Hi all,
A couple of years ago, when JSP put out its "Blind Boy Fuller--Volume 2" 4-CD set, completing its re-issue of Blind Boy Fuller's recorded works, they included in the set the complete early recorded works of several other very interesting, but considerably less prolific musicians: Cedar Creek Sheik, Roosevelt Antrim, Virgil Childers, Sonny Jones, Bull City Red, Floyd "Dipper Boy" Council, Willie Trice, Rich Trice, Frank Edwards and Dennis McMillon. Every one of these musicians apart from Fuller is worth listening to and made a lot of great music, so the set, JSP Records JSP7772, is well worth picking up.
Sonny Jones, who was apparently from Wilson, North Carolina, has only four solo numbers on the set, but they're all excellent. His final cut, "Dough Roller", is particularly striking, and has a lick in it that is one of the most memorable I've heard in recent years. It hit me very hard when I first heard it, and I figured it out a couple of months ago.
Sonny Jones played "Dough Roller" out of dropped-D tuning, and started the form on the IV chord, like John Hurt's "Monday Morning Blues". When he goes to the second and subsequent verses, he starts with a Iminor7 chord, Dm7, which he gets by moving his D shape up, intact, three frets on the first three strings, so that he ends up fretting: 0-0-0-5-6-5, articulating it with brushed triplets as Buddy Moss might have. In the second bar, he rakes his mystery chord on the top four strings and lets the sound of it hang in the air before going back to the groove. It turns out that the position he plays in the second bar is: 0-0-0-4-6-7, which ends up being a rootless IV7 chord, G7, voiced 3rd, 7th, 3rd, on the top three strings.
If you assume that Sonny Jones was fingering the Dm7 chord at the fifth fret with his index finger fretting the third string, his ring finger fretting the second string and his second finger fretting the first string, then the move into the hanging G7 in the second bar can be accomplished by pivoting on the ring finger on the second string, lowering the index one fret on the third string, and using the little finger to fret the seventh fret of the first string. The move ends up being not that awkward, though certainly a long ways from being intuitive, for me, at least. Every time I run into a lick that is this arresting, but which is at the same time just a tiny moment in musical time, I so appreciate and admire the imagination, invention and listening that the player performing it brought to the music.
Part of what makes the lick so striking-sounding is that it rocks to the IV7 from the Iminor7 chord. We're much more accustomed to hearing the I major chord rock to the IV7 chord, as played by Walter Vinson on "Stop and Listen", when he goes, in dropped-D, from 0-0-0-2-3-2 to 0-X-0-4-3-1, or when Lemon, in "Rabbit's Foot Blues" playing in A, but working out of a D shape up the neck, goes from
X-0-X-9-10-9 to X-0-X-11-10-8. Sonny Jones's rocking from the Im7 to the IV7 is the first time I have heard that done, and it's a great sound.
Getting to a Im7 via moving the I major chord position up three frets intact works most easily out of the D shape on the top three strings, as Sonny Jones did it. In the A shape, you can either move the entire "long A" position on the top four strings up three frets as Lil' Son Jackson did it on "No Money, No Love' or just move the barred portion of the A chord up three frets on the second, third and fourth strings, from the second to the fifth fret. In the E position, you can just move the E shape as it is fretted on the fifth, fourth and third strings up three frets to get an Em7. Because of the way they are voiced, and because there are interior open strings as they are played at the base of the neck, the G and C positions take to this move much more awkwardly.
Once you've gotten to the minor 7 versions of A and E, you can figure out the rock to the IV7 as performed by Sonny Jones by holding the interior fretted voice steady (third string for A and fourth string for E), and moving the neighboring fretted voices the same amount and direction as they were moved in Sonny Jones's lick. The move sounds every bit as special in A and E as it did in D, and I've never heard it done in either place before. For that matter, you can transpose the rock that Walter Vinson and Lemon did from I major to IV7 out of the D shape to A and E at the base of the neck and see what you think of the sound. I always think of moving ideas around in this way as a kind of homage to the original performer to use the idea, and the song in which the idea was first utilized. Moving ideas around has the additional benefit, I suppose, of helping you learn the neck of the guitar better, so that ideas are not necessarily tied forever, exclusively, to the first place on the neck of the instrument where they were expressed. I guess you could think of it as being derivative and original simultaneously.
All best,
Johnm
