Roomful Of Pedagogy

Published: Fri, 07/16/21

hard to make a four look like a one, and besides, the effort was going to be worth it: Roomful of Blues was playing, and a girl who considered seeing Roomful of Blues as good an idea as I did was on hand to make the pilgrimage. We wound up standing in the back of the long room that was Jonathan Swift's, with a clear view of the entire band. As a result, I saw two of the most mesmerizing choruses of Texas shuffle I have ever witnessed, which I spent watching Ronnie Earl play upstrokes on the "and" of every beat for twenty-four bars in a row. He probably played a bunch of murderous solos that night, and I'm sure the rest of the band did too, but that moment of total groove is the part I remember as the big payoff for skirting the law. (Things with the girl did not pan out, but considering she introduced me to both Guy Van Duser and P.G. Wodehouse in the course of turning me down, I'm willing to call the whole thing squarely in her favor.)

I don't think I had actually heard Roomful of Blues on record before going to see them live. I knew they were blues revivalists, and was aware that, in contrast to the British Invasion veneration of all things Muddy, Wolf and the various Kings, Roomful's founding guitarist and guiding light, Duke Robillard, was more consumed by the likes of T-Bone Walker, Tiny Grimes and Count Basie soloists Lester Young and Buck Clayton. Having recently been exposed to Albert Collins and Gatemouth Brown and their swing-inspired penchant for stinging, epigrammatic guitar licks, walking bass lines and a full horn section, I found this detail particularly intriguing.

By the time I caught Roomful, Duke had departed. While his replacement, Ronnie Earl, was no slouch in the guitar department, held equally deep convictions on the subject of T-Bone Walker, and brought plenty of depth and soul to the table, he didn't, as far as I knew, share Duke's deep grounding in the Kansas City branch of the blues family tree. When I finally met  Robillard as host of his guest appearance at the National Guitar Workshop, I realized it would be hard to find any guitarist who could match Duke's encyclopedic knowledge of blues and swing styles.

The original idea behind my hosting Duke, I think, was that I would serve as a kind of translator: Duke would do his thing as an intuitive genius, and I would explain what he actually meant in terms the students could actually grok. But of course it turned out Duke, like certain musicians who have spent countless hours teaching themselves to play from recordings, was perfectly capable of explaining just about anything the students wanted to know. He was so good at it, in fact, that while he was talking and playing, I chose to fade into the scenery with a notebook of my own, the better to capture anything he was good enough to break down for the class. Which is how I found myself in the enviable position, when he started explaining how to comp the blues like Freddie Green, of being paid to interrupt and say, "uh, sorry, what was that third voicing again? The one at the seventh fret?" I wound up writing out a couple complete choruses as demonstrated by Duke, learning as much as anyone in the class in the process.

It has only occurred to me now that Duke's way of teaching has had a direct impact on my own. He wouldn't just say "Oh, these are the voicings – you should know this chord, and that chord, and this shape is such-and-such." Instead, he taught all of that in context: he could play through a chorus of changes, then go back and break it down chord by chord. And unlike a lot of artists brought in to teach, he could actually play through the same thing multiple times and do it virtually the same way over and over until we got it. He taught swing guitar vocabulary the same way, laying out one chorus demonstrating how to use the major scale to play blues, and another just to show how to solo with double stops. And for slow blues, he played through a whole chorus of Tiny Grimes' "Blue Harlem" like a tourguide in a historic neighborhood, pointing out all the highlights and subtle distinctions along the way.

I don't know when those Freddie Green voicings morphed from a period-specific swing tool to a cornerstone of my fingerstyle blues vocabulary, but these days, when I teach those voicings, or anything else for that matter, I realize my aim is to emulate the Duke school of pedagogy: show the ideas in context, and explain why they work as part of a greater whole. Having a whole chorus or two of comping or soloing to work on provided me with a handle for carrying around a bit of Duke's knowledge, and it's my hope that learning a chorus or two of fingerstyle blues on my channel might provide a similar handle for some of the ideas we talk about around here.

So for this week's Youtube lesson, I demonstrate how to use Freddie Green voicings in a fingerstyle context, and offer a few ideas about how you can take this approach further in your own playing. You can find the lesson here:

Play The Blues With Freddie Green Voicings

And you can download the tab here:

Get The Tab

More soon,

David

P.S. For even more on how to apply Freddie Green voicings to the blues, you can now get access to my entire Chord Substitutions And How To Use Them workshop, now updated with even more examples, when you subscribe to The Fingerstyle Five monthly membership. Find out more at www.fretboardconfidential.com.