On the Road Again

This past week I have put in a couple of 2-3 hour practice sessions with the guitar. Since playing with Joseph a month ago one of the things I have been working at is sliding bar chords. Yesterday I was listening to a couple of Canned Heat blues songs (Going Up the Country and On the Road Again), and decided to learn the chords and play along. I found that Going Up the Country required a sliding bar chord going from fret 6 to 11, then down to fret 1. Normally the hardest place to play are the frets near the nut (frets 1-3), but I found placing the fingers in the cramped space of fret 11 to be challenging. To play On the Road Again I was especially satisfied when I was able to create the blues boogie pattern. I had always wanted to play that kind of rambling/rolling blues rhythm, and guessed it would take playing a combination of exotic, hard to finger chords. So I was surprised to find that it was a familiar pattern that I practice everyday - E/G/A. The tricky part is in the timing and strumming, but I quickly picked it up and was jamming along without much problem. This experience taught me that with a few simple chords many different styles of music can be created through timing variations.