Watch the Roots & Musical Innovation online guitar lesson by Robert Jones from Blues Traditions: Electric Roots

The purpose of these lessons is to show how traditional acoustic blues styles helped to shape the seminal sounds of classic electric blues. We'll focus on the styles of four highly influential blues guitarists, namely Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James and John Lee Hooker. We'll explore some of the general sounds that characterize their sounds, and then we will attempt to trace some of the country blues artists who helped to shape their electric guitar styles. In this lesson, I used two very different guitars. The acoustic demonstrations are done on a custom built OO size flat top built by Gary Zimnicki (www.zimnicki.com). The wood was recovered from a house built in Detroit in 1910. The guitar that I use for the electric demonstrations is a Silvertone archtop (model 2256) built in and sold only in 1940. It's equipped with an old DeArmond model 1000 pickup, and played through a Fender Deluxe with a "Hall Of Fame" reverb pedal and little distortion from an "OCD, Fulltone" pedal.

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