Читать книгу Blues Guitar For Dummies - Jon Chappell - Страница 16

In addition to all the great chords, riffs, and solos you get in Blues Guitar For Dummies, you can also read about many of the most important blues guitarists who helped shaped the history of the blues and why you should care about them. A blues guitarist can be significant for many reasons, but the criteria I use for including the artists that I do in this book is that he or she must meet at least one of the following requirements:

 He or she had great influence and a historical impact. Muddy Waters, for example, merits inclusion not because of superior technique (although his playing was certainly formidable), but because he transplanted the blues from its acoustic, rural Mississippi roots to post-War Chicago, where it exploded into an entire movement that would define “Chicago blues” and influence everyone who played electric blues after that, including Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. No Muddy, no Stevie.

 The guitarist has technique that is innovative or unsurpassed in virtuosity.Robert Johnson, for example, was at the tail end of the Delta blues movement and learned many of his licks from other players. But he was an extraordinary player and provided the best examples we have on record for Delta blues playing.A lot of people tried to meld electric blues with the emerging heavy rock sound in the mid-1960s, but none quite as masterfully as Eric Clapton did. He was the best of a generation.In the 1980s, Stevie Ray Vaughan was so good that you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who even got close to him in terms of raw talent.

 The guitarist’s style is unique or so highly evolved that it’s responsible for his or her widespread success. Sometimes you don’t have to be the greatest player to achieve greatness. With many blues guitarists, it’s not all about the technique, but the artistic work created with modest technique. Bonnie Raitt may not have the blistering chops of a Duane Allman or Stevie Ray Vaughan, but her beautiful tone, impeccable taste, and unmatched lyricism in world-class songs have advanced the blues into the mainstream like no other blues player has before.

Often a guitarist featured in this book has more than one of the three qualities in the preceding list. Take a couple of examples:

 T-Bone Walker, the great early pioneer of electric blues, was not only technically dazzling and innovative, but also historically significant as the first electric blues player to establish the guitar as a lead instrument, thereby influencing every great player in the succeeding generation.

 Jimi Hendrix is the best at everything as far as the guitar, the blues being no exception. He scores top marks in all three categories, so that’s why he’s in the book. Also, if you leave Jimi Hendrix out of any discussion about guitars and guitarists, people get really, really mad at you and make your life miserable.

You may or may not see your particular favorite blues guitarist in the pages of this book, which is understandable, as there are too many great blues guitarists for any book to list them all. But every guitarist you do read about here in some way changed the world of blues for the better — for listeners as well as other blues guitarists who heard them.