Blues Guitar Meets Southern Soul

In the early sixties, blues guitar was going through some major transitions. In fact, the guitar in general was quickly becoming one of the most recognized  and popular music instruments of all time. And one of the main changes in the sixties that had an effect on the blues was that people wanted to dance. So the blues guitar met southern soul and got a little bit more funky in the capable hands of players like Albert King, Buddy Guy, and Freddie King. And who knew at the time that these players would lead the way for powerhouses like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton to take the reins. GuitarWorld came out with a very cool article a little while back about this change for the blues guitar in music history and even supplied some tab that contains some of the more popular rhythm parts that southern soul and blues guitarists were playing. I thought you would dig checking that out, and then listening to one of the southern soul songs Albert King played that helped take him to the top of that music style, “Oh Pretty Woman.” There’s a lot of cool stuff here so I hope you enjoy it all as much as I did!

One of the greatest blues guitarists to embrace the southern soul style that emerged in the early sixties was Albert King. See him in action in 1970 playing his hit, “Oh Pretty Woman,” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw-kPkdrajU.

[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/Hw-kPkdrajU” height=”420″ rel=”0″]

GuitarWorld produced an article about the emergence of southern soul rhythm guitar and how some blues artists used it to their advantage. Take a look at some tab examples of soul rhythm guitar and check out the original article at http://www.guitarworld.com/talkin-blues-how-play-soul-blues.

By the early Sixties, the blues branch of the popular music tree was rapidly thinning. One of the main factors contributing to its demise was rhythm. After decades of dance-floor popularity, triplet-based shuffles and swing grooves had started to be viewed as decidedly old-school, eclipsed by the straight-eighth-note-based rhythms of R&B and rock and roll.

Among the popular syncopated styles to emerge on the R&B side was southern soul (often called simply “soul”), which originated out of studios in Mussel Shoals, Alabama and Memphis, particularly Stax Records and its house rhythm section of Booker T. & the MGs. Soul singers such as Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding rose to stardom with hits like “Mustang Sally” and “I Can’t Turn You Loose” that borrowed nearly everything from blues and gospel tradition except the beat. The message, however, was clear: the future belonged to the funky.

I hope you enjoyed learning a little bit more about the emergence of southern soul rhythm guitar in the early sixties and the effect it had on the blues. There’s more coming your way at Blues Guitar Unleashed, so stay tuned.

Thanks,

Griff