Big Road Blues, Tommy Johnson cover by Tom Muck

This is Big Road Blues, by Tommy Johnson, and is my 80th acoustic blues recording. This is the first song I've attempted by Johnson, mostly because his vocals can be difficult (with yodeling.) It was recorded in 1928 for the Victor label, and is a highly influential song. Charlie McCoy played second guitar on it, but Tommy Johnson's part in drop-D tuning is much louder on the recording. McCoy is mostly playing trills with some bass runs, so I just did Johnson's part. Most people that play this don't hit the chords that he hits on the downbeat of the main progression, but I tried to do that. I had to tune the G string up to A to make it sound close. I'm not sure he's doing anything like that, but the chords are fairly dissonant, with B and A open strings over a D ascending progression, so I tried to get the sound close. It's played on my Kalamazoo KG-14f tribute guitar from Fox-guitars.

[@reinva6016]

Great, but what I do , sometimes more succesfully than others, is muting the 3rd string with the side of my finger to create the same sort of effect without retuning.

[@tommuck6226]

That's a good idea, but it wasn't working for me. I'd probably do that in a live situation, though, to avoid retuning.

[@ColinStachowski]

Such a great job Tom, just what I was looking for!

[@tommuck6226]

Thank you!