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How to Play 12-Bar Blues in Country Guitar

Learn how to play twelve-bar blues in country guitar from musician Boo Reiners in this Howcast video.


Twelve bar blues in country music is something that Hank Williams was especially prolific at and did better than anybody. It's really just twelve measures. You've got sometimes just four measure of the one chord if we're in the key of E.

We're going to use E, A, B7. We might want to use E7, A7 instead of just E triad and an A triad we could just use all seventh chords. And of course B7 is the five chord. So we're going to go like this 1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 1. Okay so that was basically two bars for each chord except at the top we've got four bars of the E chord. At the end of the form you've got one bar of B7, one bar of A7 and then you've got two bars of E7 to finish the form. Some people might throw a B7 in for the last. Even the last two beats, they might sound something like this. Top again.

So that's your basic twelve bar blues which you could use in any number of country standards and obviously the blues genre is full of twelve bar blues. So have fun with that and we'll see you next time.

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