How To Play San Francisco Bay Blues
by Eric Clapton

If you'r looking to learn how to play San Francisco Bay Blues by Eric Clapton, then you're in the right place.

A black American folk singer songwriter by the name of Jesse Fuller, also known as the "Lone Cat" because he provided all of his own backup music, wrote the San Francisco Bay Blues back in 1954.

The song never received much attention until artists like Bob Dylan and Ramblin Jack Elliott began performing it in the early 1960's. Then others like Eric Clapton, Janis Joplin, Paul McCartney and others took the song under their wing and began playing it to large crowds.

Its a great tune for the acoustic but my personal rendition is different in one small way from say Eric Clapton and Paul McCartneys version. The play in in C ... I play it in G with a capo on the 5th .. so it's still technically in the key of C, but my chord sequences are different.

There have been more than 30 albums of various compositions released under the Jesse Fuller name. You can see the list here.



Eric Clapton recorded the San Francisco Bay Blues as part of his 1992 Unplugged album, which has 14 tracks of some great songs. Because Im playing this one with a capo on the 5th, the chords will be G, C, E7, A7, D, D7, B7 and if you choose, you can throw in a Cdim, as I do in the picking section.

The picking lead break here is a bit in-depth because it's actually playing two lead parts where two separate instruments, say a guitar and piano would feed off of each other. But all of what Im doing here is fully explained in my full instructional tutorial at the link below. Grab the free tab in the right menu.

                 

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Full Tutorial - .wmv format - 18 min 20 sec

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The rhythm on this is quite simple. Note-dn-note-up-dn .. note-dn-note-up-dn all the way thru. You can modify this slightly when you move from the G chord down to the E7 ... it could be note-up-dn-dn-dn-dn as you play those four walking bass notes of G, Gb, F and E.

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