Ms. Fretboard and I spent a night out at the Kerrville Folk Festival last weekend. We're strictly amateur – we were there for one night (night five, it turns out) of a possible eighteen, and hightailed it back for the relative comforts of home after a mere twenty-four hours.

Still, we managed to pack a lot in. You don't really want to be at loose ends all afternoon in the hill country this time of year, when the mercury is already flirting with the mid-nineties, so we joined our friends for an expedition to the Medina River not long after we arrived.

Despite the fact that for many folks the late-night song swaps and jams are the point of the experience, it always seems a little silly to me not to scope out the evening main stage, since you never know when you might get your mind blown. 

So after a few hours of floating in the shade of the cypress trees, and a bit of lethargic hanging out back at the festival, Ms. F and I, not feeling exactly bronzed and fit but at least ready for some hippie Thai food and a spot of singer-songwriter action, made our way down the dusty main drag to the evening concert.

Alas, this time, about halfway through the second act, the weeks of graduation-month hijinks and general sprinting through work of one kind or another caught up with me and I repaired to my tent for one of the stickier disco naps I've ever had the pleasure to take.

It was short-lived as naps go, as hailstorm warnings soon had everyone else back at the camp site as well, making sure tents were still staked down, rain flies were up, and things were basically in as good shape as you could hope for in the event of gnarly incoming weather.

As it happens, the storms had the good taste to go around either side of the valley the festival lies in, and by the end of the official concert, the music at our camp site, at least, was well under way, and didn't let up until around 3:30 in the morning.

And yes, I made it to the very end, though I did wake up the next morning feeling, to paraphrase Raymond Chandler, "hot, tired, and full of no coffee." But also with the positive vibes and low-level buzz that comes from playing five straight hours of music the night before.

Somehow, I never thought to call "Statesboro Blues," a song I've spent the past month talking about in the Fingerstyle Five membership – specifically how to start coming up with ideas for soloing in drop D on this classic twelve-bar blues.

I always present a series of licks in these lessons, along with a few "model solos," written-out examples of how you might put those licks together into a working solo. But a couple of weeks ago someone asked me how to start memorizing those licks, so they wouldn't have to read them off of the tab.

So for today's Youtube video, I've actually posted my answer to that question, as edited down from the original live stream by Fingerstyle Five member Bill Z.

You can find it at the link below:

How Would I Memorize Licks?

More soon,

David