Blues Riffs

If you’re already tuned in to Sonny Landreth, you can skip the following prose, get right to the click, and start working with this masterpiece of a blues electric slide course immediately. If by some cruel twist of fate, you have not yet treated your ears to Sonny’s magical slide guitar work AND you yearn to learn electric slide blues guitar — you’ve just hit the jackpot.

Lightnin' Hopkins had a hard and fast approach to dealing with the abundance of record labels he recorded for during his career. The irascible bluesman would show up at the session in question but would refuse to play a note until he was paid his fee upfront. Once paid and satisfied, he'd unpack his stock set of boogie blues riffs and pretty much improvise songs on the spot until he'd fulfilled his agreed upon quota. Then he would leave. This system led to an awful lot of similarly constructed and executed throwaway tracks, but Hopkins had a special gift for personalizing the blues that came through in the best of these improvised songs, and a few gems always showed up in the process. This disc combines 1961's Walkin' This Road by Myself, which features Hopkins with drummer Spider Kilpatrick, harmonica player Billy Bizor, and pianist Buster Pickens, with 1963's solo acoustic Blues in My Bottle…

The The Rockin' Blues Express is a supercharged collection of songs reflecting the many aspects of modern blues, roots and rock! Influences include Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, Jimi Henedrix, Duane Allman, Gary Moore, Johnny Winter and Stevie Ray Vaughn.