Tuesday, March 4, 2014

What Did You Miss This Week? (Week 348 #392)

Walking Through the Blues!!!
Our thorough analysis of Walking Through the Park has coincidentally segued to another classic ambulatory blues, Walking By Myself! The original is Walter Horton blowing harp on the Jimmy Rogers tune and he is on fire! Oh, but discussion of his smoking solo is next week.

This week the conversation revolved around the source of the tune and Horton's melodic playing on it. Not only does Walking By Myself sound an awful lot like the jazzy tune Why Not from T Bone Walker (written by Dossie Terry), it turns out Jimmy Rogers is even playing guitar on Why Not. Very interesting, but hey, that's blues - borrowing was par for the course at the time.

A tune like WBM is an interesting combination of melody playing (which was the standard for so much early harp playing - see jug bands and country blues) and driving blues. For this week, we studied the melody. Horton sticks very close to the melody on the 8 bar sections. Joe reminds players that having a melodic blues programmed into your set list is both a strong set variation and also plays well with listeners' ears.

Work from the transcription to get the melody down and we'll bring you the solo next week...

Class Notes
  • Thanks for all who registered - it's going to be a great session!
- Grant Kessler, B1 Blues Crew

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