Which popular BLUES standards to play live?

[Jack Hanson]

"The thing is, there is no tradition of steel playing, pedal or non-pedal, in classic electric blues. ie blues from say 1939 to 1969".

Freddie Roulette plays incredible blues on his old 8-string Nationals. Most of his work is from after 1969, but he started working with Earl Hooker and Charlie Musselwhite long before then.

[Jack Hanson]

My approach to playing blues on the steel is to emulate the styles of blues harpmen Little Walter, Walter Horton, Paul Butterfield, et al. To my ears, that's what Duane was doing in the Allman Brothers Band. Put on Fillmore East and listen to Duane's slide solos. Even though a few of the tunes have a guest harmonica player (Thom Doucette), it is apparent to me that Duane was heavily influenced by the classic amplified blues harp players. The really tough part for me is to get that huge overdriven Les Paul through a 50-Watt Marshall tone with my PSG rig.

5 blues tunes:

1) Statesboro Blues
2) Sweet Home Chicago
3) Boom Boom Out Go The Lights
4) Stormy Monday
5) Born In Chicago

[Dave Mudgett]

I think most blues bands these days have a more electric sound. Listening to Fred McDowell isn't going to help the OP please a modern blues crowd.

Respectfully, I could not disagree more with that statement. You also might wanna check in with Bonnie Raitt (who studied directly with McDowell) and many other modern blues masters. Yeah, the ones I'm talking about are 'electric' and 'modern'. But the influence of earlier slide masters like McDowell, Nighthawk, and Earl Hooker - I term them 'transitional' between older and modern styles - is unmistakable on modern blues slide guitar players both directly (from studying them directly) and indirectly (from studying players who were strongly influenced by them). I think one is missing something huge by bypassing them and moving to the more blues/rock players first.

Really, once you get down a certain number of blues styles, feels, and tempos, it's not too tough to play reasonably well on most meat-and-potatoes blues tunes without any advanced preparation. Of course, getting everything authentic, with accurate kickoffs, signature riffs, solos, and so on, requires a more encyclopedic knowledge. But to cop the basic feels and work around most blues tunes, I think one can get to a reasonable place in a fairly short time with proper, concentrated study of the right classic players of various blues styles.

One other thing on playing blues (IMO) - do not be afraid to really slide the bar around at will. No need to cover up the noise due to friction, sliding back-and-forth heavily for vibrato, and so on. I also wouldn't go for an extremely distorted amp sound - any reasonable tube amp pushed just a bit is fine. Smaller amps like Fender Champs, Princetons, Deluxes, and Vibroluxes work fine, any era, although I like tweed a lot for that. Old Gibson, Valco, and other tube amps work great too. I wouldn't go for any extreme distortion at all - maybe a little light overdrive on a larger blackface/silverface type of amp so you're not bringing the walls down with volume to get to the sweet spot.

[John Polstra]

1st pedal, 1 and 2 to F#/G
2nd, A
3rd, B
4th, C

Lane, I don't quite understand what you mean by "1st pedal, 1 and 2 to F#/G". Could you spell it out for me? Does the pedal raise string 1 to G and string 2 to F#?

And thanks for making those videos! They're very helpful.

John

[Mike Perlowin]

We pedal steel guitarists tend to rely on the pedals, but the guys who played slide like McDowell, Muddy Waters, Son House, Bukka White and Robert Johnson did it all with their slides.

I played that style of slide guitar back in the 60s. (Like Bonnie Raitt, I also copped some lessons from Fred McDowell, as well as Bukka White.)

2 or 3 years after I took up the study of the pedal steel guitar, I scored a little 6 string lap steel, and found that all the bottleneck stuff I had learned decades earlier, worked better on the lap steel.

Eventually, I learned how to integrate the use of the pedals into the style. But INHO, blues playing is more about using the bar than the pedals. You can see that if you go back and look at the video I posted earlier.

I suggest to anybody who is seriously interested in playing blues, get yourself a lap steel and spend some time learning to emulate the old masters on that instrument, then move over to your pedal steel guitars and add the use of the pedals to what you've learned on the lap steel.

[Lane Gray]

I mistyped. P1 takes the 1st string to G#, and 2nd to E.
You're welcome. Since I don't have the opportunity to gig with my current day job, this lets me play and stay half useful. I enjoy playing, and as long as some people find my thinking on this contraption and the playing of same useful, I'm happy to do it.
Got some more coming Monday, if all goes according to plan.
Now I go back to edit that earlier post to make it clearer

[John Polstra]

Great, Lane, thanks for the clarification. I'll be looking forward to the new videos!

John

[J Fletcher]

Memphis Slim with Ike Perkins on electric steel, according to the notes at Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPa2MLeNnCQ

[mike nolan]

Several years ago.... screwing around in the studio during some downtime. The challenge was to do the illest possible version of this song .....
Yeah, that's a pedal steel.... but I might as well have been playing a board with one string on it....
You can probably guess who is singing and playing guitar.

https://soundcloud.com/pineyb/dont-start-me

[b0b]

I like the bass and drums on that one, Mike.

not much else

[mike nolan]

The point was to be as distorted and nasty as possible... like music blasting out of a car window on a hot summer night in 1959 (the last good year). The mix was re-amped out through a pair of cranked tweed Harvard amps. We put a couple of mics on those and recorded that as the track. Guitar and steel solos were intended to go way outside.....

So, it is entirely possible that you might not like it

[Dave Mudgett]

Well, I like it, Mike. The rhythm section put down a phat groove that you could drive a Boeing 747 through, which you then proceeded to do.

I assume it's GE either singing through a bullet mic or the distortion on the voice is from the re-amping? Very primitive to the point of psychedelic, which I'm totally cool with when it's done like this. Not your regular blues-rock %$%^&. I do this kind of thing with some old blues tunes every once in a while. Blows the cobwebs out of my overly analytical brain sometimes. Folks, it's good for ya', and one of the great thing about blues.

[mike nolan]

Thanks Dave,

This post was actually in response to Jack Hanson's earlier comment...

My approach to playing blues on the steel is to emulate the styles of blues harpmen Little Walter, Walter Horton, Paul Butterfield, et al. To my ears, that's what Duane was doing in the Allman Brothers Band.

cause we were really going for that blown out harp through a small amp vibe... I thought it worked.

My thing with the blues is always that it should be primitive.... not too clean, and not too many notes. If you can embrace that, then you don't really have to "learn" standards. They just happen.

There is plenty of room for interpretation.... and we all don't have to agree.

[Tom Gorr]

I have no experience playing blues on steel guitar....and not much playing anything else, either.

So I'm thinking there are a few positions that make sense:

the A+F IMaj position and using the F lever to switch between a minor and major voicing or passing blues note. Use of the E-F# raise here as well.

the B6-ish E+B I7 position and doing a maj blues thing with bar moves for minor passing notes

Any more advice on positions, and IV and V moves from those I positions?

[Tony Glassman]

The incredible list of artists thet Dave Mudgett mentioned plus:

Bro' Jack McDuff, Jimmy Smith, Billy Hawks, Little Milton, Junior Parker, Johnnie Taylor, Junior Wells, Magic Sam, Ruth Brown, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon ..... The list is never-ending.

[Lane Gray]

Tom, I usually DON'T use the A&F position. I use a lot of AB, B+D# lever and two frets back, either using the A pedal, A# lever or B+C.
For minor key stuff, I usually use either the D# lever (G#m at the nut) or A pedal.
I didn't get around to a tutorial today describing WHAT I played on last week's videos (sorry, Steven), but I got a couple more of playing blues, and this time I put tape flags on the pedal rods, so hopefully we'll be able to see when I hit pedals.

[Tom Gorr]

Thanks Lane - I'll spend some time working those positions, and thinking it will be a great exercise in learning the machine better.

[Dave Mudgett]

the A+F IMaj position and using the F lever to switch between a minor and major voicing or passing blues note. Use of the E-F# raise here as well.

You can also toggle/feather the A-pedal between stops - whole step bends in the right places are used plenty in blues. For example, going between b7 to 1 in the chord you're working around is used a lot in standard blues guitar playing. Toggling/feathering the F-lever between major and minor tonalities is also useful in that context, as you mention. But there are lots of other applications for whole-step bends in blues - even going from 5 to 6 is useful, but typically handled a bit differently than if one is working a traditional country song. There are obvious differences between country music and blues, but also a lot of commonalities in the styles. For example, I can't think about Hank Williams without feeling a strong sense of blues in his music. Or when I listen to someone like Lloyd Green playing country music, I feel that I am listening to someone who really gets the blues, and there are many others.

Of course, one can do a lot of these figures by sliding the bar also. But I think there's a place for pretty much anything on a typical E9 copedent, or C6 (or B6 on a universal) for that matter. So I fundamentally disagree that E9 is not useful for blues - I think it's made-to-order, although I think a few of the variations used by some sacred steelers (e.g., having a lever to get a second unison E note in the middle) can be useful.

My biggest issue is finding serious blues players who want to use steel guitar. I do get a certain amount of resistance, e.g., "It's not a blues instrument", "It's a country instrument", and so on - typecasting is alive and well. But there may be other reasons - e.g., around here, pedal steel is sort of a spotlight hog, since almost nobody plays one out in that context. Then add the fact that especially pedal steel takes a fairly large footprint on stage. For whatever reason, a lot of people seem to prefer to see me show up with a guitar and a tweed amp.

[Lane Gray]

Dave, I know what you mean about resistance. Fortunately Robert R has given the instrument enough cred that I can usually get some time playing with strangers.
One of the bands that hosts a local jam has gotten second place twice at the IBC in Memphis, and when I hit their jams, I'm welcome most of the night.

As far as white guys on the blues, I'll point out that my fiancée calls Jimmie Rodgers "the original wigga" and Hiram King "Wigga #2." (Disregarding the ones in the 40s, I guess) Her sense of humor and musical taste and knowledge are two of the things that make me find her indispensable.

[b0b]

I think the tone ("that sound") that most steel players try to get doesn't work well in blues. That's why serious blues players say "It's not a blues instrument". Same with jazz.

[Dave Mudgett]

b0b, I've been playing blues most of my life, it's what moved me from classical piano to guitar almost 45+ years ago, first seeing Bloomfield with The Electric Flag very early on - that and other early blues shows I saw were just riveting, never got over it - after that, I just had to dig in deeper.

When I started playing pedal steel, much later, I basically sounded more or less like a blues guitar player - I had to figure out how to stop playing like that and do the standard country pedal steel thing. But who wanted to play with me? A strongly folk/country-influenced Americana band. My blues and rockabilly bands wanted nothing to do with it. Too much trouble, wrong stereotype, and so on. Rockabilly frontman came up to me and said, "Dave, I have to be honest with you, I hate pedal steel. It's too hillbilly for me." Ha! (you'd have to know the guy to understand how ridiculous that sounded, and we already played quite a bit of revved-up country music). People were coming up to me and asking if we were gonna become a country band. It's not even that I sounded anything like a country pedal steel player, that came later. The mere presence of the instrument put all that in motion. I tried for a while, and then moved on to people who were more accepting.

I just don't understand for one bloody second how a steel guitar, pedals or not, can seem foreign to anybody steeped in a style (blues) where slide guitar is so prominent and important to its development. A pedal steel is just a slide guitar on steroids, but you don't have to kick in the steroids all the time, or even very often. But it's a damned nice trick to have up your sleeve.

To make it sound like a "blues instrument", the biggest issues are, IMO, choice of approach and choice of amp. The approach to phrasing, how and when to bend/slide notes, what chords to play in a given situation, how to handle rhythm, and a host of other smaller almost intangible things, all matter. On amps, hard to go wrong with a tweed or other old tube amp, more or less like a lap steel, slide guitar, or harp player might use, but I think a lot of things work. Certainly anything that works as a blues guitar amp works fine. Probably not gonna use a total clean-machine like a typical 200-300 watt pedal steel amp without something to seriously grease up the sound. But on the other hand, I've seen some great blues guitar players use clean-machines. Bloomfield used blackface Twin Reverbs with JBLs, but cranked the blazes out of them; Albert King used solid-state Acoustic amps and, later, Roland JC-120s; BB King used Twins and then solid-state Lab L5s for years; I've seen lots of Mississippi blues guitar players use solid-state Peaveys - they all make them work.

I guess my point is that, IMO, it is possible to push any kind of steel guitar out of the range where someone can say, "That SOUNDS like a country pedal steel." But it may sometimes be harder to get people to think it doesn't LOOK like a country pedal steel.

Just my experience.

[Tom Gorr]

I'm still waiting on parts to make it happen, but I'm thinking the G#--G lower on string 6 may be what the doctor ordered for playing in the (former) no pedals position???

[Tony Glassman]

I think the tone ("that sound") that most steel players try to get doesn't work well in blues. That's why serious blues players say "It's not a blues instrument". Same with jazz.

Give a listen to Buddy's ride on "I Feel So Bad" off of the Ray Charles' album: Volcanic Action of My Soul. The steel sounds perfect on this classic Little Milton blues tune.

[Lane Gray]

I did two more over Christmas.
Here's one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWtRNJb ... ata_player
And the other one. With a bonus tidbit for the new guys: if you get lost, KEEP GOING. The clock doesn't stop when you fumble.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB7Uw4A3OJI

[David Spires]

b0b, I couldn't agree more... and I certainly understand what you mean as well Dave, but the thing I find is that even my pickups and placement of them on my pedal steel, don't give me the blues type of tone that I enjoy from my Asher lap steel. Believe me - I miss my pedals and knees, but it allows me to approach that type of tone completely differently than I do my country pedal steel thing.

It isn't as though I've never seen great blues played on a Tele & Twin, but sometimes a whole change in perspective is good. Most importantly for me, grabbing my Asher and Blues Jr make me 'think' differently.

-David Spires