FUQ (eff -yu - cue) - FAQ's with an EDGE

Tagged As: Fingerstyle Blues Guitar

Question:
I recently bought a Blind Blake CD that blew my mind. Can any of you out there recommend any other good fingerstyle blues recordings to pick up? Are there any good TAB resources on the net?

Answer:
would say the blues players most closly related to Blind Blake are: Blind Lemon Jefferson (who they probably all copied), Blind Willie McTell, Rev. Gary Davis (who survived into the 70s and is filmed), and Blind Boy Fuller (who is the most commercial of the lot). Big Bill Broonzy has also done some things in that style; but he had a band in Chicago and did some quite different things too. For playing, I would say Blake and Davis have the hardest guitar parts. Fuller's guitar is simpler and he tends to play very simply while he sings and to make the breaks more complicated whereas Davis and Blake are playing complicated syncopated parts on the guitar while they sing. There is an older book by Stefan Grossman called Oak Anthology of Blues Guitar which has a sampling of these people in music and tab. There is a tape with the pieces that you can buy separately. (The publisher is Oak Publications, if you didn't guess.) A more modern book with many of the same pieces is Mel Bay Presents Legends of Country Blues Guitar by Stefan Grossman. It comes with a CD. One nice feature of this book is that it has music/tab for some of Hurt's later pieces he did for Vanguard--like Payday.