Stevie Ray Vaughan, Albert King, and The Slightly Sweet and Smokey Port Ellen.

 *Disclaimer: I wrote this about a month ago while playing my grandfather's old blues records on a record player with a glass of scotch in my left hand. If you follow me on twitter look at my tweets around the 15th of July. I haven't looked at it since and besides a spell check no editing has been performed on this post. You have been warned*

Blues guitar solos are the musical manifestations of sex. I tweeted that statement maybe 10 minutes ago but I’ve already changed my mind. Blues guitar solos are the musical manifestations of GREAT sex. You ever listen to Stevie Ray Vaughan and Albert King’s Blues At Sunrise? It’s a 15-minute song that builds to one of the most heartfelt, soulful, and passionate climaxes that I’ve ever heard on a blues song. The first 3 minutes of the song focus on the guitar and the drums telling their own story about love and heartbreak, fire and ice. It entices you and brings you into the story that you instinctually create that just so happens to mirror exactly what you have going on at that very moment in your life. Whether its about sexual frustration and you imagine each stroke of the guitar string to be you being teased to the point of quivering at the same tempo he’s playing or you imagine your lover and the song becomes a soundtrack to the last time you touched and where it led. Blues is all about feeling and losing yourself in the music and allowing it to take you over without you needing to say a word. Now isn’t that the perfect lover? The one who knows exactly which buttons to push and when without asking or saying much? 

 

I’ve never played an instrument and I don’t know much about the technical jargon that would allow me to better explain blues to you, but I know what I like and I know what I feel. A great blues guitar player always strikes a chord within me and makes me feel something different than what I’m used to. Before I even knew about sex and listened to my first blues song, I remember thinking that every chord that was played, every key that was stroked, and every stick that came crashing down on the drum set made me want to get up and move. Not necessarily move as in dancing, but I had to get up and do something. You ever listen to music that refused to allow you to sit still? It’s almost as if the blues artist were sirens calling me to come closer and open myself up to this pure emotion. If you’re happy, sad, angry, in love, out of love, ANYTHING, listen to a blues song and watch your emotion become elevated and compounded. Notice how the sounds will reverberate through your body and call you to act upon whatever you’re feeling or cause you to work through it. This is the essence of music. The blues knows that life is music with an ever-changing rhythm and you have to sing, sing and even dance, the downs along with the ups. When a good bluesman plays something, they don’t just play it or say it, they make you BELIEVE it. There's so much feeling in the notes and in the words. No matter what mood I’m in, I can lose myself in the music. I also think the blues are a better American 20^th century history book than the watered down stories they tell you in school. Those scratchy old delta records take you to that hot, grim plantation and make you feel what they were going through better than any paragraph a scholar could put together. 

The genius of the music is the improvisation. This is not something just any great guitarist can do. If you listen to a live muddy water performance of a song and compare it to the studio version the improvisation varies ever so slightly but just enough to let you know that he’s vibing to the crowd. I don’t know much about music, I was never a musician or professionally trained but what I do know is the structure of the 12 bar blues form. It’s the perfect blueprint to play, write, and improvise over. You have the I-IV-V chord structure and the 3-line verse, which includes two identical lines and a rhyming response. Rock and Roll, country, pop, bluegrass, and more have borrowed elements from this genre. If you look at the history of this music you’ll see that it’s uniquely American and has led to the creation of popular modern day music. So if you ask me why I love the blues I’ll tell you that I love the blues because at my core I’m an artist and I live to feel and that’s exactly what this genre of music allows me to without any inhibitions. Just feel.