Death Don’t Have No Mercy Guitar Lesson

Death Don’t Have No Mercy, a song commonly done by lots of folks back in the 60’s 70’s grateful death diversion on a little slower more druids-like than that and of course that is more similar to - and hot tunas version but Reverend Gary Davis wrote a lot of just great what would you call country blues finger picking songs. Now country blues differs from world blues and urban blues and Chicago blues in it’s acoustic finger style generally and a little bit more rag time, actually a lot more rag time oriented.

And this is kind of blues that I’ve really have love since I was teenager and first heard hot tuna playing that stuff in the in the early 70’s. This Death Don’t have no Mercy, that was an interesting progression because it’s not a 12 bar blues progression, it’s more of a 16 bar thing. Four measures right there, another four measures of E minor to D and G and then B7 4 measure to two measure of B minor here, two measures of A minor maybe C7 instead.

And then the last four measures start changing every two beats E minor to C never a lot of ways doing these back to E minor to B7 and the last two measures, a nice little run, done heading back down to the E. So it falls into 16 bar form rather than 12 bar form which again make it more typical of Ska-Joplin types of rag time, things that were being done 30 and 40 years earlier. This staff really is more from the 20’s and 30’s and any other time.

So it has more similarities to American Tin Can Alley stuff then it does to the a lot of 12 bar blues that came more popular with Robert Johnson and then into the 50’s with electric guys and, Helen Wolf and Muddy Waters and everybody that electrified blues and made it—what we know now of today as electric blues. So acoustic blues is a really a fun, fun genre and if you like to see a complete lesson on this because I really would like to break the song down if enough people visit us a totally guitars and recommend a lesson which is how we can decide on what we’re doing over there.

So if you like to see a full lesson on Death Don’t Have No Mercy, come over Totallyguitars.com, hit the recommend the lesson button and put it in there because that’s a lot of how we decide what we’re doing lessons on I would love to get to more Gary Davis, hot tuna kind of stuff because this is what I really love to teach my students everyday and we’d like to have complete lessons up at the sites, so hope you can come check us out and let me know that you like to see a lesson on Death Don’t Have No Mercy.