To learn to play the blues: drop, or forget, everything you think you know about music. The guys and gals who first began to learn to play the blues in the late 19th and early 20th century didn’t have one second of musical training beyond singing “field hollers” in slave country. (A field holler is a call and response litany – woke up this morning, feeling bad; woke up this morning, felling bad; my woman done left me, I feel awful sad – that anyone who wants to learn to play the blues will become mighty familiar with). No: to learn to play the blues in such a way that you actually play it, you got to drop all your teaching and pick up your instrument like you’ve never seen it before. Bash it and plunk it and pick it until it starts to sound like you feel. That’s how to learn to play the blues.
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong once sang a song, Learnin’ the Blues. What it says is, when you learn to play the blues you’re living, not sitting around in some practice hall wrestling with an instrument. The instrument is the way you express them, but to learn to play the blues is to learn the blues themselves – the language you need in order to play. To learn to play the blues, you need to live a life. It’s like singing. No-one can sing unless they know words. No-one can learn to play the blues unless they know heartache. Best to leave it in the words of the Queen and Satchmo’ themselves, who, if you’d asked them how to learn to play the blues, would have told you:
You’ll walk the floor, and you’ll wear out your shoes: when you feel your heart break, you’re learnin’ the blues.