Hello All,
We’ve got a new song coming your way this week: “The Likes of Me” by the incredible Jerry Reed. Jerry Reed was a true guitar player’s guitar player and he had a very brilliant and unusual sense of harmony and color. He didn’t really present this via his wild persona, but to me he was always the thinking man’s country guitar player. Very sophisticated.
This song includes some chord changes that are outside the norm: we have a b7, a b6 chord and a b3 chord (that’s flat 7, flat 6, etc). We’ll discuss where these came from and some bigger picture structures (like the mixolydian mode) that can help you contextualize them. Also it’s just a great song.
Enjoy!
Chris
Topics and/or subjects covered in this lesson:
Bluegrass
Print Chords & Tab
Loop 0:00 Run-Through of The Like of Me
Loop 2:35 Breakdown of Chords and Rhythm
Loop 17:33 Closing Thoughts
Comments
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Love that 6/9 chord you throw in in the last verse.
I didn't know Jerry was such a pungent lyricist--just knew him as a picker. Thanks!
Oh yeah, Jerry was so great. It's a little goofy, but I also love Amos Moses!
I should stick to 1-4-5 for awhile. But it is beautiful. And you explained it in a way I understood. Thank you.
Fantastic Rodney! Glad you got something out of it!
Jerry was always composing, and rarely taking great care of the thing afterwards.
One day Jean-Philippe Lalanne, good fingerstyle player who knew Jerry played something in front of him.
Jerry said "very nice tune, who composed that ?"
Jean Philippe said "you did"
Ha! I love that!
Jerry Reed was one of the all time greats. Have you ever heard the story about the recording of his song Guitar Man? Elvis was in the studio and his guitar player just wasn't getting the guitar part. Jerry was out fishing somewhere. The producer finds him calls him up, tells him that the session was going a little rough and could he come down and show Elvis' guitar player how to play the part? Jerry says to him "Son, you don't need me to show him how to play it, you need ME to play it!" So he goes down to the studio, lays it down, and the rest is history.
Tony Rice has sung Jerry's praises countless times that I've seen. Great song!
Great story. He was right!
Hello Chris, great song and great solos as usual.
I don't mean to flatter you too much but It's a pleasure to hear and see a real musician, I mean never reciting his grids, doing solos always related to the song, eloquent (to me Jerry Douglas has the same rare quality on the dobro). That being said, do you sometimes think in terms of pentatonic scales ?
I'm glad you show us something by Jerry Reed, whose name was first introduced to France and probably Europe by the late Dadi, who put Blue finger and The claw in his third record. In the first record of Chet Atkins with Jerry there is a stunning version of Tennessee Stud where Jerry does wonders with his "banjo roll", and funky rocking solos on a classical guitar.
His first appearances on US tv are exceptional, like this one where he plays Ray Charles in 1969 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUXAbyNsSK0
Thank you again,
Jack.
PS : could we consider that the presence of C chords and F chords are explained by the fact that they are chords of blue notes, the minor seventh and the minor third ?
Hi Jack,
Thank you for the kind words! I do definitely use pentatonic scales. Quite a lot actually. I guess I don’t really think of it in terms of “now I will play a pentatonic scale” but a lot of my favorite players and favorite music are built around the pentatonic scale, so that sound is very much in my ears. And I’ve definitely spent time mapping that sound out all over the fingerboard: playing it vertically in all the various positions where you can play it, as well as playing it horizontally (from low frets to high, high to low on one or two strings), and then trying to mix those approaches so that those notes (or sounds as I tend to think about it) are “available” to me wherever I am on the guitar. That is basically the same approach I use for triads as well as regular scales though too. You just have to spend some time mapping them out for yourself so that you can use them fluently and without thinking about it.
And yes, the C and F chords are definitely coming from the blue notes!
Cheers,
Chris