How to Play Blues Guitar - Mississippi John Hurt

Mississippi John Hurt was a giant amongst blues guitar players and had a huge influence on later generations. However, it's rare to find modern players carrying the same feeling - it's certain that I can't, but I thought I'd put out this lesson so we can take a closer look at what he did.

Often, we change the style for various reasons, mostly because some of the stuff is too time consuming to learn for most people - this isn't a criticism at all - we don't have time to copy all styles perfectly, but blues guitar lessons need to show us how the great ones did it, if possible.

In some cases, like John Hurt, it's pretty easy to get the idea because his style is crisp and clear, but it's something else that blocks us when we try to lean blues guitar in this style - we have difficulty capturing that special 'feeling' Here again, this isn't surprising. we haven't lived the blues and we didn't create it.

The very least we can do is to try and bring a little of that special flavor into our blues music and pay homage to legends such as John Hurt. John had a superbly almost unique guitar picking technique, in that he kept his third and fourth picking fingers on the sound board while his other two fingers picked the melody. because of this firm anchor, his timing was great.

In my case, my hand lifts away from the guitar finger board when I use the second finger and it messes up the timing. Oh well, back to the drawing board - talk later, I have to go and practice Spike Driver ...

Have fun.

Cheers Jim