Chords for Nerdville Sessions w/Joe Bonamassa | B.B. King

_ _ _ [C] _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ [E] _
_ _ _ [G#] _ _ [F] _ _ [B] _
_ [F#] _ _ _ [E] _ _ _ _
_ [C] _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ [Bm] _ _ _ _ _ [B] _
_ _ Hi, [N] _ _ _
my name is Joe Bonamassa and welcome to Nerdville, California.
Today I'm speaking here with the All Guitar Network and we're talking about B.B.
King.
And what we're going to do in this series is we're going to cut some videos and show
you some of the gear and some of the techniques that B.B. would have used throughout the years
and basically explain his approach and how he would use this old ES-355 to make the kind
of music that he made.
_ This guitar is a 1969 and it would have been like the guitar he played in Zaire when he
went over to do the concert for Don King and the Crusaders and it was for the Muhammad
Ali fight and _ that video in particular, the way he played, really resonated to me when
I was a kid and when I met him he had a black version of this and this guitar was used on
a video that I did called The Three Kings and of course when we came out and we did
The Thrill Is Gone in the style of B.B. in Zaire in 1973, you have to come out with the Walnut 355.
You know, B.B. was a simple player but as a blues player he was the only guitar player
that I knew other than maybe Eric Clapton or Ry Cooder that quite frankly was recognizable
in one note _ and it was that vibrato, it was that approach and it was that _ just that stinging
sound and he would use the front pickup a lot or the middle position which would be
both but a lot of times when I would see him play he would have just the front pickup
going and he would sing these beautiful songs and then when it was time for him to solo
[C] he would go. _ _ _ _ _
_ [A] _ _ _ _ _ [E] _ _
_ _ [C] _ _ [E] _ _ _ [F#] _
_ _ _ [Bm] _ _ _ _ _
[A] _ _ [B] _ _ _ And that's all it needed, you know, he had a great vocabulary of phrases, maybe not guitar
licks, maybe he didn't know scales and he didn't know a lot of chords but he had a great
vocabulary of phrases and what I mean by phrases is, you know, two notes mean something.
_ [C#] _ _
_ _ [C] _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ [E] _ He's only playing five or six notes at the same time but he's also really, you know,
saying a whole lot and he was able to cut through his band and for many years he used
an orchestra, he had many horns, he had two drummers when I met him, I think there was
even a time he had two bass players and it was this thing where he needed to cut through
and he needed to really assert himself as the soloist and he was always that guy and
he would sing, he would hold the guitar on his side and then he would play.
One of the cool techniques if you're really learning about B.B. King's sound is the vibrato
[C] and it's real simple.
_ _ _ [G] _
_ _ _ _ [C] _ _ _ [G] _
_ _ _ _ [C] _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ [G] _ _ _ _
So, the way he would do it, he would always start with the tonic, you know, or a fifth
up from the tonic, in this case it would be G and what he would do is he would always
land the vibrato and let that hold, so it would be.
_ _ _ _ [Am] _
_ _ [C] _ _ _ _ _ _
[Am] _ _ _ _ _ _ [A#] _ _
_ [C] _ _ _ _ _ [G] _ _
_ _ [D] _ _ [C] _ And another trick he would do is watching his band, _ depending on the night, as a singer
I know this, some nights you just don't want to sing the song in G and maybe it's better
in F sharp or vice versa and like, so he would let the band know what key he was going
to play in by just [Em] going. _
_ _ [G] _ _ _ [Em] And the band would pick up on it [N] immediately and I just thought it was so wonderful to
watch and so wonderful to experience this symbiotic relationship between the front guy
and this gigantic band.
I learned so much from B.B. both as a human being and as a player and of course my Desert
Island Blues song, I've always said this in interviews, is The Thrill Is Gone.
One, I think it's a beautifully written song, I think Bill Simzik did a wonderful job producing
it with the strings and three, in a very un-blues like fashion, it was a hit single on the Billboard
charts so that's why B.B. King to me was so _ ahead of his time and the king of the blues
because he proved that a mass audience could love the blues and it wasn't just this music
that should be relegated to small places in front of a few people and B.B. brought it
to the masses and not only with his guitar playing but with his act and the entire package.
So God bless B.B. King, he was my friend for almost 25 years and we do miss him but his
music will live on forever and hope that us young blues players now can do it justice
going into the future.
Thank you very much, this has been Joe Bonamassa for the All Guitar Network here from _ Nerveville,
California.
Thank you for watching, we'll see you next time. _ _
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