In the history of the guitar blues there have been some great players and fortunately many of those great players are still with us today. Whether you prefer smooth guitar blues or whether you like to have your guitar blues smash you in the face there have been players to oblige you and to entertain you for over a century now. Here is a quick look at some guitar blues players that have made an impact.

BB King

BB King has been playing guitar blues for over 60 years and is one of the standards that people use when they talk about guitar blues players. He has recorded with such great bands as U2 and is best known for his trademark hollow body electric guitar he calls Lucille. He was originally called the Beale Street Blues Boy but before his first record came out the record company shortened it to BB and used his real last name of King to create the name BB King. In over 60 years BB King has played his smooth style of blues all over the world.

Eric Clapton

Known simply as “Slow Hand”, Eric Clapton is a self taught guitar prodigy who got his start in the famous 1960′s hard rock blues band Cream. After Cream disbanded he went on to form such acts as Derrick And The Dominoes but Clapton was always displaying his trademark slow hand smooth guitar blues style somewhere in the world. Recently Cream was reunited for a few shows and it is unknown whether or not they will stay together but even without a reunited Cream Eric Clapton has still left his mark as one of the greatest guitar blues players ever.

Robert Johnson

It is difficult to talk about guitar blues players without talking about the man that greats such as Jimi Hendrix and Muddy Waters cite as one of their prime influences. Robert Johnson was born in 1911 and died in 1938 but in between there he recorded and released at least a half dozen or more records that survive today as an example of the talent and vision that Johnson had. He lived the blues and, by some accounts, died because of the blues and Robert Johnson is the place where most blues is said to have come from.

Jimi Hendrix

For some reason Jimi Hendrix is never given his due as the master guitar blues player that he was because many people cannot see past his use of sound and energy on the electric guitar. But everything Jimi did was based in the blues and many of his more popular songs are simply blues songs done Jimi’s way and there is nothing wrong with that.

If you have a hankerin’ to be a blues guitar player but don’t know how to start, there is no better way than to immerse yourself in the recordings of the blues guitar players of the twentieth century. You can use the licks of famous blues guitarists as building blocks that will eventually be the fragments of your own blues guitar solos. There is wide agreement amongst blues fans about who are the greatest blues guitarists, who is the best to learn from, but once you get talking to people you will realize that each person’s reaction to the works of the blues masters is personal and unique. So your starting point to being a blues guitar player is to take your own personal take on the blues you hear and expand on it.

If you are a new guitar player you might not be familiar with the various techniques that blues guitar players use to make their guitars sing. There is no special blues “magic” that you learn from the blues legends, the guitar techniques for one style are pretty much the same as for another, but you will find your own personal way of making established guitar techniques your own.

There’s a whole world of communication in the techniques that guitar players use to play notes with the left hand instead of picking using the right hand. The techniques are called hammer-ons and pull-offs. A pull-off is the art of picking a note and taking your left hand finger away in a kind of pulling action so that the note below your original note sounds. For example, you could place you first finger on the first fret of the first string and the second finger on the second fret of the first string. With both fingers in place, you pick the first string sounding the F# note and pull your second finger away so that the F note at the first fret sounds.

The “opposite” to the pull-off is the hammer-on which, if you follow up on the pull-off you just executed, you “hammer” the second finger back to where it was at the second fret so that the F# note sounds again. Another technique for the guitar player’s left hand is String Bending. If you look at your finger placed at a fret, you move the finger by pushing up and down. This makes your guitar string give a warbling sound.

As you are an aspiring blues guitarist of the twenty-first century, you will probably prefer to listen to electric guitar players. B. B. King is the coolest of the black blues guitarists, closely followed by a white English boy named Eric Clapton. You could also give a listen to Chuck Berry who is practically a one-man guitar style.

Memphis Blues music first appeared in the 1920s in Memphis, and Memphis ever since has been a Mecca for blues music lovers worldwide. Beale Street, the heart of Memphis music scene, is home to everything from jug bands to jazz.

The sub genre of Memphis Blues music that is Jug Band Blues emphasizes syncopated rhythms and sounds of early jazz and folk songs. Jug bands play on homemade, simple instruments, such as harmonicas, banjos, washboards, and kazoos, and of course, jugs.

After WWII, Memphis Blues music saw the birth of electric instruments. Many musicians flocked to Memphis to the Blues scene with these electric instruments, changing the sound of Memphis blues. The musicians would gather on Beale Street, where there were recording studios up and down. West Memphis saw the same influx of musicians, who would record the most famous and renowned classic blues, rhythm and blues, and rock & roll records. Once of the most famous of these studios was Sun Records, who would also record the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley, among many others.

The beginning of Memphis self expressive music was attributed by a certain sound that became familiar to the colored workers of the cornfields, the sharecroppers. Much of the early Memphis blues music was an attempt to capture the sound of the singing workers. This sound at first was nicknamed the gutbucket blues. Some of the more popular topics of the songs were those of prayer, faith, and life.

Even today on Beale Street, songs are written and recorded in the small studios by artists with their dreams in tow. The streets in Memphis are just as alive today with the Memphis Blues as they were in the 40s and 50s. The clubs and bars in Memphis fill up every night with tourists and people who sit for hours listening to the artists and their music, much the same way they always have.

With all of the new and ever changing genres of music that have come about, people may wonder what gives the Memphis Blues music such staying power. The answer is simple. The Memphis Blues remains such a huge part of tradition in Memphis because it is more than just music. It is an entire culture and lifestyle that gets passed from one generation to the next.

Ever since the Memphis Blues music was born on the curbs of Beale Street, people have been flocking to Memphis to enjoy it ever since. Chances are pretty good that it will continue to be enjoyed and loved for many more generations to come.

The Velvet Bulldozer!!!