Customer Reviews

Robert Johnson - King of the Delta Blues: Guitar Transcriptions and Detailed Lessons for 29 Songs

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i bought this book from amazon.ca, and when i got it in the mail, i was very disapointed to find that it was only about 70 pages long and only had a few bars of music for each robert johnson song covered. If you want a book that is very heavy on theory, this is it - but it won't give you the tabs you want, so i would recomend looking into robert johnson the new transcriptions (ISBN: 0793589193). it's a few bucks more, but a way better book.

hayden kee

This is the companion book to "Robert Johnson: The New Transcriptions." If you truly want to get to know RJ's style and penetrate its surface, this facilitates your assimilation. It doesn't work without the transcription book, though.

This book is full of subtle, detailed expositions of Robert Johnson's music. It is an academic text, and perhaps not necessary for the casual player. However, it contains a wealth of information that is crucial to knowing the music, as well as knowing the approach to the transcriptions, which are intricate and raise many questions for the careful guitarist. It is a terrific reference/textbook.

I was really disappointed in this book. It claims to present a "detailed analysis" of each song; in fact it does nothing of the sort. Instead it has a few (at most three, often only one) short passages (typically two or three measures) accompanying each song, giving brief "performance notes" (on the order of a half-dozen lines of text) for each passage.

To pick two features that I found particularly troublesome about the commentary: 1] As brief as the comments are, a lot of space is wasted; for example, rather than indicating left-hand fingering using a standard notation (for example, the standard "1-2-3-4" notation, which could have been explained in a brief paragraph in the introduction) placed along side the music itself, much precious text is wasted spelling out the fingering (e.g. "put your ring finger on the first string...."). 2] Many very important issues aren't even mentioned; most notably, there's virtually no discussion in the entire book on right-hand technique, a critical feature when playing Johnson's music. Granted you can't put in everything, but for a book purporting to give "detailed analysis" such omissions are quite troubling. (And to pick one pet peeve, there's quite a bit of bewildering terminology: What, in heaven's name are "ice cream chord changes"?)

Let me make two final points and I'll end. First, when a book comes along that I don't find personally useful, I can usually imagine who a good target audience might be. But in this case it's hard to know who that would be. This book would be useless to a beginner; and a knowledgeable player would be far better served by carefully studying the complete transcriptions.

Finally, the thing that bothers me most is how good this book should have been. It's clear from the notes that the author has great knowledge of, experience with, and sensitivity for the music and information (all too briefly) covered here. If the author were to write a book that truly lived up to this book's title (and potential), now *that* is a book I would be first in line to buy.

Well, I guess I said it all in the title. If you are an intermediate level guitarist and have decided to sink your teeth into "Robert Johnson:The new transcriptions", then this book plus Dave Rubins signature licks book are perfect study companions.