May 2012 There’s a problem with learning to play the blues guitar that is inherent across what has been called “the board of the blues” (B.B. King, apparently, is its chairman). If you want to play the blues guitar, you’ll never be as good as Robert Johnson. Or B.B. King, for that matter, who cited Mr Johnson as one of the reasons why he wanted to play the blues guitar.

Eric Bibb, commonly known as Eric Clapton, cited B.B. King as one of his major influences in learning to play the blues guitar. Unlike most, Clapton managed to become (say some) as good as his hero, certainly more successful – and unlike practically any, Clapton, who wanted to play the blues guitar because he’d heard the Blues Boy doing it, actually got to produce an album with him. Which, one supposes, is a bit like Luke Skywalker and Yoda singing duets.

Learning to play the blues guitar, according to Clapton, is about having the feeling for the music. About hours and hours of listening to B.B. King and Robert Johnson and trying to copy what they do. According to Mr King (christened “Blues Boy”, I believe, by his sister), learning to play the blues guitar is about nailing a piece of cattle gut to a barn door, tying the other end around a broom handle and stretching it to different tensions to see what sound it produced. This story of King’s method of learning to play the blues guitar is absolutely true and is apparently the reason why he can produce such sweet cascades of sliding bent notes: when King starts to play the blues guitar, those notes are being shaped in the same way he used to bend the broomstick by the barn.

According to Robert Johnson (though as far as this author knows he never claimed this himself) learning to play the blues guitar is actually about selling your soul to the Devil. The story goes like this: Johnson could play the blues guitar a little bit but not a lot. He went out waking one night and came back the next morning able to play the blues guitar so well that every musician since him has cited him as one of their major influences (this is certainly true). According to legend, he met the Devil at a crossroads and sold him his soul in exchange for the ability to play the blues guitar. This may or may not be true, but two things are known for sure: one, the surviving recordings of Johnson’s music show that he could indeed play the blues guitar better than anyone else in the world; and two, he died, violently and young, having recorded only 27 sides.

On the other hand, as all of those old guys and gals were so fond of saying, to play the blues isn’t a style and to play the blues isn’t a technique. It’s a feeling. If you want to play the blues you’ve got to have the blues. Which is a kind of joyful mixture of hope and despair.
Right?

Well, again: sort of. You can play the blues without ever having felt a note of despair; and you can play the blues without having spent a day broke or hungry in your life. Difference is, whether, when you play the blues like that, you or anyone else feels it. When you play the blues in a penthouse, even if you play it note for note like Nina Simone or Robert Johnson, does it feel like the blues? When you play the blues for a hobby, does it sound like the blues? And, above all, when you play the blues like that – if you play the blues like that – does it matter?

Of course it doesn’t. Not really. When you play the blues you play the blues. Because you want to play the blues, for whatever reason you have. No, a white man with a decent job in a big city is not going to have the background necessary to play the blues like Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter. But then a white man with a decent job in a big city probably doesn’t want to have that background. He just wants to play the blues because he likes it. Because it sounds nice. And what’s wrong with that? After all, a white man trying to play the blues in modern London, say, is no different from a normal classical pianist banging out Beethoven’s “Eroica” in full orchestral company. In order to play the blues like Leadbelly, a middle-aged stockbroker would have to have been born nearly 100 years before he was; he’d have to have had a hideously disadvantaged life on a slave plantation; and he’d have had to have been imprisoned twice for murder, once for killing a guard during an escape attempt. He wasn’t and he didn’t. But he still tries to play the blues. And why not? A classical pianist, if he or she wishes to play like Beethoven, would have to be deaf, incipiently suicidal and at least three-quarters mad. Not to mention dead. If they can play “Eroica”, my friends, then you and I can play the blues.