“Brown’s Ferry Blues” was originally written in the early 1900s by The Delmore Brothers. Over the course of their careers, the Delmores wrote more than one thousand songs, including “Brown’s Ferry Blues”, “Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar”, and “Fifteen Miles from Birmingham”. The Delmore Brothers grew up in a musical home as their mother, Mollie Delmore, wrote and sang gospel songs for their church. The Brothers blended gospel-style harmonies with the faster paced guitar parts of traditional folk music and blues to help create the still-emerging country genre.
In this guitar lesson, you’ll learn a guitar arrangement in the style of “Brown’s Ferry Blues” by The Delmore Brothers. This particular arrangement is also inspired by Doc Watson and Billy Strings. We’ll cover an intermediate guitar break, an easier guitar break for the beginner country & bluegrass pickers, and the rhythm guitar progression. After you master the guitar arrangements, practice your picking over the backing track in the key of G.
| Video Start Time | Lesson Topic |
|---|---|
| 00:00 min | Chord Progression Overview |
| 00:56 min | Instrumental Break Chord Progression |
| 02:27 min | Chord Progression to Backup Vocals |
| 05:09 min | Chords and Lyrics Example |
| 12:23 min | Strumming Pattern 1 |
| 14:57 min | Strumming Pattern 2 |
| 17:44 min | Chord Transition Bass Line Walk 1 |
| 21:09 min | Chord Transition Bass Line Walk 2 |
| 23:36 min | Chord Transition Bass Line Walk 3 |
| 26:23 min | “Brown’s Ferry Blues” Song Structure |
In the previous guitar lesson in this course, I showed you five of the most common ways to build a guitar solo and we talked about several techniques that will help you improvise better guitar solos. We also discussed the first type of solo in detail — the melodic guitar solo.
In this guitar lesson, you’ll learn about the second type of guitar solo where we’ll play stock country & bluegrass licks over the top of a standard chord progression. First, I’ll teach you four stock country and bluegrass guitar licks. We’ll talk about how to use these licks to play a hard-driving guitar solo in a country and bluegrass style. Then, I’ll show you some more of my favorite lead guitar improvising techniques. As you’re studying the concepts in this lesson, be sure to also check out the Bluegrass Lick Library and Guitar Scale Charts that we have available at Country Guitar Online. After you complete this lesson, practice your country & bluegrass improvising over the backing track to “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” in the key of G. Lesson tablature is available for download below the video.