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This is the video that gave me the idea to start this blog. Doc is playing Deep River Blues in a Travis style of fingerpicking. He is perhaps better known for his flatpicking, but has several fingerstyle pieces in his repertoire. The E and A strings are muted slightly using the heel of his picking hand, but he lifts his hand to let those notes ring out when they are emphasized.

Doc is alternating between an E7 chord at 0X6757 and an Edim chord spelled 0X5656 the rest of the piece is based on cowboy chords A. E and D7. The bass line walks up from the open E to F#, G, open A and B. The timing of it is the hard part.

Deep River Blues is included in the book, “The Songs of Doc Watson”, which has the lyrics, chords, sheet music and guitar tabulature.

Notes:

“Cowboy chords” refers to those open chords that you fist learned on the guitar. When I use alphanumeric chord spelling I am giving the fret position of each string starting with the low E string. 0 is an open string, X is muted (or just not played) 1,2.3 … are the first, second third, etc. frets.

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