From Texas to the Delta: #4 Scrapper Blackwell and Some Minor Blues Men

From Texas to the Delta is a free weekly video guitar lesson series covering acoustic blues picking techniques. Your instructor is Jim Bruce, who has many years of experience teaching guitar players of all skill levels and styles, and will have an online classroom at TrueFire soon — stay tuned!

Video Guitar Lesson

When we think of the original blues men, we tend to think of names such as Muddy Waters, Son House and Robert Johnson. However, there are many lesser known artists that produced styles that have had a lasting effect on generations of musicians. Floyd Council and Pink Anderson (who Pink Floyd was named after), are two examples of great guitar stylists that didn’t make the big time, but have huge appeal. Council oftne played as second guitar on Blind Boy Fuller recordings, while Anderson started his career playing traveling medicine shows.

Another blues man, Scrapper Blackwell, wrote such songs as ‘Kokomo Blues’, which Robert Johnson copied and called ‘Sweet Home Chicago’, and ‘Nobody Wants You When You’re Down and Out’, which became a great standard. His partner, piano player Leroy Carr, penned a song called ‘How Long, How Long Blues’ and we take a look at how to play this in the video.

Keep it real, Cheers,
Jim Bruce

From Texas to the Delta is a free weekly video guitar lesson series covering acoustic blues picking techniques. Your instructor is Jim Bruce, who has many years of experience teaching guitar players of all skill levels and styles, and will have an online classroom at TrueFire soon — stay tuned!