Playing Blues Guitar - The Father Of The Blues

(Note: If you’re interested in the Blues, visit: Beginner Blues Guitar)

The first instrumental hit playing blues guitar was in 1912, called “Memphis Blues,” composed by W. C. Handy, also known as the Father of the Blues. Handy was born in 1873, in Alabama, and began his entertainment career in the 1890s. His first gigs were touring with all black musical troupes. After serving as bandleader of the Mahara’s Minstrels for four years, in 1903 Handy moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi where he first heard the Blues. In his book, he describes his introduction to first hearing the blues guitar as “the weirdest music I had ever heard” (Handy, 74). It was from then that Handy emerged from being a beginner blues guitar player, into a world-renowned Blues guitar musician. In 1914, this once beginner blues guitar player composed “St. Louis Blues,” considered one of the most popular blues guitar songs ever recorded.

While Hendy is considered the Father of the Blues, B.B. King, born Riley King, in Indianola, Mississippi in 1925, is by all accounts considered the King of the Blues. When King was approximately nineteen years old, he started to take beginner blues guitar lessons from his cousin, Bukka White, a well-known Blues musician in Memphis, Tennessee. While working as a disk jockey in an all black music format radio station, Riley took on the name “Blues Boy,” which eventually was shortened to B.B. King’s first national record debut was in 1951, when his “Three O’ Clock Blues” was released. By the 1960s, his haunting guitar playing and trilling blues guitar style, was influencing not only blues guitarists, but also emerging rock musicians. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, King inspired a new musical format - long guitar solos, which practically became the standard for most rock and blues guitar songs. Apparently, this musical style is attributed to King’s inability to sing and play guitar at the same time, and hence the non-vocal, long guitar solo was born. For more information on the full biographies of these and other musicians and how they began their careers as beginner blues guitar players, please see the links below.

Interested in beginner blues guitar? Click here to learn How To Play Blues Guitar!

Bibliography:

Handy, W. C. Father of the Blues: An Autobiography. New York: Macmillan, 1941. Reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1991.

Freeland, David. “King, B.B.” Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Popular Musicians Since 1990. Ed. Stephen Wasserstein, Ken Wachsberger, and Tanya Laplante. Vol. 1. Detroit: Schirmer Reference, 2004. 361-362.