the entire time for messing with his own Muddy moment. “And Freddie was a big guy!” laughed Duke. But the best of all are Paul Rishell’s stories about backing up Howlin’ Wolf in Boston, also in the early ’70s. After one session, one of the other musicians asked Wolf if he had any words of wisdom for a young, up and coming bluesman. Wolf looked the afro’d and dashiki’d guitarist up and down and growled, “Yeah! Throw them pedals in the river on the way to the barber shop!” So I wish the things I am about to tell you, I learned from hanging with Robert Lockwood Jr., sitting in with Roosevelt Sykes, and catching Magic Sam at his incendiary Ann Arbor Blues Festival appearance in the …
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thank you Mr. hamburger
U R totally too KooL… keep the blues alive… Thank You…
This is a terrific lesson. One of the best I’ve seen on blues. Five stars!
Is Sweet Home Chicago in F minor scale?
Dude! That’s that old-style blues sound I’ve been looking for to learn! awersome!
Awesome gees!!
Very concise and well organized lesson. This is the real stuff and every guitar player should learn at lest some of this style! Bravo!!! Joey Vaughan “World Blues Attack”
good stuff man!
thank you sir (: its a great lesson with great licks you canplay in other songs aswell!
how does the lick work at 9:00 ? pls tab it or so
c’mon, since when was ccr or led zeppelin or yardbirds considered blues?
and gary moore, too much clapton …
it is almost a crime to put such stuff when you ignore artists like taj mahal with all that superb guitar work by the great jesse ed davies … and led zep’s cover of muddy’s ‘you shook me’ when the original has that fantastic slide work by the great earl hooker! sigh …
also wish they had more material by otis rush, magic sam, buddy guy, son seals, fenton robinson, freddie king …
Rating: 3 / 5
The hook that got me to buy this was a tab for “Mamma Talk To Your Daughter”. I love that song and was really looking forward to getting a guitar tab for it. The version in this book is by Robben Ford, and it is terrible. Takes a really great rockin’ blues song and makes it into some weak insipid waste of time. Of all the versions of this song, why anyone would choose this one is beyond me. A lot of the book follows this theme though. It has a lot of Eric Clapton, whom I do not like because he does the same thing with the blues as Robben Ford. There is an Eric Clapton version of “How Long Blues” in here, and it is awful, although it is faithful enough to the original that you could improvise out a good version of it yourself from the tab in the book, something you cannot do with the Robben Ford version of “Mamma Talk to Your Daughter”. It also has a lot of Yardbirds, ZZ Top, Allman Brothers, Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Johnnie Winter. I already either have tabs or know all the SRV in here. I’m glad to get the Johnnie Winter, but the rest of them I could care less for. A lot of it isn’t blues, IMHO.
There are some really good tabs in here though. The Albert Collin’s Frosty is in here, as well as Guitar Slim’s “Things That I Used To Do”. It has “Further On Up The Road” by Bobby Blue Bland, and some Elmore James, but not “The Sky is Crying”, it has the SRV version of that, which is OK, but I already have it, and it would be nice to have the Elmore James version. It has a version of “Stormy Monday” by The Allman Brothers Band that is awful. It has “Blues After Sunrise” by Eric Clapton, which is weak and insipid. There are so many great versions of these two songs, why these? It also has a lot of Kenny Wayne Shepherd in here, and I am not a fan! …but if you are a fan you’d probably like that aspect of the book…… It has some Muddy Waters, but not “Can’t Be Satisfied”!
Of the stuff that I like, I already have or know how to play most of it. There aren’t 10 songs in here that I don’t have, don’t know how to play and like. I have all the Buddy Guy songs in here, for example, as well as all the T-Bone Walker songs, and it does not have T-Bone’s “Stormy Monday”. I have all the Howlin’ Wolf songs that are in here. So I guess from the standpoint of a person like me, with a small collection of blues songs, a major downside of this book is that a lot of the songs in it are already available elsewhere, and if you have a collection of blues music, you will have most of the songs in here (of the ones you would want).
I was really looking forward to this book. Next time I will be more wary and look for the versions of the included songs. This should be retitled “Blues-Rock White Pages”. If it were so titled, I would have known it would be like this and would not have cared for it at all, let along bought it. Of course if you like blues rock stylings, you’ll probably like what I hate about this book, and thus generally like the book!
In the end though, I guess am really steamed at the lame version of “Mamma Talk to Your Daughter” more than anything else! I guess I’ll have to figure that one out for myself!
Rating: 2 / 5
Fantastic!!!
Sounds great with a Capo on the 2nd fret too!
Simply the best examination of the song I have seen. Thankyou
Thanks for the time, you play very well. Your instructions are also very easy to follow. I’ve been playing for 6 months and get to add this classic to my list of songs now. If you could only teach me to sing