Phillip Henry

I often talk about the fascinating roots of blues and slide guitar, and I thought it might be fun to take this blog off on a tangent, exploring the roots of English folk music instead! 

English folk has a long and fascinating history, shaped by ordinary people and passed from one generation to the next. Unlike classical music, which was often written down and performed by trained musicians, folk music traditionally belonged to communities - like many of the traditions that created the blues. Songs were learned by listening and remembering, meaning that many survived for hundreds of years without ever being written down.

The roots of English folk music can be traced back to the Middle Ages. People sang while working, celebrating, travelling and telling stories. Songs often reflected everyday life, including love, farming, war and hardship. Traditional dances were also important, with instruments such as fiddles, pipes and drums providing music for village celebrations and social gatherings.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, folk songs continued to develop. Ballads became particularly popular. These were songs that told stories about real or imagined events, including battles, murders, romances and famous characters. Because songs were passed on by word of mouth, different versions of the same ballad could develop in different parts of England.

The Industrial Revolution brought major changes to English society during the 18th and 19th centuries. As people moved from rural areas into towns and cities, traditional music changed with them. New songs emerged about factory work, poverty, politics and working-class life. Folk music therefore became a way for people to express their experiences and preserve a sense of community during a period of rapid change.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, collectors became interested in preserving traditional songs. Figures such as Cecil Sharp travelled around England recording songs, dances and tunes from local communities. Their work helped prevent many pieces of music from disappearing, although modern researchers have also questioned some of the ways these collectors selected and presented traditional material.

The folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s introduced English traditional music to a new generation. Musicians such as Ewan MacColl and Martin Carthy helped bring folk songs into concert halls and clubs, while new performers combined traditional material with contemporary ideas.

Today, English folk music remains a living tradition rather than simply a piece of history. Artists continue to perform old songs while writing new ones inspired by traditional styles. Folk festivals, dance events and folk clubs can be found across England, helping keep the music alive.

From medieval villages to modern stages, English folk music has continually changed while retaining its connection to ordinary people's stories, experiences and communities.

Whether you love the folk scene in the UK, with our fabulous festivals and folk shows, or you are fascinated by the use of slide guitar in rock music, I've got a course for you! Grab your Get Going with Slide Guide or check out my courses here.

See you on the back porch!

Something a little different this week. If you've had BBC iPlayer on recently you may have come across a documentary called Operation Grand Canyon with Dan Snow. If you have — that's my slide guitar and harmonica you can hear on the soundtrack.

I thought it was worth telling you the story of how that came about. And the story behind the programme itself — because it's a remarkable one.

John Wesley Powell and the last unknown

In the spring of 1869 a 35-year-old one-armed Civil War veteran and self-taught scientist set off down the Colorado River into what was then the last uncharted territory in the United States. His name was John Wesley Powell. Nobody knew what lay inside the Grand Canyon. Nobody had ever come out the other side to describe it.

Powell and his crew of nine men took four wooden boats into the canyon. What followed was 99 days of one of the most extraordinary journeys in American history.

By mid-August they were more than a mile deep in the earth, the canyon walls closing in above them, brutally hot and close to starvation. Powell himself was thrown out of his boat running a rapid and had to swim to shore with one arm. Three of his men abandoned the expedition near the end and were never seen again.

Two days after those men turned back, Powell and the remaining crew emerged from the canyon. They had done it.

Powell later wrote about entering the unknown section: “We have an unknown distance yet to run. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not. With some eagerness and some misgivings, we enter the canyon below.”

That sense of stepping into the unknown — with some eagerness and some misgivings — is as good a description of a creative challenge as I've ever read.

 Dan Snow and the recreation

Operation Grand Canyon with Dan Snow — first broadcast on BBC Two in 2014 and back on iPlayer now — follows historian Dan Snow as he attempts to recreate Powell's journey.

 The same 280-mile route down the Colorado River. The same antique-style wooden boats. A team of historians, geologists and scientists, taking on the same rapids that nearly finished Powell's expedition 150 years earlier.

 It's part history documentary, part adventure. The white water sections are genuinely dramatic. The landscape shots — the Grand Canyon being what it is — have a scale and a stillness that's hard to put into words.

The programme has been shown around the world — it was a BBC and Discovery Channel co-production, so if you're not in the UK you may have come across it on Discovery, or on PBS in the States. If you haven't seen it, have a look for it wherever you watch.

I was asked to write the music for it. I worked with one of the programme's historians, Sam Willis, on some of the music — a collaboration that helped shape how the score sat alongside the historical content.

What I reached for

There's a tradition of the slide guitar as a scoring instrument that goes back to Ry Cooder's work on the Paris Texas soundtrack in 1984 — which we talked about earlier in this newsletter series. That score established the slide guitar as something cinema could use to evoke vast landscape, solitude, the American interior. Since then you hear it everywhere in film and television — any time a director wants that quality of space and longing, that sound of someone searching for something just out of reach. It's become part of the language of the moving image.

When I was asked to write the music for Operation Grand Canyon it felt like stepping into that tradition. A vast American landscape, a journey into the unknown, the slide guitar and harmonica as the natural voices for it.

Throughout the score you hear what we've been talking about in these newsletters — the power of both instruments to sing out just a few notes and carry an enormous amount of emotional weight. 

The slide and the harmonica share something important: they can both wail and they can both groove. 

A long crying note held over a wide canyon vista, vibrato doing the work, the note breathing with the image rather than competing with it. 

Or short punchy riffs, attack and release, the rhythmic percussive quality both instruments have when you push them that way. 

When you're writing music for a landscape that has been six million years in the making you very quickly learn that less is more.

For the faster sections — the white water, the rapids, the physical effort of navigating a wooden boat through fast current — both instruments shift into something more rhythmic. Short riffs, momentum, the music feeling like the effort and unpredictability of fast water.

The long crying note for the vast and still. The riff for the fast and physical.

If you want to hear what I mean, go to 47 minutes 49 seconds into episode one.

At that point two rivers converge. The water changes — darker, more violent, the current pulling in two directions at once. The mood of the whole journey shifts. What had been open and exploratory becomes something bleaker, more uncertain. Powell's crew would have felt it immediately. 

The slide follows that shift. It moves into the minor pentatonic, reaching for the blue notes — those notes between the frets that sit in the gap between major and minor, between hope and something harder. 

It's the same territory Blind Willie Johnson was working in when he recorded Dark Was The Night in 1927. The same quality Ry Cooder found when he scored Paris Texas. A sound that doesn't explain the emotion — it is the emotion.

That moment at 47:49 is the heaviest Blind Willie Johnson influence in the whole score. I wasn't consciously thinking about him when I recorded it. But those players live in your fingers after enough years. When the image asked for something darker, that's where the slide went. 

Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning

The piece that ended up over the closing credits was Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning — a traditional spiritual that I've arranged as a beatbox harmonica piece. Just me, one harmonica, playing percussion and melody simultaneously. 

I've been playing this piece for years. It grew out of a long obsession with what a single instrument can do when you push it past its obvious limitations. The harmonica wasn't designed to play rhythm and melody at the same time. Doing it anyway — finding the way in — is exactly the kind of problem I find most interesting.

Hearing it over the end of a BBC documentary felt like a full circle moment. A piece developed over years in practice rooms and on stage, suddenly sitting at the end of something watched by a lot of people who'd never heard of me.  Check it out on spotify here:

https://open.spotify.com/track/2f0nMCaxg76NgurkiyuBuE?si=510da991c5ab4585

What scoring for picture teaches you

The thing about writing music for film or television is that the image is always the boss. You can't fall in love with your own ideas. You can't hold onto a phrase because you like it if it doesn't serve the shot. Every note has to earn its place.

That discipline maps directly onto what I try to teach in slide guitar lessons. Don't play what you know. Play what the moment needs. Listen to what's happening and find the note that serves it.

The Grand Canyon is a humbling subject. Powell's journal, his crew's accounts, the sheer scale of what they did in those 99 days — you come to it with your slide guitar and your harmonica and you try to find something worthy of it without overstating your own contribution.

That's a good way to approach any piece of music.

This week in the woodshed

Go and watch Operation Grand Canyon with Dan Snow on BBC iPlayer — you can find it here. If you're outside the UK, search for it on Discovery or PBS — it's been shown around the world.

Skip to 47 minutes 49 seconds into episode one. Listen to what the slide does when the two rivers meet. Then go back and watch the whole thing from the beginning. 

Then watch it again with the sound off. Pick up the slide and play something over the top. The landscape shots, the white water, the moments of stillness. Don't think too hard about it. Just find the note that the image seems to need and let it breathe.

You'll learn more about space, economy and listening in twenty minutes of that exercise than in hours of conventional practice. The image is an unforgiving teacher. It tells you immediately when you're playing too much.

If you'd like to explore this kind of expressive, intentional slide playing in a structured way, I'll be opening a limited number of places on the 30-Day Slide Launchpad again in late September. Drop me a WhatsApp if you'd like to be first to hear about it.

See you on the back porch!

It's the equinox this week, and this year it's a real turning point as we've had such a long, hot summer. The autumn will bring two tours for me, and a selection of indoor gigs that might even require heating! As well as the UK Slide Guitar Festival, too. 

It's interesting being a working musician all year round - I love the changing seasons that bring new opportunities and challenges, although I suppose the summer festivals will always have a special place in my heart. 

I teach all year round, and I love the variety this also brings. Building a life around guitars means working with students, fellow gigging musicians and others in the world of music, and I absolutely love it - especially getting to know my students and work with them in various ways. 

If you want to build your confidence with slide, or even if you've never picked up a guitar before but want to learn to play slide guitar, you're in the right place. I have a range of courses to suit everyone and I'm always around to help you work out the best route for you. Head over to the Learn Slide Guitar Facebook group to join the community and get started. 

Check out my courses here and remember that you can pick up your free Get Going with Slide Guide here. 

See you on the back porch!

Slide guitar is a technique that can sound deceptively simple. Put a slide over the strings, move it around and let the guitar sing. In reality, it demands an enormous amount of control, and we can understand that better by taking a look at session guitarist PK Mayo.

In his recent Ultimate Guitar feature, Mayo describes slide playing as a discipline where there is little room for error. Intonation, muting, vibrato and touch all have to work together. Unlike fretting a note, where the fret provides a precise pitch, the slide leaves the guitarist responsible for finding the note themselves. Even a small movement can turn a beautiful phrase into something painfully out of tune.

Mayo's approach reflects his background as a versatile working guitarist. His playing draws from blues, rock, country, soul and R&B, giving his slide work a muscular, expressive quality. Rather than treating slide guitar as a fixed style, he approaches it as another vocabulary that can be adapted to the demands of a song.

His style is quite different to that of a slide player such as Ry Cooder. Cooder is one of the most influential slide guitarists of the modern era, but his approach is much more closely tied to traditional roots music. His playing draws heavily from early blues, country, Hawaiian guitar and other pre-rock styles, and his tone is often warm and vocal, with individual notes carefully shaped through subtle vibrato and controlled movement.

Cooder's playing can feel almost conversational. He doesn't necessarily need to play fast or fill every space. A single sustained note, carefully pitched and given just the right amount of vibrato, can carry as much weight as an entire guitar solo.

Mayo's style, by comparison, feels more influenced by the demands of the modern electric guitarist. There is still a strong connection to blues tradition, but his experience as a session player means that versatility and precision are equally important. He needs to be able to fit the slide into different musical environments rather than simply reproduce one historical sound.

Despite these differences, Mayo and Cooder share the most important principle of slide guitar: making the instrument sound human. The best slide players aren't simply demonstrating technique. They are using pitch, vibrato, dynamics and tone to make the guitar speak.

While Cooder shows what can happen when a player digs deeply into the roots of the tradition, Mayo demonstrates how those traditions can be absorbed and reshaped by a modern working guitarist. Different approaches, but the same fundamental lesson: with slide guitar, every note has to mean something.

Check out my courses here, or pick up your Get Going with Slide Guide here to get started. 

See you on the back porch!

The season is changing and I'm looking ahead to the autumn and winter here at Slide Success. There are lots of exciting things in the pipeline, including tours for my duo, Edgelarks, and for the Gigspanner Big Band. If you'd like to come and see us live, check out my previous posts to find the dates and pick up your tickets. 

Another highlight of the autumn for me is the second UK Slide Guitar Festival, which is fast approaching! I'm really looking forward to this, and there are still some spaces available if you'd like to come along. 

Michael Messer and I will be hosting the festival, in Folkestone from 13th-15th November 2026. The weekend will include workshops, jamming and plenty of opportunities to learn new tips and tricks, in great company. There will also be a gig in Folkstone on the Saturday night. 

We have a range of options available for accommodation and you can find out all the details by sending a message to me or Michael Messer. 

Grab your tickets now if you'd like to join us!

Last week I blogged about Fred McDowell and You Gotta Move, and how the slide and the voice become almost indistinguishable. 

This week I want to go one step further back. Before the guitar. Before the slide. To where the blue notes live in their most natural, unmediated form.

The human voice.

What Alan Lomax found

Alan Lomax spent decades doing something that no one else was doing — travelling across America with a recording machine, pointing it at people who would otherwise never have been heard, and capturing music that would otherwise have been lost forever.

He recorded Fred McDowell emerging from the woods in Como, Mississippi. He recorded chain gang prisoners at Parchman Farm. He recorded Georgia Sea Island Singers keeping alive traditions that stretched back to West Africa. He understood that the most important music in America was not in the concert halls or the recording studios — it was on the porches and in the fields and in the prison camps, being made by people who had no idea they were making history.

The work song tradition he captured is where so much of the blues phrasing comes from. Not from guitarists learning from other guitarists. From voices. From the rhythmic pulse of physical labour. From men and women finding the blue notes under conditions of extreme hardship — not because they knew music theory, but because those notes were the truest expression of what they needed to say.

The blue notes we've been talking about for months — the squeeze between frets 3 and 4, the notes that live between major and minor — they didn't start on a guitar. They started in a human throat, reaching for something that twelve-tone Western tuning couldn't contain.

Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers

Bessie Jones was one of the great carriers of this tradition. Born in Georgia in 1902, she grew up with the songs of the Sea Islands — a group of barrier islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina where African cultural traditions had survived in a remarkably intact form, partly because of the relative isolation of the communities there.

The Georgia Sea Island Singers kept alive ring shouts, work songs, game songs and spirituals that connected directly to West African musical traditions. Lomax recorded them extensively and they became central figures in the folk revival of the 1960s.

Bessie Jones's voice is extraordinary. The blue notes she finds — the microtonal inflections, the notes that sit between the Western scale positions — are instinctive and precise at the same time. She's not thinking about music theory. She's singing what she feels. And what she feels sits exactly in those zones that we've been trying to reach with the slide.

Sink Em Low

Have a listen to Sink Em Low by Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, from the Alan Lomax recordings, on the album Join the Band. You can find it on Spotify here:

https://open.spotify.com/track/1bZwtgX7d38xyKtdu3jUPB

It's a chain gang work song. The kind of song that was sung to coordinate the rhythm of physical labour — the swing of an axe, the driving of a stake. The pulse of the music is the pulse of the work. And within that pulse, within that hypnotic repetition, Bessie Jones finds blue notes and vocal inflections of extraordinary expressiveness.

Listen to the phrasing. The way each phrase starts, rises, bends, resolves. The call and response between the lead voice and the group. The space between the phrases — the silence that carries as much weight as the notes.

This is the source. This is what the blues is made of.

Taking it to the slide

I've arranged Sink Em Low for slide guitar. And what makes it such a useful piece to work with is that the process of arranging it is itself the lesson.

You listen to the vocal phrase. You try to sing it. Then you try to find it on the slide. The blue notes Bessie Jones sings naturally — the inflections that make the phrase feel the way it feels — those are exactly the notes in the squeeze zones we've been working on. The slide finds them the same way her voice does. Not by hitting a fixed pitch, but by moving through a zone, finding the note in motion.

I teach this piece as part of the 30-Day Slide Launchpad. It works particularly well on the top string — the vocal melody sits naturally there in Open D — but it also translates beautifully down to strings 4 and 5, where it takes on a deeper, earthier quality that's even closer to the original chain gang feel.

The slide and the voice 

We've been building toward this point across the last few newsletters. The singing before you play idea from Calcutta. The harmonica players finding the blue notes by bending. McDowell's slide and voice becoming interchangeable. Now this — the voice as the original instrument, finding the blue notes before anyone had a guitar to play them on.

But here's the thing I keep coming back to. It's not just that the slide can follow the voice. Working with a piece like Sink Em Low, I've found that the process goes the other way too.

When you spend time finding Bessie Jones's vocal phrases on the slide - really hunting for those inflections, those blue note squeeze zones, those moments of tension and release - your ear gets trained. You start to hear the notes between the notes. And once you can hear them, your voice starts to reach for them too.

The slide teaches the ear. The ear teaches the voice. The voice teaches the slide. It's a circle, and Sink Em Low is one of the best ways into it I've ever found.

Before the guitar there was the voice. And the voice is still the destination.

This week, let's focus on one track, and just one exercise. 

Bessie Jones, Sink Em Low (Georgia Sea Island Singers, Alan Lomax — Join the Band, 2012)

Find it on Spotify using the link above. Listen to the whole thing first without your guitar. Then listen again and try to sing along - find the blue note inflections with your own voice before you pick up the slide. Then take it to the top string in Open D and see how close you can get.

Don't worry about being precise. This isn't about note perfect reproduction. It's about chasing the feeling. 

Sink Em Low is one of the pieces I teach in the 30-Day Slide Launchpad - along with You Gotta Move and a handful of other pieces chosen specifically because they connect your slide playing directly to the vocal tradition. I'll be opening a limited number of places in late September. Spaces will be limited so if you'd like to be first to hear about it drop me a WhatsApp.

See you on the back porch!

Last week I recommended Fred McDowell's You Gotta Move. If you haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, go and listen now before you read any further…

The farmer who walked out of the woods

It's the first day of autumn, 1959. Alan Lomax and English folk singer Shirley Collins are in Como, Mississippi, on what became known as the Southern Journey, a field recording expedition through the American South. They're set up at Lonnie Young's porch, recording the Young brothers' fife and drum ensemble.

Nobody expected what happened next.

A slight man in overalls emerged from the local woods, guitar in hand, and ambled over to the porch. His name was Fred McDowell. He was 54 years old. He'd never been recorded. He'd spent decades playing at local dances, picnics, juke joints and on the farm where he worked without anyone from the wider music world ever hearing him.

Without much fanfare he sat down and started to play.

Lomax later wrote that the blues, speaking through Fred, sounded like a deep-voiced herald, with the treble strings answering like a silver-voiced heavenly choir. Lomax kept returning to the farm for several evenings, recording everything McDowell knew. McDowell kept telling him he couldn't play nearly as well as other men he knew.

When Lomax played back the recordings to McDowell that evening on the porch, Fred stomped up and down, whooping and laughing and hugging his wife. He knew he had been heard. He knew his fortune had been made.

What happened next

At 55 years old, Mississippi Fred McDowell was suddenly lauded as a great new discovery in the blues world. He went on to play the Newport Folk Festival, tour Europe, and record more than a dozen albums. A star of the 1960s and 70s folk revival — decades after most musicians would have given up hope of being heard.

And then the Rolling Stones covered You Gotta Move on their Sticky Fingers album in 1971. The Stones wined and dined him and bought him a silver lamé suit. McDowell wore it home to Como.

He died in Memphis in 1972. He was buried in the silver lamé suit.

What makes him extraordinary

Here's what I want you to listen for in You Gotta Move. The slide and the voice are almost indistinguishable.

McDowell sings a phrase. The slide plays the same phrase back. Or the slide leads and the voice follows. Or they move together, so closely intertwined that you stop being able to tell which is which. The slide isn't accompaniment — it's another voice in the conversation.

This is exactly what we've been building toward in these newsletters. The singing before you play principle I mentioned last week. The economy of the harmonica players. Blind Willie Johnson telling a complete story without words. All of it points here.

The slide guitar, when it's working properly, doesn't play notes. It sings. And McDowell's You Gotta Move is one of the purest examples of that anywhere in the recorded blues tradition.

What it means for your playing

I teach this piece. And what makes it so useful as a teaching piece is that the vocal melody is right there on the top string in Open D — the same strings and positions we've been working in throughout this series. The slide just plays what the voice sings. Simple as that.

But here's the thing that took me a while to understand. It works both ways.

Most players think the slide follows the voice. And it does. But the slide can also help your voice. When you play those blue note squeeze zones on the slide, the notes between the frets that we've been talking about for weeks, your ear starts to hear those microtonal positions. Your voice starts to find them too. The slide teaches your ear. And what your ear learns, your voice can eventually reach.

The slide and the bottom strings work beautifully here too — strings 4 and 5 carry the same melody in a lower register, darker and more grounded. McDowell uses that lower register as a kind of bass voice under the singing. It's the same cigar box thinking we talked about a few weeks ago — those bottom strings as the engine room, this time carrying the melody itself.

Playing and singing aren't separate activities. The slide is a path toward the internal voice you're trying to get out into the world. Every time you find a blue note on the top string, you're training yourself to hear it — and eventually to sing it.

The slide doesn't just follow the voice. It helps you find it.

Have another listen to Fred McDowell, You Gotta Move. Listen with this in mind: when is it the voice leading and when is it the slide? See if you can tell them apart. Then pick up your slide in Open D and try to play the vocal melody on the top string. Don't worry about getting it perfect. Just try to follow the voice with the slide. That's the whole exercise.

You Gotta Move is one of the pieces I teach in the 30-Day Slide Launchpad — a structured programme for getting your slide playing off the ground with my personal guidance. I'll be opening a limited number of places again in late September. If that's something you'd like to be first to hear about, drop me a WhatsApp, or pick up your Get Going with Slide Guide here. 

See you on the back porch!

I grew up in Lancashire. And like a lot of kids who grew up in Lancashire, the Beatles were impossible to avoid. Even in the nineties, decades after they'd split up, they were still part of the air you breathed up there. You grew up knowing every song.

But it wasn't the early Beatles that got under my skin. It was what happened when George Harrison started bringing the sitar in. That sound - the drone, the microtonal quality, those notes that didn't fit neatly into Western tuning - lodged in my head and never quite left.

I didn't know it at the time but that was the beginning of a twenty year journey that would eventually take me to Calcutta.

The plan

By the mid 2000s I'd been playing slide guitar seriously for years and I'd been listening to Debashish Bhattacharya for almost as long. If you don't know his work, go and find it. Grammy nominated, BBC award winner, the man widely regarded as the greatest living Hindustani slide guitarist. His recordings stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard them.

I found out he taught. He'd opened a School of Universal Music in Kolkata and he accepted international students. There was an application process. I applied.

I also applied to the Arts Council for funding. They said yes.

In 2008 I flew to Calcutta.

90 days

I was there for three months. Which is something I think about every time I talk to students about the 90-day coaching programme — because 90 days is exactly enough time to transform your relationship with an instrument, if you approach it right.

I studied in Debashish's home. One to one sessions and group sessions, in the Indian guru-student tradition that goes back centuries. He taught technique, repertoire, the Indian classical approach to the instrument. But the thing that changed me most wasn't any of that.

It was the ear training.

In Indian classical music you sing before you play. Always. The melody lives in the voice first and the instrument follows — trying to reproduce what the voice can do, trying to match that human, vocal quality. Every session started with singing. Every phrase was sung before it was played.

As a slide guitar player that concept hit me like a thunderbolt. Because that's exactly what the slide should be doing — following the voice, imitating the voice, reaching for the kind of expressiveness that only the human voice has. The connection between the slide technique and the voice that I'd been groping toward for years suddenly had a framework. A tradition. A thousand years of thinking behind it.

Sing it first. Then play it. If you can't sing it you can't play it.

That's something I pass on to my students now. It sounds simple. It isn't. But it changes everything.

The instrument

I also went to Calcutta to get a Chaturangui.

The Chaturangui is Debashish's own custom instrument — designed and built by him, patented, unlike anything else in the world. The name breaks down as Chatur meaning four, ang meaning colour — four colours, four voices within one instrument. It's a lap slide guitar with 24 strings — six principal strings in Open D tuning, plus drone strings and fourteen sympathetic resonating strings that ring in response to the notes you play, like the strings on a sitar.

The design was partly inspired by the Weissenborn — the hollow-necked Hawaiian slide guitar. Which tells you something about how all these traditions keep finding each other. Hawaii, India, the Delta blues — all reaching for the same thing from different directions.

I practised on the Chaturangui I brought home. It's still one of the most extraordinary instruments I've ever played.

An eastern flavour — try this on your slide

One of the surprising things about the Chaturangui is that it's tuned to Open D — the same tuning you already know. The Indian classical tradition and the Delta blues arriving at the same starting point.

Here's something I discovered when I got to Calcutta. Before I went I'd already been experimenting with a particular sound on the slide — raising the 4th of the scale slightly to give it a floating, luminous quality. I'd written a piece using it called Reverence, drawn to that sound without quite knowing why.

When I got to Calcutta, Debashish pointed out that I was playing in the Kalyan thaat — the great parent mode of Hindustani classical music, the scale family that contains Yaman, one of the most important ragas a student learns. In the West we call it the Lydian mode. I'd arrived at it by instinct and it turned out to have a thousand years of tradition behind it.

In Open D the raised 4th sits just above fret 5 on the top string. Try this — play slowly up the scale on the top string, one fret at a time. When you reach fret 5 keep going. Skip over it to fret 6. Feel what happens. That's the moment the scale opens up — the familiar major sound suddenly has something else in it. A shimmer. A sense of space. That one extra semitone is the difference between the major scale you already know and the Kalyan sound — a scale that has been fundamental to Indian classical music for thousands of years, and as it happens was once just as common in the West. But that's a story for another newsletter.

That piece eventually became Reverence Revisited and Kalyan Variations on my album True North. Worth a listen if you want to hear the mode in context.

https://open.spotify.com/track/6SKWRtwnAB2uwWs1w3LyET?si=9619b10169274832

https://open.spotify.com/track/4QRrtXDRuAdZvH0Vwx3sE1?si=7626e8a8ecd24f7e

What it did to my playing

The whole three months made me re-evaluate everything. Not just technique — the whole approach. The economy. The intention behind every note. The relationship between the slide and the voice.

Indian classical music can tell a story with just a few notes. The raga is a framework — a set of notes, a mood, a time of day — and within that framework the musician finds their own path. What you leave out is as important as what you put in. The space between notes carries as much meaning as the notes themselves.

Sound familiar? It should. We talked a few weeks ago about Dark Was The Night — Blind Willie Johnson telling a complete emotional story with no words, just a slide and a voice. And how Ry Cooder took that spirit and built the Paris Texas soundtrack from it — one of the most celebrated film scores ever made, telling everything with just a handful of notes.

That's the same discipline. The same understanding that what you leave out is as important as what you put in. Debashish Bhattacharya in Calcutta and Blind Willie Johnson in 1927 were reaching for exactly the same thing. They just had different names for it.

This week, I recommend:

Debashish Bhattacharya — 3: Calcutta Slide Guitar — find it on Spotify or YouTube. Don't try to analyse it. Just listen to the relationship between the slide and the voice — how the instrument seems to breathe and sing.

Try singing before you play — pick a simple phrase on the top string in Open D. Sing it first. Then play it. If the guitar version sounds more mechanical than the sung version — that gap is exactly where the work is.

Fred McDowell — You Gotta Move — find it on YouTube and listen before next week's newsletter. The slide and the voice are almost indistinguishable in this recording. The slide follows the vocal melody so closely it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. That's exactly what we've been talking about today — and next week we're going to look at it in detail. It's a piece I teach and one of the great examples of the slide as a voice. Get it in your ears first.

The vocal quality of the slide — making the instrument sing rather than just play notes — is something I work on with every student in the Slide Success programme. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, you can see my courses here or pick up your free Get Going with Slide Guide here.

See you on the back porch!

We're off our tour again in the Autumn, and we're looking forward to some great gigs with the Gigspanner Big Band. 

If you haven't got tickets yet, there's still time to book and we'd love to see you there! You'll find the dates and venues below and you can pick up tickets from the Gigspanner Big Band website here. 

The Gigspanner Big Band tour dates are: 

23/10/26 Southampton Turner Sims

24/10/26 Cranbrook St Dunstan's Church

25/10/26 Hertford St Andrews

26/10/26 Bury St Edmunds The Apex

28/10/26 Didcot Cornerstone Arts

29/10/26 Worcester Huntingdon Hall

30/10/26 Trowbridge Town Hall

31/10/26 Teignmouth Pavilion

01/11/26 St Austell Keay Theatre 

Grab your tickets now from the Gigspanner Big Band website

Happy sliding!

The diddley bow gave you one string and a groove. Those kids in West Africa beating it with a stick weren't playing melodies, they were finding rhythm, pulse, the hypnotic repetition that sits at the heart of all blues. One string, beaten and slid, can lock into a groove that makes your body move.

But one string has its limits. You can groove on it. You can find the notes between the notes. What you can't do is riff across strings, build a chord, move from one harmonic colour to another.

The cigar box guitar changed that.

The story starts — as so many blues stories do — in hard times. During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln imposed a tax on consumer goods including cigars, which at the time were packed in large crates of a hundred or more. To accommodate the new tax stamps, manufacturers switched to smaller cedar boxes holding twenty five cigars. Those boxes were cheap, lightweight, resonant, and when the cigars were gone, they got thrown away.

Somebody picked one up, nailed a broom handle to it, strung a couple of wires across it, and the cigar box guitar was born.

The earliest documented image is from 1876 — an etching by Edwin Forbes, official artist for the Union Army, showing two soldiers at a campfire. One of them is playing a cigar box fiddle. Whatever he was playing, it wasn't a factory instrument.

The instrument that built the blues

By the late 1800s cigar box guitars were everywhere in the rural South. Three strings, sometimes four. A piece of wood for a neck. A glass bottle or a knife blade for a slide. Open tuning so you could bar the strings with one finger and get a chord. No formal training required. No music shop needed. Just whatever came to hand.

The players who would go on to define the blues learned on these instruments. Lightnin' Hopkins started as a child on a cigar box guitar. Big Bill Broonzy said his first guitar was a cigar box. Blind Willie Johnson, whose Dark Was The Night we talked about a few weeks ago, developed his slide technique on a cigar box before he ever touched a proper guitar.

That's not a coincidence. The cigar box guitar, strung in an open tuning with a slide, strips everything back to what matters. Rhythm. Groove. The riff. The feel of the note under the glass.

The engine room

Three strings in an open tuning with a slide and suddenly you've got everything. The drone underneath, the riff moving across the strings, the grunt and churn of a full blues groove. Not just rhythm, harmony and rhythm together. The engine room, fully assembled.

This is where the riff was born. The one chord groove that just keeps rolling. The shuffle that drives everything forward. The kind of playing that makes your foot move before your brain has caught up.

And here's the thing, that same simplicity is exactly what makes slide guitar so powerful on a full six string guitar, too. The players who learned on three strings never forgot what three strings taught them. Strip it back. Find the groove. Let the riff breathe.

It never went away

By the 1960s, cheap mass-produced guitars had made the cigar box guitar look like a relic. But it never really disappeared.

Seasick Steve brought it roaring back into public consciousness in the 2000s — a weathered blues musician who appeared on Later with Jools Holland playing a three-string cigar box guitar and stopped the room. The rawness of it, the simplicity, the pure groove: it was the same thing that Lightnin' Hopkins had in the 1930s. Nothing had changed except the audience.

There's a reason people keep coming back to the cigar box guitar. It reminds you what the music is actually about. Not technique. Not complexity. Just the groove and the feel and the note under the slide.

The cigar box guitar is hiding inside your guitar

In Open D tuning, the bottom three strings — strings 4, 5 and 6 — behave exactly like a three string cigar box guitar in open tuning. Same drone. Same riffing potential. Same groove. And the same is true in Open G — strings 3, 4 and 5 give you that identical cigar box feel in that tuning.

That's the engine room. You've already got it. You don't need a broom handle and a Figaro cigar box.

Here's a taste of what that sounds like. This is the Swamp Slide Groove from my Backporch Blues Riffs course — inspired by Slim Harpo's I'm A King Bee, one of the defining recordings of swamp blues. That hypnotic, mid-tempo groove, that trance-like repetition — that's the cigar box spirit right there on strings 4, 5 and 6.

Homework…

Before you pick up the guitar — go and listen to Slim Harpo's I'm A King Bee. Let that hypnotic groove sink in. Then come back to the tab above and see if you can find that same feeling.

Lightnin' Hopkins — Mojo Hand — three strings, open tuning, pure groove. Listen to how much he gets out of so little.

Seasick Steve — Dog House Boogie — raw, driving, impossible not to move to. Same impulse as Lightnin' Hopkins, seventy years later.

A quick one before I go

I've just finished updating Backporch Blues Riffs — five essential slide riffs in Open D, built exactly on this cigar box guitar philosophy. Strip it back, find the groove, get playing straight away.

Check out all of my courses on my website, including: 

Backporch Blues Riffs — five riffs, full tab and video lessons (normally $11)

Riff Builder Extension — a system for building your own riffs, plus two more riffs to get you started (normally $19)

Riff to Song Blueprint — how to take your riffs and turn them into a full 12-bar blues (normally $19)

Or head over to the Learn Slide Guitar Facebook Group and join the community…

Happy sliding!