Blues Genealogy: "Sweet Home Chicago" - Blues Guitar Lessons - David Hamburger

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David Hamburger - http://truefire.at/DavidHamburger

Over the years I've had the pleasure of teaching at various workshops in the company of some fabulous blues guitarists, including Paul Rishell, Steve James and Duke Robillard, among others. I've always soaked up as much as I could from these experiences, realizing early on that as long as no one who was paying me to teach realized just how much I was actually learning myself, I was pretty much sitting on so much velvet. The thing I've always envied about these guys is their hands-on connection to the past. Steve's got stories about backing up Furry Lewis onstage in Memphis in the early '70s. Duke told me once how he got called up to sit in with Muddy Waters, while Freddie King was already onstage too, and Freddie proceeded to glower at Duke the entire time for messing with his own Muddy moment. "And Freddie was a big guy!" laughed Duke. But the best of all are Paul Rishell's stories about backing up Howlin' Wolf in Boston, also in the early '70s. After one session, one of the other musicians asked Wolf if he had any words of wisdom for a young, up and coming bluesman. Wolf looked the afro'd and dashiki'd guitarist up and down and growled, "Yeah! Throw them pedals in the river on the way to the barber shop!"

So I wish the things I am about to tell you, I learned from hanging with Robert Lockwood Jr., sitting in with Roosevelt Sykes, and catching Magic Sam at his incendiary Ann Arbor Blues Festival appearance in the 1960s. But I didn't. I learned them on Youtube, and from Wikipedia. Also from Elijah Wald's fantastic book, Escaping the Delta. More on that in a future post. For now, on to the Robert Johnson tune, "Sweet Home Chicago."