Hi everyone!
Just want to take this opportunity to introduce myself.
I've been playing acoustic guitar for 20 years and have been a blues fan ever since I heard Taj Mahal's "De Old Folks at Home" album. It made a massive impression on me, and I stopped wanting to be Hendrix and started wanting to just be able to sit on a porch and just play for hours. I've never really been any good, but you learn a trick or two if you've been playing that long.
A few months ago, for my birthday, my lovely girlfriend decided to surprise me with a new guitar. I only had one guitar - a Maton acoustic that I got 18 odd years ago - that still holds up so I decided to get something with a different sound. I was originally thinking about getting an electric to make some noise, but in the end I walked out with a resonator because even after all those years I still just want to sit on the porch and make music.
Realising that I'm getting older and that I've never really taken music seriously, I decided I was really going to dedicate myself to learning the language that my soul speaks. I would hear bits of it in the music of guys like Taj, Muddy Waters, Lightning Hopkins but the more I looked into it, the more I was finding it in the music of guys I'd never heard before or never really listened to - Ishmon Bracey, Gary Davis, Skip James, Tommy McClennan, guys like that. I started listening to a wider range of music than I had ever before.
I decided that I would learn one song a week for the next year, week in and week out. The first was Gary Davis' "Death don't have no Mercy". I looked around but couldn't find a tab or even the chords anywhere on the net, so I ended up working it all out by ear. I became intrigued in learning as much as I could about the people who were making the music that I loved, which lead me to weenie campbell.
I thought that maybe there were other people like me out there who would like to learn some of these songs, so I started writing out the tabs and I made a website to hold all the songs I was doing: www.52weeksofblues.com. (For the record it cost me about $100 to have it up for the next 3 years and everything in the site - design, coding, content - is done by me. There's no advertising or anything like that - just a labour of love!)
So far I'm up to week 14, and I realise my ear is better than my playing - I can only play about half of them without making a mistake big enough to make me stop and start again! All the tabs have been worked out by listening to the songs, and a lot of them are youtube recordings of old 78s so there's bound to be some mistakes. I do a little write up about the life of the artists but for some of them there is just not that much info out there. I think telling the story of these pioneers is as important as working out the music they created. I started off with just a few paragraphs on the musicians, but lately I've been writing essays about these guys.
So the site again is http://www.52weeksofblues.com/ Check it out, if you like, and if there is anything wrong in there please let me know. Especially about the lives of the artists - I really want that part to be as accurate as it can possibly be. And if you have any songs you'd like to see a tab for please let me know, and I'll see what I can do
Thanks!
Just want to take this opportunity to introduce myself.
I've been playing acoustic guitar for 20 years and have been a blues fan ever since I heard Taj Mahal's "De Old Folks at Home" album. It made a massive impression on me, and I stopped wanting to be Hendrix and started wanting to just be able to sit on a porch and just play for hours. I've never really been any good, but you learn a trick or two if you've been playing that long.
A few months ago, for my birthday, my lovely girlfriend decided to surprise me with a new guitar. I only had one guitar - a Maton acoustic that I got 18 odd years ago - that still holds up so I decided to get something with a different sound. I was originally thinking about getting an electric to make some noise, but in the end I walked out with a resonator because even after all those years I still just want to sit on the porch and make music.
Realising that I'm getting older and that I've never really taken music seriously, I decided I was really going to dedicate myself to learning the language that my soul speaks. I would hear bits of it in the music of guys like Taj, Muddy Waters, Lightning Hopkins but the more I looked into it, the more I was finding it in the music of guys I'd never heard before or never really listened to - Ishmon Bracey, Gary Davis, Skip James, Tommy McClennan, guys like that. I started listening to a wider range of music than I had ever before.
I decided that I would learn one song a week for the next year, week in and week out. The first was Gary Davis' "Death don't have no Mercy". I looked around but couldn't find a tab or even the chords anywhere on the net, so I ended up working it all out by ear. I became intrigued in learning as much as I could about the people who were making the music that I loved, which lead me to weenie campbell.
I thought that maybe there were other people like me out there who would like to learn some of these songs, so I started writing out the tabs and I made a website to hold all the songs I was doing: www.52weeksofblues.com. (For the record it cost me about $100 to have it up for the next 3 years and everything in the site - design, coding, content - is done by me. There's no advertising or anything like that - just a labour of love!)
So far I'm up to week 14, and I realise my ear is better than my playing - I can only play about half of them without making a mistake big enough to make me stop and start again! All the tabs have been worked out by listening to the songs, and a lot of them are youtube recordings of old 78s so there's bound to be some mistakes. I do a little write up about the life of the artists but for some of them there is just not that much info out there. I think telling the story of these pioneers is as important as working out the music they created. I started off with just a few paragraphs on the musicians, but lately I've been writing essays about these guys.
So the site again is http://www.52weeksofblues.com/ Check it out, if you like, and if there is anything wrong in there please let me know. Especially about the lives of the artists - I really want that part to be as accurate as it can possibly be. And if you have any songs you'd like to see a tab for please let me know, and I'll see what I can do
Thanks!