Originally Posted by Gavin B.

I'm mostly attuned to attuned to the delta blues guitar players who a currently playing the circuit. Here's two of my favorite players of old fashioned delta blues.

Rory Block turned 60 years old recently and she still looks fantastic. In the early sixties her bohemian father who owned the Block Sandal Shop in the East Village trained her to become folk blues guitar prodigy. By age 11 she was wowing musicians like Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, John Sebastian and Rev. Gary Davis who heard her playing in impromptu jam sessions at the shop. The elder statesman of delta blues, Son House was so taken with the playing skills of young Rory, he called her his teacher. This video below is from a concert I attended about 6 or 7 years ago at Sheldon Hall in St. Louis. The song is the Robert Johnson classic Terraplane Blues, the most challenging and technically demanding guitar piece in Johnson's repertoire.

Rory's right hand playing is amazing. Notice how effectively she uses a combination of open handed strumming, a syncopated bass line played with her thumb, flurries of finger picked notes notes and literally flailing away at the guitar strings to achieve texture and tension in her guitar playing. She gets more volume out her acoustic Martin guitar than anyone I've ever heard playing without the use of plastic or steel fingerpicks.



Bob Brozman specializes in the bottleneck style of playing on steel bodied guitars manufactured by the National Steel Guitar Company. Bob has a collection 20 vintage National Steel resonator guitars which is probably 19 more steel resonator guitars than any person could possibly need. He's also a master of Hawaiian slack key guitar and the ragtime guitar style.

When I was still in high school I used to go to Balaban's Cafe in the Central West End of St. Louis where Bob performed on Thursday night in a group called Stringbean, Jellyroll & Trashcan. At the time Bob was working on his PhD thesis at Washington University on delta blues. He's the world's only holder of of a genuine doctorate in the bluesology.

Bob & I became friends and I found out that his father was a sucessful blues club owner in Harlem during the 1940s and 50s and like Rory Block, Bob Brozman was exposed to blues music at an early age and tutored by his father to play blues guitar.

I took five or six guitar lessons over the course of a month from Bob back in the late 70s, and learned more about playing guitar in that single month than many guitarists learn over the course of a lifetime. My only regret was I wasn't bestowed with the natural talent to make a career out of playing blues guitar.

Bob is the master of technique. He knows every trick in the book and then some. In this short 2 minute one chord blues song, Bob displays a technical command of guitar playing that is far beyond the reach of nearly every delta blues guitarist in the world as we know it.