Burlap and Blues, The Blues Blog

In 1982, I was given the cheapest guitar that you could ever imagine. My mother paid either 5 or 10 dollars for it at a garage sale. To say that she over paid was an understatement. If you are a guitar player, you can understand, there are times when a guitar needs to be mercifully killed rather than sold, and this one should have been killed, but it found its way into my hands. It was a classical guitar that was strung with steel strings, in an era before truss rods were put on all guitars. Needless to say, it played real hard.

Follow up:

The first blues ‘jam’ that I learned was a simple blues in “A” that I read from a book. I played the three chords and practiced them faithfully until I could make the changes well. There was something about the turn around, that made me want to play that progression for hours on end. Needless to say, playing a blues progression with straight chords is very boring.

For the first year of my playing, I studied chord theory and music theory. It wasn’t until my junior year in high school where a fellow guitar player taught me the pentatonic scale and taught me about how to solo. I taught myself how to bend strings until they could be bent no more. It was not an uncommon event for me to have to get on my bike and ride 25 miles to the music store to buy a single guitar string because I snapped one.

I learned how to program an old Tandy Color Computer to play the blues in A. It was a monophonic instrument, so I had to program it to Arpeggio the chords, but it was my first backing track. Imagine the beep of a Pong in the key of A. I would jam in front of the computer for hours working on that lone pentatonic scale.

Every blues player has a story, whether buried in the teachings of great musicians, or stumbling upon the meaning of life in back alley. We all keep the blues alive in our own unique way.

Thanks for reading

Ken