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Chapter 2
Blues Meets Guitar: A Match
Made in Musical Heaven
In This Chapter
The roots of blues guitar
What defines blues guitar music
How acoustic and electric guitars each make the blues in their own way
The essential gear you need to play the blues
The guitar and blues go together like apple and pie — as if they were made
for each other. And you could argue that they were. The guitar allows you
to sing along with yourself (try that with a flute), and singing was the way the
blues started. And it’s much easier to bring out on the front porch than a
piano. It’s cheaper to own (or make yourself) than many other instruments,
and that helped bring the blues to many poor folks — the people who really
had the blues.
As the blues developed, guitar makers adopted features that helped bring
out the qualities of the blues to even better effect. An electric guitar is played
with two hands and leaves your mouth free to sing (as an acoustic does), but
electrics, with their skinnier strings, are easier to bend (a way of stretching the
string while it’s ringing, producing a gradual, continuous rise in pitch), and
electronic amplification helps project the guitar’s sound out into the audience
of (often raucous and noisy) blues-loving listeners. In this chapter, I show you
in detail why the blues and the guitar — both acoustic and electric — make
great music together.
Because the blues was concentrated in the rural South, in the time before
musical instruments adopted electricity, the earliest blues guitar music was
played on acoustics. The “Delta blues” style was the first recognized style
of the blues and consisted of strummed and plucked acoustic guitars with
chords formed the same way as in other forms of folk music.
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