Customer Reviews

Masters of Instrumental Blues Guitar

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"Masters of Instrumental Blues Guitar" by D. Garwood is an oft-overlooked but nonetheless significant instruction book aimed at the novice fingerstyle guitarist who is interested in learning to play real country blues fingerstyle guitar. It lacks the glossy pizzazz of newer instruction materials, but it truly delivers the goods in terms of solid guitar-learning knowledge.

When this book first came out it was one of only two available study resources for this style of playing (the other being Happy Traum's book). Now of course there are literally thousands of instruction resources available. And yet I always think of this book first when someone asks me how to learn to play fingerstyle country blues. The reason is that Mr. Garwood the author chose an excellent method: He presents and explains this music in terms of the two most common bass line structures in country blues guitar (alternating bass lines and so-called "monotonic" bass lines common to Delta and Texas playing) and then he teaches these concepts by teaching non-simplified arrangements of many songs originally recorded by two of the classic practitioners of these methods: Mississippi John Hurt of Avalon MS, and Mance Lipscomb of Navasota, TX. As it turns out, the guitar music of these two players is both top-notch deep country blues and has arrangements that are actually accessible to the novice player. The end result is that, upon completing the learning of tunes in this manual, the student is able to play an excellent variety of legitimate country blues tunes in a variety of styles. More importantly, Mr. Garwood's approach to organizing this guitar knowledge serves as an excellent basis for further study. By that I mean specifically that his method of explaining these arrangements in terms of (i) bass line structures and (ii) free-form melody structures going over those bass lines, ... is a great way to approach ANY fingerstyle arrangement of ANY tune.

The book has some excellent photos, and the simple, almost crude text layouts have a great retro feel to them. There are also examples of signature tunes by other seminal players like Rev. Gary Davis and John Fahey. The tablature used in this book is as easy to read as TAB gets, particularly for non-music-readers. Lastly, the music of John Hurt and Mance Lipscomb and Gary Gavis etc. is just plain wonderful stuff ... music that is fun to know and play over ones' lifetime.

Obviously this book provided me with a lot of useful info in my music life, and even though it's out of print at this time I strongly advise the reader to grab an available copy if at all possible ... a nice addition to a fingerstyle guitar learning library.