Death Letter Blues

Description

Hey there, this is Anders with Guitar Tricks and today I'm gonna teach you how to play the classic song "Death Letter" as made famous by Son House. This is Delta blues in its purest form, and it's a ton of fun to play. Son House was the guitar player Robert Johnson looked up to when he was learning to play, and it's not hard to see why. This is pure emotion channeled through the guitar using some very simple tools like the slide, the open tuning, and the aggressive finger strumming.

In this tutorial I'll show you how to play this song like you hear it on the record, and after getting into the open tuning, we're gonna breakdown the intro riff which is repeated throughout the whole song whenever there's a break in the vocals.

I'm gonna show you how to play the IV chord with the combination of the slide on your fingers. I'll show the same thing for the V chord, and finally we're gonna break down the awesome ending.

We're gonna talk about how to imitate the tone and attitude and much more. The song is in 4/4 and the tempo varies throughout the song, so let's get to work on it!