John Miller’s Mississippi Fingerstyle Blues Guitar 1926-1959

Perhaps more than any other state, Mississippi has long been linked with the blues, so much so that Alan Lomax referred to it as The Land Where the Blues Began. From the earliest days of recorded blues, and even before that, Mississippi has always abounded with great fingerstyle blues guitarists. So it was that Mississippi fingerstyle blues guitar was the obvious choice for author John Miller’s next book, following up on his earlier releases, East Coast Fingerstyle Blues Guitar and Texas Fingerstyle Blues Guitar.

In Mississippi Fingerstyle Blues Guitar, 1926-1959, John Miller has adopted an approach designed to showcase a wide range of the styles of the Mississippi blues guitarists who recorded in the period covered by the book, twenty-seven different guitarists in all, each represented by a single song. And the songs in the book have been selected for variety in the keys and tunings in which the songs were played, too, with a generous helping of songs in four different open tunings as well as songs in D, A, G, E and C in standard tuning. And along with songs by the heavy hitters you’d expect to encounter in such a book — Charlie Patton, Tommy Johnson, Son House, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt — you’ll encounter pieces by more obscure, though no less expert players, people like The Down Home Boys, Mattie Delaney, Frank Evans, Cat-Iron, and Rosa Lee Hill. Each song in the book is preceded by a brief bio of the person who performed it, a discussion of the song with practical playing tips designed to help you bring the transcriptions to life, the song’s lyrics, and transcriptions presented in both standard notation and TAB. Plus the book includes sound links to the original recorded versions of all of the songs, so you can get the sound of the songs in your head.