Hillbilly Fingerstyle Blues Guitar

The musical appeal of the Blues, as they began to be heard in the early twentieth century, was so infectious that musicians with open minds and ears were drawn to it as soon as they heard it. And that appeal crossed the racial and ethnic divides that characterized American society. So it was, that even before African American guitarists were recorded playing fingerstyle blues guitar, their white neighbors had already begun learning the music—listening to, watching, and imitating the musicians whose music they so admired. And what these white musicians ended up expressing in their own playing and singing was not simply imitation, but their own reconfiguration of what their models did, played in accordance with their own senses of rhythm, phrasing and how to sing the music.

In Hillbilly Fingerstyle Blues Guitar, author John Miller offers transcriptions, in tablature and standard notation, of twenty-eight pieces by these white fingerstyle blues players, taken from recordings made in the period 1926—1970. Some of the featured musicians in the book, like Sam McGee, Frank Hutchison, Maybelle Carter, Hobart Smith, and Roscoe Holcomb are pretty well known, but the tunes by more obscure players like Debs Mays, Lake Howard, or Lester McFarland certainly don’t suffer by comparison, and in many instances are spectacular. The pieces have been chosen for variety, too—you’ll encounter pieces played in C, E, and A in standard tuning, as well as songs in Open G, Open D tunings and an exotic offshoot of Open G tuning. Downloadable links to all of the original performances from which the transcriptions were made come with the book, so you can get the sound of the tunes in your head.

The musicians in Hillbilly Fingerstyle Blues Guitar gravitated towards the Blues because the music spoke to them so strongly that they felt compelled to make it part of their own musical language. And they did just that. These performances are strong and worthwhile in their own right, but they’ll also show you how you can honor those who have inspired you by singing and playing in your own voice. And that’s an important lesson to learn. Includes access to online audio.