Anybody interested in modern music sooner or later asks the question, "Where did today's popular music come from?" The answer is the blues. There may be many musical milestones but the blues is the whole journey. So let us look at where the blues came from, where it went and who it met on the way. We will also take a look at the "blues guitar sound" and how it has its unique effect on our feelings.

Some people claim that the roots of blues music can be found in West Africa. Whether or not we can be so precise, the fact is that many slaves from Africa adapted the spontaneous singing they had been doing all their lives to their new way of life in the Mississippi Delta. They had no plan to influence the culture of their new world, they just did it. They sang in the fields, at social gatherings and in church. As time went on professional composers and entertainers began to form a musical genre.

Learning How To Play Blues Guitar - The Basics

So where do you begin to learn how to play blues guitar? If you do not already know how to read sheet music or tab, find a tutorial on guitar tabs. This is the fastest written guitar music to learn and any blues music you need will be found in tab. Also you need to know what chord charts are, and how to read them. Neither chord charts or tab is hard to learn. What will take some practice is developing your ear so that you can learn riffs and licks from records.

Learning How To Play Blues Guitar - The Basics

The blues genre began in the early twentienth century when W.C. Handy published "Memphis Blues", "St Louis Blues", and other songs which reached the hearts and souls of black people. To people like W. C. Handy who were raised singing in church, the piano was the natural instrument to accompany their songs. But the guitar has always been popular so it deserved a place in blues and jazz. Blues guitarists like twelve string guitar player Leadbelly and electric guitar innovator of the future, B.B. King were making sure the guitar would always be part of blues music. Some blues guitarists made their living in smoky saloons playing slide guitar using a bottle neck or the blade of a knife to fret the notes.

In the early nineteen fifties artists like Elvis Presley and Bill Haley were calling the blues "rock'n'roll" and the players of the electric blues guitar like B.B. King were making the world aware of the lead guitar. The guitar had always taken its turn for solos in jazz bands but now it competed with the singer for the attention of the audience.

The blues can be played in any key and is found in three basic forms: eight bars, for example "Heartbreak Hotel", sixteen bars like "Saint James Infirmary" and twelve bars like "St. Louis Blues". For some reason the twelve bar blues form is more popular with audiences than the other two, and it is the basis of many great songs outside the blues genre.

After years of imitating their idols something odd happened to the white blues guitar players in Britain and the USA. They developed their own original styles. The older generation of blues players even started using the modern arrangements of blues songs and adopting some of the musical innovations introduced by young white guitarists like Eric Clapton. So foreign culture influences American popular music and in turn gets fresh input from a new generation of guitar players from all over the world.