Online Guitar Lessons - How Long Blues (Leroy Carr)
Leroy Carr was a piano player who is usually associated with his musical partner Scrapper Blackwell. They recorded many sides throughout their collaboration and toured extensively all over the U.S. Scrapper Blackwell's guitar style was a cross between delta and ragtime sounds, often with an asynchronous bass which didn't hold a true monotonic bass, or a true alternating bass pattern either. This is one of the marks of a true master - the picking thumb is truly independent and moves anywhere over the strings in order to to produce a rich variety of guitar sounds
The song is
another example of the 'woe is me, my woman is gone' style of blues,
which was a very common theme. In the context of those times, material
for blues was all around - black men living as second class citizens,
scraping a living, traveling everywhere to play music, drinking too much
and having failed romantic relationships due to all of the preceding!
I
decided to retain the attractive melody for the lyrics, and the basic
chord structure and simplifying the delivery. The appeal of this version
is created by a strong monotonic bass, which occasionally breaks out
into singles string bass runs, heavily repeated treble string phrasing
and a short instrumental break providing variations around the verse
structure, which is basically the same each time it's sung.
Thus
can be played with or without picks, and I tend to use picks for public
performance, as I like to 'throw' the picking thumb down onto the bass
strings, immediately damping with my right hand palm - this produces an
percussive effect which accentuates that phrase and builds tension
towards the end of the verse.
Author: Jim Bruce
Date: 2014-06-27
Category: Music