Remembering Johnny Winter (February 23, 1944 – July 16, 2014) Johnny Winter on slide guitar | Don’s Tunes | Jas Obrecht

Photo by Jack Robinson

For a beginner, could you explain the advantages of playing in an open tuning versus standard tuning?

Johnny Winter: Well, when you’re playing with a slide, the advantages are that you’ve got that chord there. You can just barre the strings and you’ve got a chord to work with. That’s the advantage – that you’ve got an open chord to work with, and you can have that chord ring down in the bass notes while you play the top strings with your fingers – I do some of that. You know, I keep the bass going with my thumb and play lead with my fingers, especially if I’m playing by myself. That’s a big help. The notes are easier to go to. It’s easier to go to blues notes in those two tunings than it is if you’re just tuning to standard tuning. Duane Allman was about the best slide man at playing with a regular tuning. You just don’t get too many chords, especially if you don’t use your little finger [for the slide]. That’s pretty important.

I started out using my ring finger because it really feels weird playing with a slide on your little finger, but a guy from the Denver Folklore Society – I think his name was Dave Debetzer – he was a blues freak, and he got me my first National guitar for about a hundred-and-fifty bucks, and he really helped me a whole lot, man. He forced me to use that little finger. He said, “Man, you’re gonna be unhappy later on down the line if you don’t change.” It’s so hard to do at first.

So you were initially wearing the slide on your ring finger, like Duane did.

Yeah. That’s what feels natural at first, but when you do that, you really can’t play chords. You can fret with those free fingers if you put the slide on your little finger. You can do a lot of fretwork with those three fingers. If you put the slide on the middle, it pretty much screws you up. You can’t do much chord work that way. So I have the slide halfway up my little finger, not all the way on it, but halfway up to where I can still bend that little finger.

Jas Obrecht Interview

another classic interview from Jas . . . . . . .

Don's Tunes 

See what Johnny means here . . . . . . over on Highway 61

Buddy Guy: Don’s Tunes - Jas Obrecht interview

 When do you play your best?

Buddy Guy: When I’m not trying to be my best. When I’m not pressing myself to try to make this audience get into what I’m doing. I feel like I’m not doing a good job if I don’t see them smiling or saying, “Yes.” For example, when we first started going to Europe playing blues, the Europeans were like, “We take this as a serious music, almost like opera.” Nobody said anything or patted their feet—nothing. I was thinking, “Oh, Jesus, I’m not doing nothing right now. Maybe I got to flip out or do something.” Then I got booed. I talked to Muddy again, and he said, “Don’t feel bad. It happened to me.” When Chris Barber took Muddy back to England for the first time, they booed him for playing this loud stuff through the amp! They invited him back the next year, and he left the amp and took the acoustic guitar, and they booed him for not playing the amp! [Laughs.]

The same thing happened to me in Germany. I had to go stepping out in front of Roosevelt Sykes, John Lee Hooker, and Big Mama Thornton, and they would just boo every time they’d see me. I said, “Oh, my God!” Me being shy, man, I was just like going under the table. And then when I went back, I said, “I know what I’ll do. I’ll get me a chair and sit down like John Lee and them and play.” I went back, and they got me the same way they did Muddy. They said, “No, no. You’ve got to get out there and move around. That’s what we’re looking for now.” It takes you so long to figure out what they’re saying, unless someone comes up and translates it for you.

Interview: Jas Obrecht 1990

Don's Tunes

Buddy Guy - I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man 

(Carlos Santana Tribute) - 2013 Kennedy Center Honors

Jeff Beck w. Buddy Guy - Let Me Love You 

- Madison Square Garden, NYC - 2009/10/29&30

Lightning Hopkins on playing the guitar | Don’s Tunes

 

"I had the one thing you need to be a blues singer," Lightnin' Hopkins used to say. "I was born with the blues." The songs he created – "barrelhouse," he called them – were as sorrowful as a cottonfield holler and as earthy as the Texas bottomlands that swallowed his sweat. "You know the blues come out of the field, baby," Lightnin' said. "That's when you bend down, pickin' that cotton, and sing, 'Oh, Lord, please help me.'"

Scars on his hands and ankles testified to stints on the chain gang and long days of driving mules and chopping cotton. But Lightnin' was indomitable, and, like Lead Belly and Muddy Waters and other great bluesmen, he played his way to better circumstances, parlaying his anger and pain into tough, deeply felt music. "The blues is a lot like church," Hopkins explained. "When a preacher's up there preachin' the Bible, he's honest to God trying to get you to understand these things. Well, singing the blues is the same thing."

Sage, scoundrel and natural-born storyteller, Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins had a genius for improvised poetry, creating new verses or entire songs as the spirit moved him. He could sing about hairstyles, being broke, how his car was doing, goings-on in the club where he was performing, or the way things used to be. He damn near sang "Po' Sam" into an everyman of the blues.

Lightnin' was a supremely confident guitarist, keeping time with his left leg while swinging hard or traveling downhome. He often played a Gibson J-50 outfitted with a DeArmond soundhole pickup, and he also performed and recorded with a small Harmony flat-top and a Fender Stratocaster. Resting his pinkie and ring finger on the face of his guitar, Lightnin' played bass and rhythm with his thumbpick while plucking solos with his bare index finger. He thrived on first-position shuffles, especially in the key of E with the fat A7 chord with the high G. 

"One of the most distinctive elements of the Lightnin' sound is that turnaround in E," observes ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons. "It's a signature lick that he did in just about every song he played. He'd come down from the B chord and roll across the top three strings in the last two bars. He'd pull the pick off those strings to get kind of a staccato effect, first hitting the little open-E string and then the 3rd fret on the B string and then the 4th fret of the G string. He would then resolve on the V chord after doing this roll. It's a way to immediately identify a Lightnin' Hopkins tune."

To accompany Hopkins meant doing things his way, as Gibbons quickly learned: "We were playing a traditional blues and we all went to the second change, but Lightnin' was still in the first change. He stopped and looked at us. Our bass player said, 'Well, Lightnin', that's where the second change is supposed to be, isn't it?' Lightnin' looked back and said, 'Lightnin' change when Lightnin' want to change.' And we knew – don't do that no more!"

By Jas Obrecht / Guitar Player 

Don's Tunes

 

Remembering Jimi Hendrix (November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970) - Jas Obrecht | Don’s Tunes

Photo: Bent Rej Photography

"James McKay, the grown-up son of their landlady, often sat on the porch playing blues on an acoustic guitar as Jimi listened in. When Jimi told his father he wanted to learn to play, Al purchased McKay’s guitar for five dollars. At first, Al recalls, Jimi concentrated on teaching himself easy riffs, “just like a person plunking away with one finger on the piano. One of the first things that he learned how to play was the theme song from Peter Gunn, so even when he was just starting, he could make music out of the guitar. Who knows—playing guitar could have been his way of working through some of his feelings about his mother. He just worked at it and worked at it, practicing night and day. He played the guitar every day. He carried it around with him all the time.” This habit continued until Jimi was well into his twenties, when he often fell asleep with his guitar still in his hands.

Al Hendrix: “Jimi would put my 45s on the turntable, and play along on his guitar. He’d try to copy what he’d heard, and he’d make up stuff too. He lived on blues around the house. I got a lot of records by B.B. King and Louis Jordan and some of the downhome guys like Muddy Waters. Jimi was really excited by B.B. King and Chuck Berry, and he was a fan of Albert King too, because he liked all them blues guitarists.

“Jimi also had some of his own 78s and 45s, but he never did ask me to buy him any records. He would buy his own. We also had a radio and television on Yesler. I didn’t see Jimi pay too much attention to the radio, but he liked to lay on the floor or sit on the couch and watch TV. Usually when I’d come home from work, he’d be sitting there with the TV on, and then he’d be playing along to the stereo during commercials. When the program would come on again, he would watch that again.” 

From Jimi Hendrix’s Favourite Singles and LPs / Jas Obrecht 

Not sure I totally hold with where this is going but that maybe my distrust in anything his dad said . . . . Jas we trust to report but there’s just something doesn’t ring true about this . . . . .after all it’s all just second hand info . . . . no Jimi here

This from Don’s Tunes yesterday . . . 

Remembering Rory Gallagher ( 2 March 1948 – 14 June 1995)

Photo: Govert De Roos | Ian Green on Facebook says : International Musician And Recording World magazine from early 1977

Jas Obrecht: Do you have advice for keeping your sanity while you’re on tour – keeping yourself centered? It is a rather unusual life.

Rory Gallagher: It is, indeed. There’s also a terrible danger – between travel and other things and getting to the gigs and so on, you get little time to play on your own in the hotel, and you can get lazy about playing. So I make a point of playing every day in the hotel room and bring a little cassette player and record what I’m doing, and try and write songs as well, just as a by-product of that. But to keep your sanity, I don’t know, it takes you about twenty years to find out. You know what all the ABC’s are to begin with, but there’s an awful lot of time to wear down the nerves of a musician. It’s just your attitude, really, in terms of traveling and flying, for hotels, for remembering where you are, and trying to keep all that group feeling every night to put on a good show. I mean, every musician has to go through that. You just have to develop a sense of humor and patience and just keep it cool, you know. I think the old cliché of deal with tonight’s gig and not worry about the one next Tuesday or the end of the tour or anything like that.

Jas: One day at a time.

Rory: Yeah. It’s a classic, but it’s true.

Jas: If someone was overhearing what you’re playing in the hotel room, would they be surprised? Are you a closet country player or a bluegrass guy or a flamenco player?

Rory: Flamenco, definitely. No, I do actually do some country licks. I’m quite keen on the playing of Roy Nichols, who used to be on Merle Haggard’s records, and some of the players that have worked with Waylon Jennings and Johnny Paycheck.

Jas Obrecht Interview