A few people here have occasionally expressed their fascination for the one-chord blues, and I´m one of them. This is an extended take on one such item, "Dock Boggs country blues", recorded yesterday in Gothenburg, Sweden.
My own playing is completely unremarkable, but the band I´m sitting in with, Where the Southern Cross the Dog, is worthy of attention. They play a very "organic", raw, type of blues that I´m quite fond of. Serious guys, roughly half my age, which in its own way is encouraging. They show very little influnce from the quotidian blues acts that, at least here in Sweden, are thirteen by the dozen:
These guys know what they are doing. Very sophisticated interpretation (not a replication) of Delta blues. And the instrumental Hendrix quote by the guitar player was very cool. The singer intonates perfectly, singing the minor pentatonic line that the original Delta guys would often double on guitar. And it can be doubled on harp. Delta blues uses a mInor pentatonic scale, not the blues scale. I have sort of a passing familiarity with this idiom because one of my duos plays some one chord Delta material but we make heavy use of pedalboard electronics which is not how this stuff is normally presented. The harp playing on the vid may not have been totally in the idiom, but I thought it fit very well with what the band was doing. Cool stuff!
Last Edited by hvyj on Sep 10, 2015 9:36 AM
You're consistently too hard on yourself, IMHO! I think you played pretty well and you held off on the fast stuff until it was absolutely perfectly called for... and then blasted them with it - great!
Wow. That band is awesome. That guy can sing and really sells this style well. IMO, your playing was great! Fit the context, and didn't run all over the lyrics. Did nice back and forth with the guitar, and the call-and-response styling was very nice! Bravo! ----------
@Jinx: Yeah. It took me a while to figure that out. I haven't made an encyclopedic study of a bunch of Delta blues material, but what I would play on the Delta material I was doing didn't really sound right until I finally realized that the original artists were using a minor pentatonic scale which appears to be a characteristic of the idiom .
Last Edited by hvyj on Sep 10, 2015 2:59 PM
I've never played any Robert Johnson material in its original form and while I've heard some of his stuff I've never sat down and listened to him carefully. If he is using the blues scale, my speculation would be that it is one of the inovations that made him so well regarded and influential. I do not pretend to be an expert on Delta blues but there seems to be a lot of it that uses minor pentatonic rather than blues scale.
This good work, Martin. Strong tone and you are in the groove, pushing it foward. I enjoy the way you ad texture to the strong, insistent guitar strum.
One chord jams are fascinating to perform. ---------- Ted Burke tburke4@san.rr.com
Yeah! Great band and great harp! You need to give me heads up when stuff like this goes down, Martin.
Where the southern cross the dog... I saw that in a book; "The Devil's music" by Giles Oakley. He was actually quotin WC Handy's autobiography where Handy tells of when he sat on a train station in the south and heard a man play the blues, using a knife as a slide, for the first time. The song was "Goin' where the southern cross the dog." ---------- Pistolkatt - Pistolkatts youtube
Yeah, that´s right Pistolcat. And I guess that band name is a way of saying, "We are kinda deep into this stuff", and, as I said above, they are. On some of the tunes they played you could have bet your sweet ass that you were on 706 Union Avenue in Memphis, Tenn. sometime in the mid 1950´s. A really great sound, and not as a museum showcase, but as a way of delivering blues, gospel and rock ´n´roll in a very convincing manner. I´ll try to remember to give you a heads up next time I see they´re playing. And who knows, maybe I´ll be there sitting in then as well. (The singer/guitarist, Christoffer can sometimes be spotted on that boat where you and I jam occasionally, and if you approach him maybe he can put you on some mail list or whatever. He´s fronting several bands with "roots" orientation; he and I have also been talking of doing something together in the duo format.)
Yeah. I did not make it clear that I was referring to one chord Delta blues material. I do not pretend to be an expert on Delta blues, and my primary interests are actually more modern. But I had to learn some of this one chord Delta stuff because the guitar player in one of my duos wanted to do it. The one chord Delta material he does uses the minor pentatonic scale. Maybe that's not a representive sampling so maybe I shouldn't try to generalize. But playing one chord Delta material with other musicians hasn't been any different so I dunno....
Btw,we also do some John Lee Hooker. One of the things we do is take a John Lee Hooker tune/vamp and segue into a Velvet Underground tune ("Run, Run, Run") that has a similar groove, using flangers and phasers on the guitar and harp, so we're not real traditionalistic. Not that this actually has anything to do with what we've been talking about but interfacing Lou Reed with John Lee Hooker is so much fun I can't help but mention it.
Last Edited by hvyj on Sep 11, 2015 11:42 AM
Martin, I enjoyed hearing the band and absolutely enjoyed your contributions to the one chord song. I thought you fulfilled the task we all have of improving musical performances with harp and not detracting from the music.
The band is good, but better with you in it. You are a good player and added considerably to the song. If you played in central Illinois, USA, I would come to the gig! ----------
