How to play “Sam’s Boogie,” redux, part 2
IN DEEP by Andy Aledort
COLUMNS
LAST MONTH, WE initiated a deeper dive into Magic Sam’s guitar tour de force, the live version of his classic blues instrumental “Lookin’ Good,” also known as “Sam’s Boogie.” The elusive techniques Sam uses to play this tune have eluded many players for years. While I was touring with Dickey Betts a few years back, one day he asked me to teach him how to play “Sam’s Boogie.” I didn’t know how! So I set about learning it, and it was quite a challenge. Once I had a handle on it, Dickey and I got together and would work on all the intricacies involved in trying to recreate the variety of techniques Magic Sam employs on this classic track.
FIGURE 1 picks up from 0:29 into the recording, where Sam initiates repeating finger slides up the top two strings, landing on an E note on the B string’s 5th fret G at the 3rd fret on the high E string. Sounded together with the open A string, the result is the sound of an A7no3 chord. It’s tricky to repeatedly slide up to each two-note dyad this quickly, so try doing it slowly at first.
After performing this sliding figure three times, we move to the IV (four) chord, D7, shown in FIGURE 2. Sam throws in “random” open-string accents between the chords, akin to FIGURE 3.
This is followed by FIGURE 4, in which D7 is sounded with the open D string in conjunction with the notes F# (B string, 7th fret) and C (high E string, 8th fret). The C is pulled-off to A at the 5th fret, after which B (7th fet) alternates against the A and C notes, momentarily impling a D6 sound.
As shown in FIGURE 5, an additional bass-like riff is added on beat 4 of each bar as the phrase repeats
