Want to play like Son House?

[Deleted]

Make a cup of tea/coffee then sit down and watch this:

[SoloBill]

With regard to the start pf this thread, I think being able to read music is a wonderful skill to have. I hope you guys have written to the webmaster of that page with whatever corrections are necessary so that it becomes a valuable resource.

Bill

[Michael Messer]

Hi Bill

I completely agree with you, but I am not able to make those corrections with written musical notation.

Shine On
Michael

[deadlyernest]

The ability to read music is one that I am sadly lacking, not through lack of trying, I just have a short attention span. You can replicate the style of the old blues masters to a certain extent but you can't replicate the person. I think that you have to feel the music more than anything else and you instinctively know when it feels good. You kind of get lost in the music. Listening to the recordings it seems that Son House and his contemporaries both lived and felt their music, this is what turned them into the legends they deservedly are. Hope this makes some sense.

[Michael Messer]

I guess we all hear these things and try to decode them in a slightly different way, but I do not think I hear Dry Spell Blues in the same way as Stefan. To me it sounds very precise and every verse is almost identical. The rhythmic guitar pattern has exactly the same amount of beats on every verse. I agree that it is totally unique and that nothing else in any repertoire I know of sounds anything like it. Well that is apart from Son House himself. It is not dissimilar in structure to his own original recording of Preaching Blues. If the "theatre" or "performance" is removed when decoding Dry Spell Blues or Preaching Blues, it is much more understandable and to me makes total sense. Playing and singing these pieces is a whole different thing because the theatre and performance that he creates is so much a part of the piece. When trying to decode a piece like Dry Spell Blues, as soon as we start counting and thinking in western musical language, we have lost the plot. Rhythmically, these songs are closer to African music than to anything in the blues.

Shine On
Michael.

[Pickers Ditch]

This is one of those subjects that will get discussed for eons without a final agreement being reached.

I have a very good friend who is a supa dupa classically trained session guitarist, perfect pitch, sight reads, plays anything you throw at him but can't play blues; Rock, Pop and Nashville/West Coast country? Yes, brilliantly! Blues? No. (He thinks he's playing blues, sometimes though).

He cannot listen to the old blues players - it "offends" him as they are "out of tune" and "they don't play clean" and "their timing is way out".

You can imagine the fun I have trying to get him to open his ears and listen.

The real irony is that he asks me to play bass with him occassionaly in a live band in our local pub.
When I asked 'Why me and not your normal bass player?' he answered along the lines of that I've got much more feel and can improvise better than his normal bassist, particularly for a small gig.

I'm dyslexic when it comes to reading and understanding musical notation.

Monkey see/hear, Monkey do - that's me.

Work that one out.....

[creolian]

Aug 6, 2018 7:59:26 GMT Michael Messer said:

I guess we all hear these things and try to decode them in a slightly different way, but I do not think I hear Dry Spell Blues in the same way as Stefan. To me it sounds very precise and every verse is almost identical. The rhythmic guitar pattern has exactly the same amount of beats on every verse. I agree that it is totally unique and that nothing else in any repertoire I know of sounds anything like it. Well that is apart from Son House himself. It is not dissimilar in structure to his own original recording of Preaching Blues. If the "theatre" or "performance" is removed when decoding Dry Spell Blues or Preaching Blues, it is much more understandable and to me makes total sense. Playing and singing these pieces is a whole different thing because the theatre and performance that he creates is so much a part of the piece. When trying to decode a piece like Dry Spell Blues, as soon as we start counting and thinking in western musical language, we have lost the plot. Rhythmically, these songs are closer to African music than to anything in the blues.

Shine On
Michael.

Hi Michael, all,

I've got no problem with the scholar's approach but it's not for me.

Hard to articulate, but I think you've partly hit the jackpot...  Learning the music and specific ways of playing is the easy part.   I dont think that learning another culture or imitating the spontaneous energy of specific musicians  is even remotely possible. Imo Blues music has always been as much about the entertainment as the music. Many of these cats were reel "Rolling Stones" ... Tough to learn and sometimes painful to imitate. You gots to play it with a feeling! What is the notation for that?

For me, the most entertaining music is listening to someone who has transcended inhibition and is having fun doing it "their" way. Not Son House in particular, but I have met a fair number of older black blues players. They all had there own indescribable way of putting it out there... Those rhythmic structures allow for a lot of improv in the storytelling and Many used a few signature structures or licks within a repertoire in which songs were never played quite the same.


And finally, I really do have a learning disorder which has flavors of dyslexia etc... Makes it damm near impossible for me to play anything exactly the same way twice. note for note transcriptions give me the heebee jeebees. If nothing else, blues music is a perfect vehicle of self expression for someone with my abilities.

Close as ill ever get to Son house, A stiff pop of the Buffalo Trace and let er rip.

Jeff

[blueshome]

It’s easy to forget that Son House tailored his playing to the house parties and jukes where he could make money and that this was not abstract composition but dance music.

[slide496]

[Michael Messer]

When I first got into all this music I absolutely loved this film of Son House & Mike Bloomfield at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967



....but this is the real stuff. It's crackly, but between the surface noise are some of the finest blues recordings ever made.











Shine On
Michael

[Malc]

My first ever guitar "method" was Bert Weedons "play in a day". Couldn't understand a word of it apart from how to tune the guitar. Later it was just listen to a record over and over for the chords and lyrics, later I realised that we had many of the lyrics totally wrong.

[Pickers Ditch]

Aug 7, 2018 8:28:12 GMT Malc said:

My first ever guitar "method" was Bert Weedons "play in a day". Couldn't understand a word of it apart from how to tune the guitar. Later it was just listen to a record over and over for the chords and lyrics, later I realised that we had many of the lyrics totally wrong.

I could have typed that!

[Stevie]

Me too, but I believe it worked our quite well for folks like Jimmy Page!

e&oe...

[jono1uk]

can anybody recommend a definitive collection of Son House stuff to get please? ( hopefully avalable in vinyl)

[lonelyjelly]

I just bought Death Letter, which I believe is the same / also known as Father of Folk Blues, recorded in ‘65. It’s the 1985 release and is meant to be low on digital interruptions and compression Only 9 songs but they are 9 big songs!

I’d be interested to know where to start also with regards to his work as a younger man. Maybe there are some Pristine Records remasters like MM has talked about in the past for Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, etc?