Phillip Henry

This week I want to talk about an instrument that isn't the slide guitar. Bear with me, because it's probably the most useful thing a slide player can listen to, and the connection between the two runs deeper than most people realise.

I'm talking about the harmonica. And specifically what the great harmonica players can teach us about how to approach the slide.

The man who named the Grand Ole Opry

It's 1927. Nashville radio station WSM has just finished broadcasting an hour of classical music and grand opera. Very formal, very European.

Then a man climbs up onto a Coca-Cola crate to reach the microphone. Four foot eleven. Impeccably dressed in a suit. He raises a harmonica to his mouth and plays Pan American Blues — a piece designed to sound exactly like a steam locomotive. The chug, the whistle, the rhythm of the rails.

The contrast is so extreme it's almost comic. Grand opera to train harmonica in thirty seconds. So the announcer makes a joke.

“For the past hour we have been listening to music taken largely from grand opera — but from now on we will present The Grand Ole Opry.”

Grand Ole — a mock-grand, playful corruption of Grand Opera. The name stuck. The longest continuous radio broadcast in American history was named on an off-the-cuff wisecrack inspired by a Black harmonica player imitating a train.

That man was DeFord Bailey. He went on to become the most popular act on the Opry. Roy Acuff said: "I was unknown when I began touring with DeFord. He could draw a crowd. Not me."

In 1941 Bailey was fired. WSM refused to pay licensing fees, meaning he couldn't play his best known songs on the radio. The most popular act on the show spent the rest of his life running a shoeshine parlour. When he toured with the other Opry stars he couldn't stay in the same hotels or eat in the same restaurants.

Worth knowing.

Two instruments, one tradition

The harmonica and the slide guitar grew up together. Same places, same people, same porches and juke joints.

The harmonica arrived in America from German factories in the 1840s — cheap, pocket-sized, fits in your shirt. Meanwhile in the rural South the African string instrument tradition was evolving — from the diddley bow nailed to a wall, through the cigar box guitar, and eventually to the guitar itself. We'll look at the cigar box guitar in the next newsletter — it's a story worth telling on its own.

But by the early 1900s the harmonica and the guitar had become the two portable instruments of the travelling bluesman — both cheap, both expressive, both small enough to carry when riding the rails.

And they developed side by side, shaped by the same musical culture, the same search for the notes between the notes.

The harmonica bends to find them. The slide glides and squeezes to find them. Same destination, different route.

I play and teach both. And playing both has taught me more about each of them than studying either one alone.

What the harmonica teaches you

Here's the thing about the harmonica that makes it so useful as a reference point. It's tuned to a key — just like your open tuning on the guitar. Which is great news if you're playing a straightforward major tune, because the harmonica was designed exactly for that. Every note is right there waiting for you.

But if you want something darker and more bluesy — which of course we do — you have to make the harmonica do something it wasn't designed to do. Bend the notes using tongue and throat movements to find the blue notes, the minor feel, the emotion that lives between the major notes the instrument naturally wants to play.

And that's where we can learn so much from the great harp players. Because the instrument forces a kind of discipline. You're working in a limited sweet spot — a few key holes, a handful of bends. So economy and note choice become everything. You can't hide behind runs and fills. Every note has to mean something.

That discipline is exactly what slide guitar needs.

Sonny Boy Williamson II is my go-to example for this. Nine Below Zero is a masterclass in economy — and what's fascinating is how much mileage he gets out of a single hole on the harmonica. The 3 hole is the key to the whole piece, but he uses it three different ways across the three chords.

Over the I chord he's in major territory — the 3 hole is the key note, bright and settled, but he's squeezing it up toward the blue note on his way to the next phrase. Always moving, always a question rather than a statement.

Over the IV chord he shifts to the darker feel — a half step bend on that same 3 hole, emphasising the minor third. He's squeezing and moving through the blue note zone again, but this time landing in a darker place. And that repeated darker lick builds the intensity over the four chord beautifully — you feel the harmony change without him doing anything dramatic.

Over the V chord it's a full whole tone bend down on the 3 hole — with that signature Sonny Boy vibrato — that marks the change so effectively. Three chords, three different uses of the same hole. That's economy.

On the slide guitar in Open D the parallel is right there in that same area of the neck. The 4th fret on the top string is your major third — the bright feel over the I chord. The 3rd fret is your minor third — the darker feel that colours the IV chord. And the 2nd fret is your tension note over the V chord, the same whole tone step down that Sonny Boy does with that 3 hole bend.

And the blue note zones we talked about a few weeks ago sit right in the middle of all of this. Between frets 3 and 4 — squeezing through that zone is the same move as Sonny Boy's half step bend. Between frets 2 and 3 — that's the zone you move through on the way to the V chord tension note. The same musical language, the same geography, just on a different instrument.

That's the Nine Below Zero move. And it works every time.

Two players worth your time this week:

Sonny Boy Williamson II — Nine Below Zero — the economy masterclass. Count how few notes he plays. Find it on YouTube and just listen to the space between the notes.

DeFord Bailey — Pan American Blues (1927) — the train imitation that named the Grand Ole Opry. Four foot eleven on a Coca-Cola crate, and he stopped America in its tracks.

Then pick up your slide in Open D and try playing like a harmonica player. One note at a time. Try moving slowly through the 4th fret, 3rd fret and 2nd fret on the top string over a slow 12-bar - one note per chord, plenty of space between them - and notice how each one marks a different harmony. Don't rush. Don't fill.

Less notes. More feel. That's the whole lesson.

If you'd like to find out about my Slide Success Membership, you'll find more details here. 

I've had a great time with the summer gigs and festivals, but it's been a little bit hot out there! It's been lovely to have a long, hot summer, but I'm feeling ready for some cooler gigs this autumn, and luckily there are some exciting things in the pipeline. 

I'm delighted to be heading back out with my duo, Edgelarks, in November. I'm very lucky to be able to tour and play with my wife, Hannah, and we're looking forward to some beautiful gig venues this year. 

If you can, come and join us for one of the following gigs:

Check out my courses here. Whether you've been playing with slide for years and want to brush up your technique or you've never picked up a guitar before, I've got you covered. 

Happy sliding!

Learning a musical instrument at home can be a rewarding experience, but some people worry that the online learning experience will not work for them. One of the potential problems when learning an instrument is staying motivated, and this can be especially challenging when you are learning on your own. Without a teacher physically present, many people worry that they may lose focus or skip practice. 

The good news is that Slide Success offers a totally different approach, in which you get all the benefits of a face to face teacher combined with the convenience of online learning. 

Let's take a look at a few simple habits that can help you stay motivated on your musical journey.

Set Small, Achievable Goals

One of the best ways to stay motivated is to set realistic goals. Instead of trying to become an expert quickly, focus on smaller achievements. In Slide Success, we might break it down so that you learn three new chords, or explore part of a classic Blues song. Reaching these smaller goals gives you a sense of progress and encourages you to keep going. 

Create a Regular Practice Routine

Consistency is often more important than practising for hours at a time. Try to choose a specific time each day for practising. Even 15–20 minutes can make a difference if you practise regularly. Keeping your instrument somewhere visible and easily accessible can also remind you to practise.

Learn Music You Enjoy

Practising exercises can sometimes feel repetitive, so make sure you spend time playing music you actually enjoy. Learning a favourite song can make practice feel less like homework and more like something you look forward to. Choose songs that match your current ability and gradually work towards more challenging pieces. 

Track Your Progress

It can be difficult to notice improvement from one day to the next. Recording yourself occasionally can help you hear how much you have developed over time - and you can even share your progress in the Learn Slide Guitar Facebook group. Looking back at your progress can provide a powerful motivation boost.

Don't Be Afraid of Mistakes

Making mistakes is a normal part of learning an instrument. Instead of becoming frustrated, treat mistakes as opportunities to improve. Everyone struggles when learning something new, and progress rarely happens in a perfectly straight line.

Most importantly, Slide Success is designed to ensure that you enjoy the process of learning slide guitar. It takes patience, but every practice session brings you one step closer to becoming the musician you want to be. Set achievable goals, practise consistently, play music you love, and celebrate your progress along the way.

Find out more about Slide Success here, or head over to join us on Facebook!

It's not going to come as a surprise to anyone that we loved Sidmouth Folk Week - it's one of our family favourites every year and there's always something new to discover. 

It's always intense doing a festival with children, and this time, Hannah and I ended up taking it in turns to go in to the festival or stay in the park outside! 

Our festival highlights included:

Martin Simpson - an absolute masterclass in everything, as usual. Fantastic bottleneck playing, beautiful songs. A treat.

I was delighted to discover Adriano Adewale's show Rooted and Rising. This was a beautiful exploration of trees and our relationship to them through music, and it features some of my favourite folk musicians, including Nancy Kerr. I hope this tours at some point!

We loved the Museum of Roadside Magic, curated by Libby Bove, and we particularly enjoyed their Teatime Pageant. This is a witty take on the idea of tradition and what it might mean to create new ones - all wrapped up in some excellent music and theatre with a very Wicker Man vibe. Highly recommended!

The Punch and Judy Show was a great hit with the whole family, too. 

Thanks, Sidmouth, for another fantastic folk week!

Happy days!

When learning guitar, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that better playing means playing more. Faster solos, complicated licks and lots of notes can feel like signs of progress. But slide guitar teaches us a different lesson: sometimes, less really is more.

Slide guitar is at its most powerful when you give each note room to breathe. Because the slide allows you to bend smoothly between pitches, create wide vibrato and sustain a note for longer, even a simple phrase can sound incredibly expressive. You don't need to fill every second with notes. Instead, focus on making the notes you do play count.

Think about the human voice. A great singer doesn't constantly sing. They pause, breathe, hold certain words and change their tone to communicate emotion. Slide guitar can work in exactly the same way. Your slide becomes another voice, and your job is to make it speak clearly.

One of the best exercises for developing this approach is to limit yourself to just three notes. Put on a simple backing track and see how much music you can create using only those notes. Experiment with timing, vibrato, slides and pauses. Play one note and let it ring. Then leave a space before playing the next.

At first, this can feel surprisingly difficult. Your instinct might be to add another lick or move quickly up and down the neck. Resist that temptation. Listen to the backing track and allow the silence to become part of your playing.

Playing fewer notes also improves your phrasing. Instead of thinking about what note comes next, you begin thinking about why you're playing it. Is it answering the previous phrase? Is it building tension? Is it resolving the melody? These questions turn random notes into musical conversation.

This philosophy can be heard in the playing of great slide guitarists such as Derek Trucks and Bonnie Raitt. Their playing isn't impressive simply because of the notes they can play. It's the timing, tone, dynamics and emotion behind those notes that make their performances memorable.

So, the next time you practise slide guitar, try slowing everything down. Choose a small group of notes and explore what you can do with them. Hold notes longer. Leave bigger gaps. Experiment with vibrato. Listen carefully.

Remember: you don't need more notes to become a better guitarist. You need to make the right notes mean more.

In slide guitar, silence isn't the absence of music. It's part of the music and learning to use it may be one of the most important steps you take as a player.

If you want to build your confidence with slide guitar, check out my courses here. 

Happy sliding!

This week, in a live session, Paul Stevenson asked me a question I get a lot: why does an acoustic musician need a pedalboard at all? We play acoustic guitars, not electrics - so what's going on down there at my feet?

I plugged a few different instruments in and showed everyone exactly what's happening, so I thought it was worth writing up properly, because the answer tells you a fair bit about how live acoustic sound actually works.

THE DI SIGNAL DOESN'T SOUND LIKE YOUR GUITAR

The moment you plug an acoustic instrument straight into a PA, something's lost. It's loud, sure, but it's dry, aggressive, a bit abrasive - it doesn't sound like it's got much soul in it. That's the starting point for almost everything on my board.

Most of what I'm doing with pedals isn't chasing some huge transformation, it's making marginal gains. Softening the top end, warming the bottom, taking the edge off. You're not trying to change the world every time you hit a footswitch. You're just making the tone a bit more palatable - to your ears, and hopefully the audience's.

THE MOST IMPORTANT PIECE OF GEAR ON MY BOARD ISN'T ON THE BOARD

Before I even get to the pedals, there's a battered old preamp clipped to my mic stand, made by Orchid Electronics, who I don't think even make them any more. It gives me direct volume control and a simple three-band EQ tuned specifically for acoustic instruments, plus a mute switch for when I'm swapping guitars mid-song (which, let's be honest, is most songs).

If the power to my pedalboard ever dies - and it has, more than once - I can run straight into this and do a whole gig on it alone. Everything the pedals do, this does in real time, with my hand, guitar to guitar.

It's also how I stay involved in mixing my own sound. Even a great sound engineer doesn't know your instrument the way you do, so having that control right there on your mic stand means you're doing their job a favour, not fighting them for control of it.

SOME PEDALS FIX PROBLEMS, SOME ADD CHARACTER

Once the basic tone is sorted, the board starts doing a different job — adding interest. A touch of tremolo on a slower piece adds space. A freeze pedal turns a single note into a drone, so when I'm playing solo I get a sense of another player swelling in behind me — running the tremolo over that drone breaks it up so it doesn't sound like a phone dial tone.

A simple analogue echo adds depth without dropping you into a different room the way reverb does. It's a subtler trick, and on the lap steel it gives a bit of a '50s slapback feel.

None of this is essential. It's colour. But this is where the pedal collection starts to grow — and fair warning, it's highly addictive.

DIFFERENT PICKUP, DIFFERENT PROBLEM

I also switched over to my electric lap steel, Little Jeffrey, and the DI tone on that P90 pickup was even rougher than the acoustic — it needed a proper amp simulator (a Boss IR-2) just to come alive, plus a volume pedal for the swells that are such a big part of that pedal-steel sound.

And on a resonator with a Fishman Nashville pickup, I use a Fishman Aura, which applies a modelled "microphone image" to the DI signal — recreating what a real mic on a real Dobro cone actually sounds like. Different pickup, same underlying job: make the direct signal sound like the instrument, not like a wire.

THE POINT OF ALL OF IT

A real microphone will always beat a DI signal for capturing what an instrument actually is. That's true every time, and it's why I always record through one. But live, a microphone gives you the sound of the instrument and nothing else.

Pedals let you shape a DI signal, add some character, and - usefully - dial in a bit more low end than a mic alone will give you, which matters when the audience has just had a fat, modern PA sound in their ears between sets and you don't want to sound thin by comparison.

That's really the whole answer to Paul's question: it's not that acoustic players need to sound electric. It's that the raw acoustic signal on its own needs a hand - and every pedal on my board is there to lend one.

If you're still working on getting your own tone sorted from scratch, Backporch Blues Riffs is still the best place to start — five riffs in Open D, built to get you making a genuinely good sound on your own guitar within the week. Click here to find out more. 

See you on the back porch!

We've been on a bit of a journey these last few weeks - the roots of slide guitar in West Africa, the diddley bow, Tutwiler station, and last week the unexpected Indian thread that runs all the way back through Hawaii to the ancient Vichitra Veena.

This week I want to look at something that changed everything. Not the music itself, but the moment the music got captured. The first recordings. And what happened next.

Before the record

Before recording technology arrived, music only travelled as far as a person could walk or ride. What W.C. Handy heard at Tutwiler station in 1903 had been developing in the Delta for decades, passed from player to player, porch to porch, juke joint to juke joint. Nobody outside that world knew it existed.

The technique, the feeling, the blue notes — all of it completely invisible to the wider world. Extraordinary music going nowhere.

Sheet music and what it couldn't carry

Music had been spreading across America long before the record industry arrived. Sheet music was the dominant medium, and it was big business. W.C. Handy, the same man who woke up at Tutwiler station in 1903, went on to publish St. Louis Blues in 1914 and became one of the most successful music publishers in America. He understood better than most how sheet music could carry a song across the country.

But sheet music could only carry so much. It could capture the notes, the rhythm, the structure. What it couldn't capture was the thing that made slide guitar extraordinary — the blue notes, the squeeze between the frets, the microtonal inflections that lived between the written notes. You could write down the skeleton of a slide guitar piece. You couldn't write down its soul.

Recording changed that. For the first time the actual sound — not an approximation of it, not a skeleton of it, but the real thing — could travel. And when it did, it took everything with it. The feel, the attack, the blue notes, the silence between the notes. All of it preserved exactly as it happened.

Race records — accidental archivists

From the early 1920s, the record industry started targeting Black audiences with what they called "race records" — separate catalogues, separate marketing, often on separate labels. It was a cynical commercial decision. But it had an extraordinary unintended consequence.

It created an archive.

Record companies sent talent scouts fanning out across the South looking for artists to record. They were looking for a product to sell. What they left behind — without really intending to — was a document of a musical tradition that would otherwise have vanished completely.

We know what Blind Willie Johnson sounded like because someone pointed a microphone at him in 1927. We know what Robert Johnson sounded like because a talent scout tracked him down to a San Antonio hotel room in 1936. Without those sessions, without those commercial decisions made by people who were mostly interested in making money — none of it would exist.

Sylvester Weaver — 1923

The first slide guitar ever captured on record was 1923. A 26 year old guitarist from Kentucky named Sylvester Weaver, recorded in New York City using a knife on the strings.

He recorded two tracks. Guitar Blues and Guitar Rag.

Guitar Rag went on to become a standard. It got picked up, passed around, recorded by others, and eventually became one of the foundational pieces of the slide guitar repertoire. I teach it. If you've spent any time with me you've probably heard me mention it.

And here's the thing — it only exists because of that one recording session in 1923. Without the record, Guitar Rag would have been just another piece that Sylvester Weaver played at juke joints in Kentucky and nobody outside his world ever heard. The recording is the reason it's still being played a hundred years later.

Robert Johnson wasn't trying to be Robert Johnson

Here's something that might change how you think about the Delta blues.

We have this image of Robert Johnson as a Delta primitive — a mysterious figure who sold his soul at the crossroads, playing raw, isolated, deeply traditional music out of nowhere. It's a compelling myth. It's also mostly wrong.

Elijah Wald's book Escaping the Delta makes this case beautifully. Johnson wasn't trying to preserve a tradition. He was trying to escape one. He wanted to sound like Leroy Carr — a smooth, urban, piano-led singer from Indianapolis who was essentially the pop star of the blues world in the early 1930s. Both Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf said the first song they ever learned was a Leroy Carr song.

Johnson had heard Carr on record. That's the point. Without the recording industry, Leroy Carr's influence would never have reached a young man in the Mississippi Delta. Records made it possible for a musician in one place to hear what was happening somewhere completely different — and be changed by it.

Johnson was also listening to Bing Crosby. And Hawaiian guitar. And gospel. And everything else the new technology was putting in front of him. He was a young man with his ears wide open, absorbing everything he could find — not a folk artist trapped in one tradition.

What we hear on his recordings as raw Delta blues was actually Johnson trying to modernise, trying to reach beyond the Delta, trying to sound like the records he'd been listening to. The fact that it sounds like nothing else on earth is what makes him extraordinary. But he wasn't trying to be a primitive. He was trying to be a pop star.

The part that isn't so good

The record industry preserved the music. It also exploited the people who made it.

Most artists signed away their recordings for a flat fee. Robert Johnson sold his masters and saw almost nothing from them. The race records industry extracted enormous commercial value from Black musicians while paying them a fraction of what was fair. Many of the artists whose recordings we treasure today died in poverty.

It's worth knowing. The archive we're so grateful for came at a cost that wasn't paid by the people who benefited from it.

What this means for your playing

I think about all of this every time I teach Guitar Rag. That piece is a direct line from a recording session in New York in 1923 to a student sitting with a slide guitar today. The technology preserved it. The music did the rest.

And the Robert Johnson story matters too. Because he wasn't a purist. He was listening to everything — absorbing influences from every direction the records brought him — and then finding his own voice within all of that.

Which is exactly what you're doing.

That's not so different from what Johnson was doing.

Three things worth your time:

Sylvester Weaver — Guitar Rag (1923) — find it on YouTube. The first slide guitar on record. Rough, barely captured on the equipment of the time, but the technique is right there fully formed.

Leroy Carr — How Long How Long Blues — the song that both Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf said was the first they ever learned. Smooth, urban, piano-led. This is what Robert Johnson was listening to and trying to sound like. Hear it and your image of the Delta blues shifts a little.

Robert Johnson — Cross Road Blues — now listen back to Johnson with fresh ears. Hear him as someone who absorbed everything available to him and made something completely original out of it. That's the goal.

If you want to learn Guitar Rag properly - and understand where it sits in the slide guitar tradition - it's one of the pieces I teach in the Slide Success programme. 

See you on the back porch!

My fascination with Indian music started the same way it did for a lot of people of my generation: George Harrison. The Beatles. That extraordinary moment in the mid-60s when the sitar started appearing on pop records and suddenly the whole world got a little bit bigger.

That spark stayed with me for years. And eventually, in my search for all things slide guitar around the world, it took me to Calcutta, where I studied Indian classical slide guitar with one of the most remarkable musicians alive. Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya, the Grammy nominated BBC award winner who is one of the world's great slide guitarists - and the inheritor of a tradition that goes right back to the man who pioneered raga on the slide guitar, Pandit Brij Bhushan Kabra, in the 1960s.

The man who may have started it all

In the 1870s, according to some accounts, a young man born in India was kidnapped by a Portuguese sea captain and taken to Honolulu. His name was Gabriel Davion.

In 1884 a Hawaiian composer named Charles E. King saw Davion playing guitar in what he described as a "new way" - with a slide. And some historians believe that what Davion was doing was carrying a technique from India that had existed for centuries, from an ancient instrument called the Vichitra Veena.

The Vichitra Veena is a fretless string instrument played with a smooth glass ball pressed against the strings, sliding and swooping along them to find the notes. Not the fixed notes. The notes between the notes. The slides and glides and microtonal inflections that live in the spaces Western tuning can't accommodate.

The slide technique, in other words, may have existed in India for over a thousand years before it arrived in Hawaii, before it crossed to Mississippi, before a ragged man pressed a knife against his guitar strings at Tutwiler station and Handy woke up on that bench.

Nobody knows for certain. The story is contested. But given what I've seen and heard in Calcutta, it doesn't surprise me in the least.

The Indian word for blue note

We've been talking these last few newsletters about blue notes. The squeeze between the third and fourth fret. The note that lives between major and minor. What makes the blues sound like the blues.

When I started studying in Calcutta I had one of those moments where something you already know suddenly gets a lot bigger.

Because in Indian classical music they've been talking about exactly the same thing for over a thousand years. They just have a different name for it.

They call them shrutis. The word comes from the Sanskrit for "that which is heard." Where Western music carves an octave into twelve fixed notes, Indian classical music recognises twenty two — the subtle microtonal positions that live in the spaces between. The notes between the notes.

It's the same note, the same impulse. The same search for the human, vocal, expressive quality that lives between the fixed pitches. The blues got there through West Africa and the Mississippi Delta. Indian classical music got there through thousands of years of raga tradition and the ancient Vichitra Veena.

The slide guitar is the instrument that finds them both. And that's why when Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya picks up a slide in Calcutta and when Blind Willie Johnson pressed a pocketknife against his strings in Open D, they are reaching for exactly the same thing.

The lineage — and the full circle

What I find extraordinary, and what I think about every time I pick up the slide, is that there is a direct line from Pandit Brij Bhushan Kabra, the man who first played ragas on the slide guitar in the 1960s, through Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya in Calcutta, to a guitar teacher in a small studio in Wales.

That line carries something. A way of thinking about the slide that is older than the blues, older than Hawaii, older than any of the American story we've been talking about these last few weeks.

And here's where it all comes full circle. In 1993 Ry Cooder walked into a studio with Indian slide guitarist Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and recorded A Meeting by the River. Two traditions — the Mississippi Delta and the Indian classical — sitting in the same room, playing the same instrument, reaching for the same notes. It won the Grammy for Best World Music Album.

Put it on and you'll hear everything we've been talking about in these last few blogs in one extraordinary recording.

When you squeeze your slide into that zone between the third and fourth fret on the top string and find that note — you're not just playing the blues. You're reaching for something that musicians on the other side of the world have been reaching for since before the guitar existed.

Have a listen

Three recordings. Three strands of the same story.

Call of the Valley — Brij Bhushan Kabra with Hariprasad Chaurasia and Shivkumar Sharma, 1967. The record that introduced raga to the slide guitar. Listen to what Kabra does with the slide — the glides, the inflections, the notes between the fixed pitches. You'll recognise every impulse even if the musical language is completely new to you.

3: Calcutta Slide Guitar — Debashish Bhattacharya. The man I studied with. One of the most extraordinary slide guitar recordings you will ever hear. Put it on and just listen.

A Meeting by the River — Ry Cooder and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, 1993. The moment the two traditions sat in the same room. Grammy winning. Essential. Everything we've been talking about in one recording.

You don't need to understand the ragas to feel what's happening. The instrument is doing the same thing it always does — finding the notes between the notes and making them sing.

Find my classes and courses online here or pick up your FREE Get Going with Slide Guide here. 

See you on the back porch!

I've got a bit of history for you today, a piece to play, and hopefully some serious inspiration for you and your slide.

It's 1903. A railway station in Tutwiler, Mississippi. A classically trained bandleader named W.C. Handy has fallen asleep on a hard wooden bench waiting for a train.

He wakes up to find a man sitting beside him. Ragged clothes. Shoes with holes in them. Playing a guitar with a knife pressed against the strings. Singing the same line over and over — “Goin' where the Southern cross' the Dog.”

Handy wrote about it later in his autobiography. He described the man like this:

"His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of a guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable." — W.C. Handy, 1941

That moment — a classically trained musician waking up on a station bench in rural Mississippi — is the first documented written account of slide guitar. And what Handy heard that morning would go on to reshape all of American music.

Where it came from

Now here's the thing that I find fascinating about this. Handy compared the technique to Hawaiian guitarists — and he wasn't wrong. Hawaiian steel guitar was sweeping America at exactly the same moment. By 1916 it was outselling every other genre of recorded music in the country. Hawaiian guitarists were touring the South with vaudeville shows, playing on street corners.

So the slide technique was arriving from multiple directions at once. And next week I've got another piece of that story for you — from somewhere you probably wouldn't expect.

But the deeper root, the one that matters most to us as blues slide players, goes back much further than 1903. It goes back to West Africa.

The instrument that links it all together is called the diddley bow. A single wire nailed between two screws on a board. A glass bottle used as a bridge. Nothing else. You pluck the string and move a slide up and down to change the pitch. That's it.

The diddley bow derives from instruments in the Sahel region of West Africa - northern Nigeria and Mali - where they were often played by children, one beating the string with sticks and the other changing the pitch by moving a slide up and down. Enslaved Africans brought that tradition to America. In the rural South it became the starter instrument: cheap to build, requiring no formal training, and producing a wailing, moaning quality that could carry across fields and porches.

The kids who grew up playing diddley bows in Mississippi went on to become the blues legends. Bukka White. Big Joe Williams. Muddy Waters almost certainly played one as a child on Stovall's plantation before he ever touched a proper guitar.

The line from a wire nailed to a wall in West Africa to Blind Willie Johnson's pocketknife in Open D is a direct one. It just crosses an ocean and a few generations on the way.

The first recording

The first time slide guitar was captured on record was 1923, when a 26 year old Kentucky guitarist named Sylvester Weaver, using a knife, in New York City. Twenty years after Handy woke up on that bench. Those twenty years it was just passing from player to player across the Delta, out on the porches and the juke joints before anyone wrote it down or recorded it.

Why this matters to your playing

I think about all of this when I pick up the slide. Because what we're doing is part of something very old and very deep.   

The technique of moving a hard object along a string to find the notes that live between the fixed pitches — that's not a guitar trick. 

That's a musical impulse that survived a slave ship and a plantation and a hundred years of American history before it got anywhere near a recording studio.

The blue notes we've been talking about in these last couple of newsletters — the ones that live between the frets, the ones that slide players have such an advantage in finding — they were already on that diddley bow. Already in that music at Tutwiler in 1903. Already there in West Africa, long before it ever crossed an ocean.

When you squeeze your slide into that zone between the third and fourth fret on the top string and find that note, you're reaching for the same thing that man on the bench was reaching for when Handy woke up.  That's worth knowing.

Have a go yourself: the one string exercise

Here is a simple piece to take into the Woodshed this weekend. And I mean really simple. One string only. Just like a diddley bow.

I've put together a little arrangement I'm calling Darkish Is The Night — Diddly Bow Version. 

It's based on the Ry Cooder piece we talked about last week, stripped right back to the top string only in Open D. 

No chords. No second string. Just you, your slide, and one wire — the same as those kids in Mississippi had on their wall.

The main thing here is not the notes. It's the spaces between them. Let each note breathe before you move to the next one. 

Slide into the notes rather than landing on them. And when you get to that blue note zone — the 2-3-2 movement in bars 8 to 11 — don't rush through it. That's where the music lives.

Try it slowly first. Then slower than that. Think about how your voice would sing it. Think about that man on the bench at Tutwiler and what he was reaching for with that knife on the strings.  One string. That's all it takes!

Find your own version of what's in there.

If you want to go deeper on all of this - the blue note zones, the squeeze technique, the full tab analysis of the Ry Cooder arrangement - Slide Success Pro members got the full masterclass this month. Just drop me a line to find out more.

Check out my courses on my website, or pick up your FREE Get Going with Slide Guide here. 

See you on the back porch!

It's festival season! The summer festivals are a highlight for many musicians in the UK, and the fabulous folk festivals here have certainly given me some great memories. 

This is a throwback to the inaugural Found Festival, in Buckinghamshire last summer - I loved the great set by Willie and the Bandits! 

This year, I'll be playing with the Gigspanner Big Band on 5th August at the Sidmouth Folk Week so come and join in the fun if you're local! The seaside town is taken over by fantastic folk acts, from young children to amateur and professional touring groups and it's always a great atmosphere. 

This weekend, it's the Warwick Folk Festival (23-26th July 2026), followed by the Cambridge Folk Festival, which is well worth a trip (1st-2nd August 2026). 

Shrewsbury Folk Festival is coming up at the end of August (28th-31st August 2026), with riverside camping and a family friendly vibe, and the Mosely Folk and Arts Festival combines live folk music with comedy, spoken word and storytelling performances, as well as craft demonstrations (4-6th September 2026).

Which festivals are you heading to this summer?

Pick up your Get Going with Slide Guide here, or find my courses here. 

Happy sliding!