Coffee Blues - Mississippi John Hurt - With Free Tab

 

In this video I want to share with you my version of Mississippi John Hurt's famous song 'Coffee Blues'. It is very typical of John Hurt's music and it is a fingerstyle guitar piece using a travis picking pattern. As is common with John Hurt's music, it has a quick tempo and is very repetitive, with one main section being repeated through the entire song. 

What i have given you in this tab is a very short intro section for the first 2 bars, the main section of the song which is 8 bars, then another playthrough of this 8 bar main section with a slight variration, then a short 2 bar outro. During John Hurt's recorded version he puts in more variations in this 8 bar repeated section, but I would imagine he did most of them ad lib when he played through it. If you want, you can listen to the recorded version and maybe pull out a few of these variations, but the version I have given you here has all the components required and can just be repeated.

The music is in the Key of A and is played on a guitar in Standard Tuning.

Below are some tips to help you play this piece, and links to download the tab.

Coffee Blues Downloadable Tab - Power Tab - PDF - TXT

 

• Split Triplets Most blues music uses split triplets when playing the 1/8th notes. This is where the 1/8th notes arent played equally spaced, but as the 1st and 3rd notes of a triplet, which is one of the components that gives blues music its distinctive sound. However, a lot of John Hurt's music, including Coffee Blues, does not use these split triplets and the 1/8th notes are played as straight 8ths. If you play a lot of blues music it is easy to fall back into the habit of playing split triplets when you are playing this song. It wont sound bad doing this, it just wont sound authentic to John Hurt's version. Just be mindful when playing this that he doesnt use split triplets and this makes the timing of the 8th notes slightly different to the majority of blues music.

• Slides - Slides are used a lot in this music. One type of slide he uses commonly is a small slide from frets 1 to 2. This is seen in bars 6, 10 and 18 of my version. What makes this slide so tricky is the you have to form a small barre over the top 4 strings of fret 1 and slide this up to fret 2, and this has to be done very quickly due to the fast tempo of the music. Its is very easy to make mistakes with this barre and get fluffed notes. If you are have trouble with this slide, just leave it out. In the video I have shown you an alternative to play if you want to omit this slide. 
  

• Hammer Ons - In bars 5 and 13 of my music it shows two quick hammer-ons in these bars. These can be quite tricky to play with the fast tempo as you have to use considerable force to articulate the notes properly and getting the timing correct can also be hard. Because of this, it is tempting to not play these as hammer-ons and instead pick the notes individually. I dont recommend you do this. It would be fine with a much slower tempo but because the music is fast, if you try to pick these notes at speed, you will likely get the timing wrong and tangle your fingers up. Therefore, I recommend when learning this to play the hammer-ons as written and dont be tempted to pick the notes individually.

This is about all I need to say about this piece. It is a fairly straightforward piece but the fast tempo and some of the fidgety slides and hammer-ons may trip you up when playing it. Just start slowly and work up the tempo and it shouldn't be too difficult.

Thanks for Reading,
Neil