I've been teaching a lot of traditional material lately in the Fingerstyle Five membership. Earlier this year, we did the Leroy Carr classic "How Long Blues" and John Hurt's "Nobody's Dirty Business," and we're currently in the midst of the the classic eight-bar blues "Key To The Highway."

I thoroughly enjoy spending time with these kinds of tunes. They've been done so many times, by so many different people, that there's a sort of freedom to try things out with them, rather than worry about doing any one person's particular version.

Which is not to say I don't do my homework first – going back to hear Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell's original version of "How Long," for example, or digging through multiple Brownie McGhee takes on "Key To The Highway" (by himself, with Sonny Terry, with new self-referential lyrics while recording in Scandinavia...).

As important as traditional tunes are, making up stuff is an important part of the process too. Part of the tradition, even. Let's begin with the fact that "How Long Blues" was, in 1928, hot stuff – a hit record in the latest contemporary genre and a newly-written (more or less) song aimed squarely at the marketplace.

Having missed that prewar era by a good forty years, and the Folk Revival era by more than a decade, I cut my teeth on newly-written fingerstyle guitar music of the 1970s – from instrumentals by John Renbourn and Stefan Grossman to every song in Richard Saslow's The Art of Ragtime Guitar. I knew a bit about traditional blues, but Saslow and the Kicking Mule crew were easier to find, so that's what I worked with.

Later, as I was making video lessons for Truefire, I cranked out dozens of original tunes in what I hoped was a similar vein to my '70s mentors, with the aim of putting the kinds of licks, chord voicings, turnarounds and grooves I liked into a series of easily playable etudes that would be fun to work on.

While I tried to make them as cool as possible, I definitely thought of them as teaching tools. So to this day, when someone posts their version of one of those tunes online or mentions that it's one of their favorite things to play, my first reaction is invariably "uh, you know that's just something I made up, right?"

More recently, in the Fingerstyle Five membership, I have made a conscious effort to create original material that feels like complete tunes, material I would perform or could put on a record. Usually I'm trying to fill a gap in the song archive with a vehicle for teaching a particular concept or idea: walking basslines, say, or jazzier chord substitutions on the blues.

Or else it's just to see if I can present a fresh angle on familiar territory. Lately I've been fooling around with a new way to play through an alternating-thumb blues in A minor. That's two of my favorite things right there, so I've used it plenty already, for songs like "St. James Infirmary" or "Wayfaring Stranger."

But I was messing around one day with a way to use an Amin6 chord voicing that let the notes on different strings ring out during the melody, similar to what I did on a drop D instrumental called "Parisian Blues." So I spent some time with the idea, trying to come up with a whole tune that made good use of that initial discovery.

At this point, I think I have a viable prototype – it's got a main tune, a John Lee Hooker-inspired opening vamp, and two different ways to play the same stop-time shout chorus. Plus a solo section. Most importantly, it sits nicely under my fingers, so it's relatively easy and fun to play.

So today, instead of a lesson, I thought I'd show my work. Today's Youtube is a video of me playing through my new tune, titled "Zoozoo Bingo." You can find it at the link below:

"Zoozoo Bingo"

More soon,

David