“You’ll hear these kinds of licks in the playing of Chicago blues guitar greats like Jimmy Rogers, the Myers Brothers and Luther Tucker”: Sue Foley pays tribute to blues icons Johnny Winter and Muddy Waters with 4 essential soloing licks

In my last column, I introduced an approach to playing through a 12-bar blues shuffle in the key of E with some of my favorite licks to play over the IV (four) chord, A7, and the V (five) chord, B7. This time, we’ll expand on these ideas with melodic phrases that work perfectly over these chord changes.

Figure 1 illustrates the 12-bar blues form in E, starting with the stock root-5th, root-6th boogie vamp pattern, moving from E5 (E and B) to E6 (E and C#) on each beat through bars 1-3. I begin bar 4 by sliding into a two-note shape known as a 6th, so called because the two notes – B and G# – are six major scale tones, or degrees, apart.